Re: Gambas and Wayland

[Jussi Lahtinen <jussi.lahtinen@xxxxxxxxx>]

I really have not paid attention to wayland, nor I have written any code
where I need to understand X11. And I hope I can remain ignorant about
these things also in the future.
However, it seems every new generation wants to create something new,
instead of fixing something old. Thus we are in the never ending loop of
bugs and missing features; every time the work is about to be done, a new
generation takes the lead and starts it all over. On the other hand,
everything new is always resisted and even the most innocent inventions
like umbrella, bicycle, teddy bear, tractor, microwave oven, etc. got *a
lot of *hate and concern.
So... I guess emotions are needed for motivation, but they are bad for
design. Hard situation to judge.


Jussi


On Wed, Jul 30, 2025 at 7:29 PM Benoît Minisini <
benoit.minisini@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> 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.
>
>
>