Linux Mint 21.3 released with Cinnamon 6.0 and experimental Wayland support

Quoting: EikeWhen the world moves on to Wayland (in the next decade ;) ), will this be the death of all those little DEs that won't implement a Wayland compositor?

A. Killing a category of small FOSS projects is like weeding Reynoutria Japonica. Only achievable for large organisations with full control over the infrastructure and able to aggressively retribute to anyone who actively opposes the removal process. a.k.a there will always pop up more.
B. FOSS is big on compatibility I remember reading about problems with a removed function 19 years after getting deprecated.
C. FOSS projects don't rely on users to persist(*COUGH GNU/HURD *COUGH) just developers to maintain them.

I promise you that a single decade isn't enough to weed out the small non-implenting DE's or render them incompatible with your distro.

Quoting: LoudTechie

Quoting: EikeWhen the world moves on to Wayland (in the next decade ;) ), will this be the death of all those little DEs that won't implement a Wayland compositor?

A. Killing a category of small FOSS projects is like weeding Reynoutria Japonica. Only achievable for large organisations with full control over the infrastructure and able to aggressively retribute to anyone who actively opposes the removal process. a.k.a there will always pop up more.
B. FOSS is big on compatibility I remember reading about problems with a removed function 19 years after getting deprecated.
C. FOSS projects don't rely on users to persist(*COUGH GNU/HURD *COUGH) just developers to maintain them.

I don't have the feeling you answered my question. Loads of FOSS projects are dying a silent death every day, GitHub is full of their corpses (and full of all those thriving projects, of course).

Quoting: LoudTechieI promise you that a single decade isn't enough to weed out the small non-implenting DE's or render them incompatible with your distro.

What will run the little DEs in a decade, when X.org is full of problems nobody is fixing anymore?

Quoting: whizseThis is my current one:

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I guess the lesson is - don't pick your wallpaper on an empty stomach.

Quoting: EikeWhat will run the little DEs in a decade, when X.org is full of problems nobody is fixing anymore?

Just for the sake of clarity, are you talking of any particular DEs here or just some hypothetical ones that will never move on from X.org?

Quoting: Eike

Quoting: LoudTechie

Quoting: EikeWhen the world moves on to Wayland (in the next decade ;) ), will this be the death of all those little DEs that won't implement a Wayland compositor?

A. Killing a category of small FOSS projects is like weeding Reynoutria Japonica. Only achievable for large organisations with full control over the infrastructure and able to aggressively retribute to anyone who actively opposes the removal process. a.k.a there will always pop up more.
B. FOSS is big on compatibility I remember reading about problems with a removed function 19 years after getting deprecated.
C. FOSS projects don't rely on users to persist(*COUGH GNU/HURD *COUGH) just developers to maintain them.

I don't have the feeling you answered my question. Loads of FOSS projects are dying a silent death every day, GitHub is full of their corpses (and full of all those thriving projects, of course).

Quoting: LoudTechieI promise you that a single decade isn't enough to weed out the small non-implenting DE's or render them incompatible with your distro.

What will run the little DEs in a decade, when X.org is full of problems nobody is fixing anymore?

X will never(on a scale of decades) become any worse than it currently is.
Software doesn't get worse without active interference just more of its problems get known.

The problem you've now more clearly described(sorry, I misunderstood you) will only arise when the things X relies on make breaking changes(and probably when 64 bit time runs out, but that is 292 billion years removed from today).
This is really unpopular within all layers of computer development and X relies on very little things, but unpopular doesn't mean unheard off.
So what would it take to take down everything that relies on X?
A few examples
Combined: processor manufacturers remove OpenGL support, nobody writes an X compatible OpenGL Vulkan compatibility layer, nobody ports x to Vulkan, people switch to the newer processors.
Combined: Everybody switches to a currently unknown processor type and all compilers for it only support programming languages X is not compatible with(a.k.a everybody switches away from C).


Last edited by LoudTechie on 13 January 2024 at 2:25 pm UTC

Quoting: whizseThis is my current one:

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I guess the lesson is - don't pick your wallpaper on an empty stomach.

Oh man, now I'm hungry too!

Quoting: tuubi

Quoting: EikeWhat will run the little DEs in a decade, when X.org is full of problems nobody is fixing anymore?

Just for the sake of clarity, are you talking of any particular DEs here or just some hypothetical ones that will never move on from X.org?

It's hypothetical, I only ever used KDE. I kept hearing about other ones, some E...3?, TWN, I got no idea. Like with many Linux topics, there seem to be many little alternatives to the big fishes. But I have the impression that getting ones DE to work on Wayland is quite some work that little projects might not be able to do. Is this impressions wrong?

