Gambas and Wayland

[Martin Cristia <tercoide@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

I don't care If it's Wayland or X11 as long as the graphical interface works well. Personally I would move from Ubuntu 25.04 that is AFAIK Wayland only to something else if Gb goes X11 only. 

It seems that Benoit managed to fix some of the early issues but some persist. The problem would be if all main distros go to Wayland.

El 30 jul 2025 13:29, Benoît Minisini <benoit.minisini@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> escribió:

Hi,

I just read that page, named "Think twice before abandoning X11. Wayland
breaks everything!".

https://gist.github.com/probonopd/9feb7c20257af5dd915e3a9f2d1f2277

As you may know, Gambas tries to create an uniform API for accessing GUI
toolkits, i.e. Qt and GTK+ at the moment.

I had to introduce in both of them some sort of specific sub-components
to handle the difference between X11 and Wayland: gb.qt6.wayland,
gb.qt6.x11, gb.gtk3.wayland, and so on...

And by making these components, I noticed that a lot of things are not
implemented in Wayland.

At the beginning, I thought these missing features will be implemented
in the future, that they were not there because of more prioritary
things to do first.

But then I noticed that Wayland has now the same age than Xorg had when
the development of Wayland started.

And I read the document I mentioned at the beginning of the mail.

Now I'm afraid that Wayland will never be fixed, and will be imposed by
force to the user. The exact contrary of the spirit of free software.

And I even not talking about the politic drama around the XLibre fork.

I don't want to spend hours of coding just to try to workaround Wayland
limitations and the resulting incompatibilities between each Wayland
window manager implementations and their "desktop portal thing", whereas
on X11 all window managers speaks the same language.

There are some bad designs too in some of X11 protocols, but why not
just fixing them?

What do you think?

--
Benoît Minisini.