I’m curious how software can be created and evolve over time. I’m afraid that at some point, we’ll realize there are issues with the software we’re using that can only be remedied by massive changes or a complete rewrite.

Are there any instances of this happening? Where something is designed with a flaw that doesn’t get realized until much later, necessitating scrapping the whole thing and starting from scratch?

  • @atzanteolEnglish
    4•3 months ago

    X11 is 40 years old. I’d say it’s been rather successful in the “won’t need to be replaced for some time” category. Some credit where due.

    There’s nothing so far that can’t be done in Wayland for technical implementation reasons. It’s all because some of the protocols aren’t ready yet, or not implemented yet.

    I mean … It doesn’t matter why it can’t be done. Just that it can’t be done.

    • Max-P
      8•3 months ago

      40 years old is also what makes it so hard to replace or even reimplement. The bugs are all decade old features, everything is written specifically for Xorg, all of which needs to be emulated correctly. It sure did serve us well, it’s impressive how long we’ve managed to make it work with technology well beyond the imagination of the engineers in the 80s.

      There’s this for the protocols: https://github.com/probonopd/wayland-x11-compat-protocols

      It can be done, it’s just nobody wants to do it. It’s not really worth the effort, when you can work on making it work properly in Wayland instead. That way you don’t need XWayland in the first place, but also XWayland can then implement it using the same public API everyone else does so it works on every compositor.