Gentoo on a frame.work 16 laptop

Posted Jan 12, 2026 16:45 UTC (Mon) by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
In reply to: Gentoo on a frame.work 16 laptop by felixfix
Parent article: Gentoo looks back on 2025

Which is why they called it Wayland, and not X13 (which it effectively was). They wanted to make it clear it WAS a CLEAN BREAK.

Yes, there's been a lot of frustration where things don't work the same way in Wayland as they did in X, or functionality was very slow to be moved across to Wayland. But I'm not aware of any instance where a new version of Wayland broke previous versions of Wayland.

They made no bones about "X will break when moved to Wayland" - that was an inevitable consequence of the redesign.

Linux faces a similar threat from that new Rust kernel - "evolve or die". Linux seems to have chosen the "evolve" path and probably very soon most new code will be written in Rust. The X developer (single - one man bus factor) decided the only sane choice was "die". Sorry, but that's what happened!

Cheers,
Wol

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Gentoo on a frame.work 16 laptop

Posted Jan 12, 2026 16:54 UTC (Mon) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (2 responses)

Compare it to the Python 3 / Perl 6 evolution.

The switch from Python 2 to 3 was long, painful, with breakage everywhere. Do you really want that with X11 / X13? Don't forget the X11 devs themselves wrote it off as unsalvageable!

Or do you want the switch from Perl 5 to ?Raku. It's the next generation of Perl, it is Perl 6, but they changed the name to make it nice and clear that it's a RADICAL upgrade, and THINGS WILL BREAK.

The difference between X11/Wayland, and Perl/Raku, is that there were plenty of people prepared to keep Perl5 alive. It's difficult to find anyone even prepared to try and keep full-fat X11 on life support. Just XWayland, and some support for Wayback, which have had 90% of their old code ripped out and now rely utterly on Wayland in order to actually do anything.

Cheers,
Wol

Gentoo on a frame.work 16 laptop

Posted Jan 12, 2026 17:21 UTC (Mon) by felixfix (subscriber, #242) [Link]

Python3 and Perl 6 did not remove functionality. The Rust kernel will not remove functionality. Wayland did remove functionality.

Gentoo on a frame.work 16 laptop

Posted Jan 12, 2026 17:22 UTC (Mon) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

Not really wanting to join this discussion, nor am I making any value judgement on the original topic... However, not sure your analogy makes the point you want.

Python 2 -> 3 was difficult, but there was still a lot of compatibility. It was still essentially the same language, much of the core language remained the same, just updates of libraries and APIs largely. The transition has largely succeeded, many code-bases successfully transitioned, and python3 didn't cause /too/ much pain.

Perl 5 -> 6: 6 is very different (AIUI), not at all compatible. Perl 6 appears largely to be a failure from what I can tell - and Perl has generally become irrelevant (certainly, nothing what it once was in terms of relevance).