In our State of the Budgie blog post in May of last year, we emphasized that Budgie 11 would be Wayland-first, with initial expectations being that we would support an X11 fallback mode, as well as mentioning that “it is not entirely out of the realm of possibility to have a Budgie 10 under Wayland”.
Since that blog post, several key developments have occurred in the Wayland ecosystem.
This detailed article about the future of Wayland support in Budgie is a great read. If you’re interested in the kinds of considerations and decisions that go into maintaining a Linux desktop environment in 2023.
Just endless amount of work needed when deciding to migrate to Wayland. Affecting FOSS ecosystem as a whole. For more then a decade now. No major commercial mobile platform using it. Each major project in need to invest years of development into it. Still all of them lacking in some way. So far it’s hard to say Wayland is living up to expectations.
And as this is news about Budgie Desktop and as they mentioned it in the blog. The whole situation around system tray support. It shows on why most people still don’t take Wayland seriously. Failing to result to an accepted solution for more then a decade. Still a bit detached from the reality.
You mean Red Hat, Oracle, Debian, Ubuntu, and Steam aren’t major platforms?
Anything below 1% usage isn’t considered to be major. And this 1% is now working on Wayland for 15 years already. And still the situation is far from perfect.
So what if it’s not perfect after 15 years? Xorg/XFree86 have been under development for literally twice as long, and have security and performance issues so severe that people would rather write a display server from scratch than deal with them. This is why we’ve had Y, SurfaceFlinger, Mir, Wayland etc. etc. etc.
Looking forward to seeing how Budgie’s implementation works out. While I remain wedded to the traditional desktop of Mate, the effects of GTK3 apps breaking with the desktop themes are waging attrition. If I can make myself live within the way Budgie works it will be a step forward for a more consistent desktop.
I hope that eventually Mate will have Wayland support but increasingly it seems that it is walking away from the traditional desktop. In the end it may not even matter by the time they get Wayland, it won’t be Mate any more.
It seems it was an error to make everyone write its own server/compositor. Wayland should have been an official server + a plug-in system/extension API.
Except that isn’t what happens is it…. everyone uses wlroots etc… for the most part.
What it does mean is that things are well specified. And there are standards to implement against which is much better than how X was created.
One guy ported Wayland to Haiku… and it even does a funky in process server so each application runs its own server and they appear as native applications. Meh, anything you do will have shortcomings… the question is these days is it secure? Is it fast? And is it something we can move forward with developing on… and that seems to be true for Wayland.
No that’s not what happens. Gnome, KDE and Enlightme t do their own stuff.
And the fact and the problem is that there are not standards for many basic stuff. Wayland is a barebones protocol. If a desktop environment wanted to implement some basic stuff it would be incompatible with other desktops. The replacements for X that were being developed 20 years ago were better. Without the Freed3sktop stuff Wayland would be completely useless.