There's some irony here...

Posted Feb 14, 2012 6:30 UTC (Tue) by dlang (guest, #313)
In reply to: There's some irony here... by raven667
Parent article: Wayland - Beyond X (The H)

the concern is not about the difficulty in running X11 apps on a Wayland server. That works today (plus if it didn't work, Wayland would be pretty hard to bootstrap)

the concern is getting future killer app Y that was built with a Wayland graphics library to run on a system that uses X11 for it's display. This will probably start to be a problem a few months after Fedora and/or Ubuntu ship with Wayland as the default display instead of X11 (not that the killer app will need anything that Wayland provides, it's just that it will be build using the new 'cool and trendy' graphics library.

or alternatively, make it so that you can use Wayland in the places where people currently use X11 network transparency.

There are a lot of people writing infrastructure code for Linux that don't seem to have any Unix experience. This doesn't have to be a bad thing, but when these people dismiss existing functionality as "nobody could ever want that", it then becomes a problem. Especially if this work goes in to a major distro.

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There's some irony here...

Posted Feb 14, 2012 7:03 UTC (Tue) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

I dunno, I would still expect apps to use toolkits such as QT or GTK+ which can output to several different kinds of graphics drivers, including X11. I suppose if someone did write a "killer app" which didn't use a toolkit and was directly speaking the Weyland protocol and you didn't want to run it over VNC and a high performance remote display protocol hadn't yet been implemented then that could be a problem. That's a fair number of "ifs" though.

There's some irony here...

Posted Feb 14, 2012 9:20 UTC (Tue) by daniels (subscriber, #16193) [Link]

There are a lot of people writing infrastructure code for Linux that don't seem to have any Unix experience.

As far as I can tell these days, True UNIX Experience is limited to those who exclusively comment on LWN, Reddit and Hacker News, rather than those who write code.