Wayland: Over a Decade of Self-Fulfilling Prophecies and User-Shaming
THE migration of this site is still "underway" or "ongoing" (we're mostly moving to better software and newer, properly-patched components) and it's worth commenting on the Wayland situation because of what GNOME and what Raspberry Pi OS are doing. It's just more of this "appeal to novelty" nonsense, where newer is presumed better, even when it does not refer to a newer version but something half-baked but "newer". They basically try to compel - almost force - everybody to use Wayland despite knowing the limitations and technical issues (lack of support from loads of applications and games, fatal bugs, even missing essential features).
This may be a recipe for disaster of unprecedented proportions, or perhaps the sort of thing that drove Linus Torvalds away from KDE (when KDE4 came out rather prematurely). Existing GNU/Linux users will see many things breaking, stability may suffer profoundly, and new GNU/Linux users will get a negative impression of the platform.
This is a mostly IBM-led campaign; we know IBM does not care about the desktop (and laptop) and desktop users. Heck, it does not even value software freedom, now it does not share security patches in the open, and it certainly doesn't fancy the GPL.
This is an ongoing issue that more people need to speak about. KDE users like myself and my wife cannot use Wayland, albeit some of the critics report significant progress this year. CubicleNate wrote yesterday: "Now that Wayland has arrived, what’s next? Pipewire in conjunction of Wayland is now providing even cooler functions and capabilities that haven’t been previously available to Desktop Linux (yes, this is another article I’m working on). HiDPI displays can be fully embraced in Linux as well as per-monitor fractional scaling. Truly, a fantastic capability. Wayland is also giving users the ability to use DisplayLink displays on Linux quite smoothly too. I can honestly say that I have never been more content as a desktop Linux user, or, for that matter, desktop computer user… ever. These are some marvelous times to be using Linux."
But many features remain missing and lot of software is still not compatible. Some people want the basics to work, some need advanced tools, whereas to a lot of people what matters is that the Web browser/s will work.
Either way, if the future is Wayland, how much of it was just a self-fulfilling prophecy and gaslighting? █