this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2023
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I'm kinda on the fence about it. On the one hand that is how it is supposed to work. That the new thing gets better, faster when everyone uses it. However, I liked to watch this dude named Brodie Robertson on youtube and a lot of the major features took years to land in wayland.
Not because it was hard, no one wanted to do it, or any of the normal reasons you traditionally see in foss. The reason why it took so long usually seems to be the result of having to argue that it should be done. It is honestly mind boggling that things like disabling vsync, global shortcuts, and many other features that many of us take for granted were all initially dismissed as essentially "not even deserving to exist".
Wayland takes a conservative approach to feature requests. Disabling screen tearing goes against their zero screen tearing goal. Other features, such as X11's remote capabilities, are unnecessary baggage and a security risk. Yes, people who use the remote capabilities kicked and screamed, but they now have Waypipe. Turns out building that into Wayland itself was unnecessary after all, a 3rd-party app made it happen. Their primary goal is to not end up like the mess that is X11.
These are arguments that should happen, they ensure that things in the protocol are done the right way, else there will be a massive duplication of effort as the protocol changes to something better.
Yeah the political side of FOSS is the most frustrating part for everyone involved. I will say however that at least if Brodie's videos are to be believed, Wayland is now actually being pushed to make decisions instead of fence-sitting for years (which is easy when your project isn't hitting crunch time yet)
The politics of FOSS are 100% why I have next to no interest in getting involved beyond small fixes if I come across them.
I'm not going to argue with a bunch of neurodivergent people about good design.
Dude, reading up on the explanation for including a fucking Trash in the freedesktop specification was really eye opening to me.
It's like these 🧩 honestly need an explanation for why a Trash feature is necessary.
Here it is: https://specifications.freedesktop.org/trash-spec/trashspec-latest.html