Valve Engineer Mike Blumenkrantz Hoping To Accelerate Wayland Protocol Development

I love how people are complaining about Wayland not being ready or being unstable (whatever that even means, because it's a protocol), while it's the default on both GNOME and Plasma now, which combined probably run on more than 50% of Linux desktops these days.

And not only that, but Cinnamon, Xfce and others want to follow, so very clearly people who know a fair bit about desktops seem to disagree with Wayland being "not ready".

Just please get us proper color management. Creators need accuracy & HDR is still a mess.

They could start by making the Steam client be able to run in native Wayland

I love wayland. I'm 100% on it since the KDE 6.0 Beta end of 2023. Back then i wanted to try the HDR of my new monitor. I can't remember the last time I had a problem of any kind or thought “That worked under X”.

Multi-Monitor setup with different resolutions and refresh-rates. wayland does not care. it just works. And this is to a big part a gaming machine btw.

I want to work at Valve

How would y'all feel if Valve started selling PCs with their flavor of Linux on it?

Accelerating wayland développement would mean forking it. As it is right now there's a lot of yapping in their git for every decision, small or big.

Ok but now I want a life size sentry

I personally think it is a very bad idea to "speed run development" of protocols. This will only lead to broken designs which will then cause each desktop top do things differently.

Wayland protocol development is slow and heavily debated in order to make sure everyone is happy implementing them. You want all desktop to use the same spec and this could lead to additional desktop specific protocols which would totally break compatibility.

In short, this is a really bad idea and should be rejected by everyone

Worries around this seem a bit much. They are making an experimental version of the protocol so they don't need to sit on their hands while changes are accepted. They're not bypassing the normal process.

Wayland 1.0 was released in 2012.

Now, 12 years later, it still is not production ready. I lost hopes long ago and rather stick to a security flawed but stable X11.

I am very glad with the proposal of the Frog protocol, as Wayland was dead before it could even walk.

Can anyone explain why Wayland exists or who cares about it? X has been around forever, it sucks but it works and everything supports it. Alternatives like NeWS came around that were radically better, but were too soon or relied too much on corporate support, so they faded. The GNU project originally intended to write its own thing, but settled for using X. Now there's Wayland though, which seems like a slight improvement over X, but mostly kind of a lateral move.

If you're going to replace X, why not do something a lot better? If not actual NeWS, then something that incorporates some of its ideas. I think Squeak was like that but I don't know much about it.