There are things that do not work on Wayland yet

Posted Feb 11, 2025 18:00 UTC (Tue) by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
In reply to: There are things that do not work on Wayland yet by paulj
Parent article: What’s new in GTK, winter 2025 edition

It's not just the keyboard issue - the underlying driver for Wayland is that about 90% of the X11 core protocol is not used any more, and there's a large number of interacting extensions that have evolved over time and don't play as nicely with each other as you'd like in the areas where they overlap (MIT-SHM with DRI2 and DRI3, Xinerama with RandR, Composite and Damage with core) because people have evolved them independently. The consequence is that you have to "just know" that you must ask DRI3 to do something, not MIT-SHM, or that you should trust Damage over core protocol, because Damage is more precise.

And once you're going as far as removing large chunks of core protocol because they're no longer relevant, resetting extension behaviour to a sane shared state etc, you end up with effectively Wayland. You could have called it X12, but the X11 developers who created Wayland felt that it was sufficiently far from what X11 had become that it would be clearer to give it a whole new name, rather than calling it X Window System version 12.

There are things that do not work on Wayland yet

Posted Feb 11, 2025 18:21 UTC (Tue) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (1 responses)

> rather than calling it X Window System version 12.

It wasn't that it was sufficiently far enough from X11, it was that there had already been an abortive X12 rewrite, and for whatever reason they didn't fancy X13 ...

Cheers,
Wol

There are things that do not work on Wayland yet

Posted Feb 11, 2025 19:51 UTC (Tue) by jem (subscriber, #24231) [Link]

I doubt the abandoned X12 rewrite had anything to do with why a new name was introduced for Wayland. Compare Wayland to the original X11, and you'll find that they are totally different. Yes, X.org has a lot of extensions bolted on that implement parts of how a Wayland implementation works, like compositing window managers and client rendering.

Using the name X12 or X13 would probably have provoked a lot of protests, since Wayland is *not* X. There is not direct lineage from X11 code to Wayland code (Wayland isn't even an implementation, just a specification), Wayland is totally lacking the core of X11, and the X11 and Wayland protocols are totally different, and have different roles. Calling Wayland X12 or X13 is simply wrong, since it is totally incompatible with Core X11.