Five Things in Fedora This Week (2014-04-01)

Wed Apr 2 13:26:45 UTC 2014

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On 04/02/2014 08:08 AM, lee wrote:
> Joe Zeff <joe at zeff.us> writes:
> 
>> On 04/01/2014 09:49 PM, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
>>> That would be the responsibility of the WM's themselves.  WM's
>>> have to add support.  Not the other way around as you seem to
>>> think.
>> 
>> Which is why I pointed out that the question was if fvwm works
>> with Wayland, not the other way around.
> 
> It has been established that it is irrelevant what users think.
> I`m merely saying that wayland seems not very useful when it
> doesn`t work with most of the existing WMs.

I think you completely miss the point here. The point is that X11 has
reached the end of its usable life. Because of fundamental
architecture decisions made decades ago, it cannot keep up with the
desires of the modern window managers (for things like compositing,
input method handling and much more).

People have spent most of the last decade hacking on additional
features to X11 in a haphazard way, limited by the historic
architecture. Wayland was started as a means of providing those
features that copious window managers/desktop environments have been
asking for. There is *no way* to do this in a backwards-compatible
manner, because the historical architecture never conceived of the
modern way of doing things.

This means that in order to get all these capabilities, the individual
Window Managers will need to adapt to the new API. If they do not,
there is effort to provide a compatibility layer called XWayland that
will allow it to emulate the behavior of a classic X Windows
environment. This is still a work in progress (and is not perfect),
but it's an effort to ease this migration.