Well known KDE developer Nate Graham is out with a blog post today outlining his latest Wayland thoughts, how X11 is a bad platform, and the recent topic of “Wayland breaking everything” isn’t really accurate.
“In this context, “breaking everything” is another perhaps less accurate way of saying “not everything is fully ported yet”. This porting is necessary because Wayland is designed to target a future that doesn’t include 100% drop-in compatibility with everything we did in the past, because it turns out that a lot of those things don’t make sense anymore. For the ones that do, a compatibility layer (XWayland) is already provided, and anything needing deeper system integration generally has a path forward (Portals and Wayland protocols and PipeWire) or is being actively worked on. It’s all happening!”
This means that if someone wants to create a window manager, they have to implement a whole compositor first. So instead of writing window manager code, which is what the developer is probably the most interested in, they are spending most of their time implementing the compositor.
wlroots has existed for almost 7 years and this misconception is still repeated.
I know wlroots exists. It’s a library that helps you implement a compositor (i.e. does some of the heavy lifting), but at the end of the day the window manager developer is still implementing a compositor and is responsible for maintaining their compositor.
The mere fact that wlroots, and other efforts like louvre, are necessary at all actually prove my point that it was an idiotic design to push everything off into “compositors”.
