Mladen Mijatov
13 HN recommenders · recommended in 17 months, 2013–2026
45:35 · 104K views · Feb 8, 2013
Daniel Stone, a longtime X and Wayland developer, explains at linux.conf.au 2013 why X11's design became untenable and what motivated Wayland. The talk walks through X's history and accumulated cruft.
HN treats it as the definitive, funny and educational answer to why X could not be fixed, and links it in almost every Wayland vs X argument.
20 comments from Hacker News
> when in fact the lead developers on Wayland are the actual Xorg maintainers. Daniel Stone[0] incredibly funny and educational talk[1] from 2013 could help many critics who missed the 3 decade long ongoing discussion of why X is bad . We've talked about this already in the mid 90ies (when there were no alternatives) and now 8 years after this popular linux.conf.au talk, people still having troubles understanding why X has always been a terrible tradeoff for both security and performance (well for literally everything). [0] [LINK] [1] The Real Story Behind Wayland and X this video edit: BUT X IS THE UNIX WAY! << so what is the 1 thing X does, and what is it doing well?
Daniel Stone actually did a talk involving much of the same subject matter called "The Real Story behind Wayland and X". I'd recommend that over this article (which was partially written by the same guy). He's actually a really charismatic speaker. this video
I remember finding this video enlightening, a talk on the subject by someone who has worked on both X and Wayland: this video
Mandatory video to watch for all X fans: > Daniel Stone ~ The real story behind Wayland and X' this video
> Screenshots/recording should have been on the board from day one and they could have gotten to standardizing on how to handle them in oh 2013-2015? I agree that Wayland's development has taken far too long and the transition has been rocky. But what development team couldn't use more funding? Ubuntu throwing a tantrum after the ecosystem rejected Mir and not contributing to Wayland certainly didn't help. > What other OS makes you think about display servers? I am sympathetic to arguments that Wayland/Weston could provide more functionality out-of-the-box. The bazaar's fragmented mess of "desktop environments" is certainly not a strength compared to what the Cathedrals have produced. But Linux's uniquely modular GUI stack necessitates coordination across lots of projects to develop and adopt standards. But not doing anything and sticking with X11 would have condemned us to being stuck with an insecure, buggy, and visually glitchy mess forever. > Red Hat doesn't believe in the Linux ecosystem I have my qualms with Red Hat too, but my point was that Wayland was created by Xorg developers because they tried and failed to make X11 competitive. Seriously, just go watch this XFree86/Xorg/Wayland developer's talk [1]. [1]: this video