This isn't surprising. All of the X11 based WMs are slowly bit-rotting. Unless the people that care about them step up and start maintaining the stack instead of just endlessly complaining about Wayland it'll only get worse.
> start maintaining the stack instead of just endlessly complaining about Wayland it'll only get worse.
This is actually what forced me to migrate to Wayland, seeing lots of people complaining about Wayland but not seeing people stepping up to maintain X11. And those who used to maintain X11, built Wayland instead.
Yes, Wayland isn't perfect, but for professionals who just want shit to continue working, you kind of have to move to the software that is being maintained, for better or worse.
Always the same lies. People "stepped up" in the and as a result were outright banned from the gitlab (instead of e.g. just rejecting pull requests). Current maintainers refuse to do any release management and instead treat every merge into master as a new release. This kind of sabotage makes development or contributing very difficult. Also the people that used to maintain X11 (e.g. Keith Packard) had nothing to do with building Wayland.
Wayland on the other is just a insanely stupid API. Everybody advocating for Wayland should be forced to write a simple client at least once without relying on behemoths like GTK or Qt.
Yeah, lies and then you come in with shit like this. You can surely show several proofs then, right?
> Wayland on the other is just a insanely stupid API. Everybody advocating for Wayland should be forced to write a simple client at least once without relying on behemoths like GTK or Qt.
Why would you do it outside of toying around? Btw, I have and it's nothing out of ordinary.
If this was a paid job, both you and sprash would have been fired or at least PIP'ed several comments ago. This kind of behavior has ZERO place in any code project - professional or volunteer.
If by "people" you mean a fascist who doesn't know how to program, then sure. But the sensible people who don't present a security threat with their politics or with shitty code are 100% in the Wayland camp.
> Also the people that used to maintain X11 (e.g. Keith Packard) had nothing to do with building Wayland.
Those people aren't maintaining X11 today, are they? The people who are maintaining X11 today have put it in bugfix-only mode and have told you, many times, that the future is Wayland. End of discussion.
Look, you want to run a retro 90s desktop for shits and giggles, that's great. There's even an officially supported path for this use case: Ariadne Conill's Wayback. But the DEs and the toolkits are all removing X11 support within the next year or two. There is no future there. You want to keep running modern software, you will have to switch to Wayland eventually—and soon.
> Wayland on the other is just a insanely stupid API. Everybody advocating for Wayland should be forced to write a simple client at least once without relying on behemoths like GTK or Qt.
Nobody actually develops applications that way. They all use a toolkit, and the behemoths cover pretty much 90% of actual application development (modulo things like Electron). Both of those, by the way, are deprecating X11 support.
Most of the people complaining are users who don't write any software. There is no practical difficulty in using an x11 wm at this point nor expected to be until major software not only doesn't support x11 by default but cannot be built with support for same.
> All of the X11 based WMs are slowly bit-rotting.
An absolute metric TON of code in general that is/was largely dependent on free $0 volunteer labor has been bit rotting for the past 5 years. The COVID pandemic and the ongoing tech layoffs have really opened our eyes to just how much tech got built for free by firms pushing "always be coding" down our throats in the 2010s. It's why the only truly stable Linux OSes right now are largely Ubuntu and RHEL (even more RHEL lately) - you get what you pay for if no one else is footing the bill.
I see no contradiction? Bitrot is caused by some other project moving. Of course the niche projects will suffer less from it if they incorporate less innovations.
Edit: You really do like calling other people liars and fascists?
I know what you mean, but there is bitrot. I'm currently trying dwm. Zero out of the three patches I downloaded from the website applied successfully. I'd call that bitrot.
Not sure how much I like "hand-write your own code from snippets" as a way to configure software.
One advantage of the patches not working is that manually applying a patch (usually quite simple) brings you some familiarity with the code. In my case this let me make my own modifications that were not available as patches. Altering window manager code is fun!
And while you have a good point, I don’t think this is what most people have in mind when they use the term “bitrot” (but I could be wrong). I say this because dwm as supplied continues to work perfectly without modification. The patches are enhancements contributed by third parties (as far as I know) and, as you’ve discovered, are not maintained.
(Also, once you have a working, patched dwm, it should continue to work forever, even if the patches that you used may no apply automatically to future versions of the base dwm.)
There is no X11 bitrot. Just a lack of funding. If funding for Wayland stopped today, Wayland would die much quicker than X11 because there is essentially zero community involvement whereas for X11 there are enough people that care to keep it alive for free.
The only real Wayland community effort is Hyprland. The author of that has been banned from contributing to Wayland by the corporate sponsors of Wayland.
Hence there is no community.
Also the whole "there is no Wayland" "it's just a protocol" spiel has been played so often that I believe Wayland apologists are mostly bots.
Sway and wlroots are also real community projects with no big corporate sponsors. Its main contributors are also very active in the development of wayland protocols.
Desktop Linux needs standardized and stable infrastructure. X11 delivers on that perfectly.
Wayland despite receiving huge amounts funding has actually far more moving pieces. Even for the simplest tasks you have to deal with a dbus infested portal maze, many parallel infrastructure effects and high fragmentation. The API is atrociously stupid and cumbersome.
Besides that the modesetting driver of xorg also sits "properly on top of kernel abstractions". How is this in any ways a relevant criterion. What matters is that Wayland clearly makes the wrong abstractions for Desktop applications and the vast amount of parallel infrastructure required to do even the simplest tasks shows that.
> Even for the simplest tasks you have to deal with a dbus infested portal maze
The simplest task is displaying a buffer, or changing a buffer, or handling events, and absolutely none of them have anything to do with dbus whatsoever. Also, have you seen an X11 desktop environment like KDE or Gnome? I recommend looking at all the dbus messages that are in flight there at any time.
Tell that to Havoc Pennington. Dbus was the solution he came up with based on requirements and constraints set by the DEs. A lot of people have claimed we need something better, but nobody has actually created something better. Till someone does, Dbus is the standard for client communication with Wayland compositors outside the core protocol. Sure beats piping stuff over X ClientMessage events.
Why is the onus on people to step up and fix X11 instead of on the people pushing Wayland to just stop pushing it? There would be no need to "fix" things if people weren't pushing an incompatible system that can't do what the old one can do.