Quoting: LoudTechie

Quoting: Eike

Quoting: LoudTechie

Quoting: EikeWhen the world moves on to Wayland (in the next decade ;) ), will this be the death of all those little DEs that won't implement a Wayland compositor?

A. Killing a category of small FOSS projects is like weeding Reynoutria Japonica. Only achievable for large organisations with full control over the infrastructure and able to aggressively retribute to anyone who actively opposes the removal process. a.k.a there will always pop up more.
B. FOSS is big on compatibility I remember reading about problems with a removed function 19 years after getting deprecated.
C. FOSS projects don't rely on users to persist(*COUGH GNU/HURD *COUGH) just developers to maintain them.

I don't have the feeling you answered my question. Loads of FOSS projects are dying a silent death every day, GitHub is full of their corpses (and full of all those thriving projects, of course).

Quoting: LoudTechieI promise you that a single decade isn't enough to weed out the small non-implenting DE's or render them incompatible with your distro.

What will run the little DEs in a decade, when X.org is full of problems nobody is fixing anymore?

X will never(on a scale of decades) become any worse than it currently is.
Software doesn't get worse without active interference just more of its problems get known.

Well, there's even a name for it, bit rot. And the difference between getting worse and having more known problems is little. Truth is, software, especially software with network components, needs people fixing it up to keep it's level of security. Yes, theoretically, it already has all holes that will become known the next years, but in practice, a hole nobody knows is not a threat. And new ways of finding security holes are invented. (I'd be surprised if AI is not able to find security holes, e.g.). So, yes, in my humble opinion, software (with network code) not being maintained rot over time.

Quoting: Eike

Quoting: LoudTechie

Quoting: Eike

Quoting: LoudTechie

Quoting: EikeWhen the world moves on to Wayland (in the next decade ;) ), will this be the death of all those little DEs that won't implement a Wayland compositor?

A. Killing a category of small FOSS projects is like weeding Reynoutria Japonica. Only achievable for large organisations with full control over the infrastructure and able to aggressively retribute to anyone who actively opposes the removal process. a.k.a there will always pop up more.
B. FOSS is big on compatibility I remember reading about problems with a removed function 19 years after getting deprecated.
C. FOSS projects don't rely on users to persist(*COUGH GNU/HURD *COUGH) just developers to maintain them.

I don't have the feeling you answered my question. Loads of FOSS projects are dying a silent death every day, GitHub is full of their corpses (and full of all those thriving projects, of course).

Quoting: LoudTechieI promise you that a single decade isn't enough to weed out the small non-implenting DE's or render them incompatible with your distro.

What will run the little DEs in a decade, when X.org is full of problems nobody is fixing anymore?

X will never(on a scale of decades) become any worse than it currently is.
Software doesn't get worse without active interference just more of its problems get known.

Well, there's even a name for it, bit rot. And the difference between getting worse and having more known problems is little. Truth is, software, especially software with network components, needs people fixing it up to keep it's level of security. Yes, theoretically, it already has all holes that will become known the next years, but in practice, a hole nobody knows is not a threat. And new ways of finding security holes are invented. (I'd be surprised if AI is not able to find security holes, e.g.). So, yes, in my humble opinion, software (with network code) not being maintained rot over time.

Okay. Security wise I've to agree with you.
The answer to that part is somewhat less comfortable.
In its current state I expect X to sustain a "secure" state for the coming 2 decades wherein it will be getting security fixes at comparable speed people will keep publicly discovering them(both very slow, because interest will dwindle at both sides).
Halfway I expect a (non-security)buggy Wayland compatibility layer to show up saving around half of the code currently running X.
Luckily X is not online so it will probably keep running on some offline computers.

Quoting: Eike

Quoting: tuubi

Quoting: EikeWhat will run the little DEs in a decade, when X.org is full of problems nobody is fixing anymore?

Just for the sake of clarity, are you talking of any particular DEs here or just some hypothetical ones that will never move on from X.org?

It's hypothetical, I only ever used KDE. I kept hearing about other ones, some E...3?, TWN, I got no idea. Like with many Linux topics, there seem to be many little alternatives to the big fishes. But I have the impression that getting ones DE to work on Wayland is quite some work that little projects might not be able to do. Is this impressions wrong?

The smaller your array of existing code the easier it is(it requires you to check large percentages of your code base for X commands).
The flipside is also true. The bigger you're the more people can work on the review process.