💾 Archived View for gemini.ctrl-c.club › ~jara25 › gemlog › 2023-11-26.gmi captured on 2024-05-10 at 13:32:10. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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This pull request made me laugh:
https://github.com/PCSX2/pcsx2/pull/10200
...but it is frustrating to see that developers need to insert code like this in order to warn users that Wayland does not support their application very well.
An mpv developer wrote about Wayland's shortcomings and explained why it is an insufficient replacement for X11:
https://dudemanguy.github.io/blog/posts/2022-06-10-wayland-xorg/wayland-xorg.html
One point within that blog post that I want to expand upon is the "policy not mechanism" development policy that the Wayland developers seem to adopt. I feel that there are a lot of egos within the open-source community that adopt the "my way or the highway" attitude and can be very hard to work with. Obviously, developers are free to work on anything they want in their spare time, and there are users who are unreasonable and should be ignored. An IRC client does not need to read e-mail, for instance.
If one wants to work on a project like Wayland, which is meant to replace X11 at some point, then they should realize that their software is going to be compared to what it is replacing. They should know that X11 had a broad scope, so its replacement should have an equally broad scope and should support most of what its predecessor does. Instead, Wayland ends up having a narrower scope than X11 because its developers have big egos who have a narrow definition of what desktop applications are. They think that they know what is best for everyone, and when those ideals inevitably do not align with someone else's, the other party meets a brick wall. These other developers end up expressing their frustrations within their code. That pull request for the PCSX2 project that I linked earlier is one example of this.
Any project that wants to be the core of the Linux desktop needs to support as many use cases as possible because every user is different and every application requires different functionality. "Security reasons" is a lame excuse for not implementing functionality that many users expect, such as screen recording. Anyone that has done exercises on sites such as TryHackMe and HackTheBox knows that one does not need X11 or Wayland present on the target to compromise a system, and Wayland is not going to protect from physical security problems such as shoulder surfing.
As software developers who can control how our programs behave and have all the power over our users as a result of that, we should empower our users instead of inhibiting them. Sadly, the Wayland developers are actively getting in the way of people who want to use their computers as they see fit, and I detest that kind of attitude.
Sorry for this dumb rant post. Hopefully my next gemlog entry will be more positive than this.
By the way, if you like Wayland, then that's fine! Feel free to use what you want. I do think that the Wayland hate can also be too inflammatory at times. If only we can have reasonable discussions about these topics...