Which of the half dozen waylands support fractional scaling? This is a rhetorical question that you don't need to go research. It is just to highlight that there is not one wayland and any issue of feature support requires knowing which one you're talking about. And that itself is a problem.
"now supported." to me means you can actually use it so this seemed to be talking about the implementations. I guess you were using it in the theoretically supported sense? Anyway, it's hardly an official spec (like X.org is for X11s) when the implementations pick and chose.
It's as official as, say, the HTML 5 spec, or the HTTP spec.
The implementations can be plenty different as long as they conform.
It's not that I'm not getting your point. But part of the reason I wrote this rant is better than others, is because it's not harping on the point of "omg! someone dared to write a standard that has multiple implementations! the audacity!", but instead has criticisms of the standard itself.
I understand you don't like the standard-and-multiple-impls model, but it's worth noting that the most popular Wayland implementations share plenty of auxiliary and utility code in the form of libraries (e.g. libinput, libdisplay-info, etc). It's not as fragmented as it may seem, people are pretty reasonable.
Personally I think this is a healthy way to run things, for example because changes to the standard can easily be validated in multiple implementations, which tends to promote better quality for all over time.
The problem is precisely that getting the protocol official is just the start. After that you have to go wait for every different compositor to implement it, as opposed to implementing it once in Xorg and then every window manager gets it automatically for free with zero additional effort.
This is also how the web works, or many other things where you have a standards venue and multiple implementations that contribute to and validate the standard. There may be pros and cons, but I think overall it's proven to be a healthy way of running an ecosystem.
It's also not top-down, either. The Wayland governance model consists of voting members from the compositor authors, and for protocols to enter the wp or xdg namespaces, there must be multiple open source implementations. That means that by the time the protocol is official, at least first implementations already exist. It's not moving that slowly, overall.
Also, the Wayland model doesn't preclude compositors sharing as much of their code as they want. "Implement it ones and several projects benefit" also happens in the Wayland world, for example there are multiple compositors built on libraries like wlroots.
Xorg wasn't the only X11 implementations either. Fragmentation in the X Windows space did reduce over time as the open source impl sprinted and ahead and won out over everyone else by miles, but it did exist for many years. Most people are only familiar with an X11 space that already had 25 years of maturing and consolidation on it.
> This is also how the web works, or many other things where you have a standards venue and multiple implementations that contribute to and validate the standard. There may be pros and cons, but I think overall it's proven to be a healthy way of running an ecosystem.
The web only really has 3 engines (gecko/webkit/blink), and they still vary enough that it causes problems.
> Also, the Wayland model doesn't preclude compositors sharing as much of their code as they want. "Implement it ones and several projects benefit" also happens in the Wayland world, for example there are multiple compositors built on libraries like wlroots.
Yeah, I used to have great hopes for wlroots uniting basically everything except KDE and GNOME and mostly solving the fragmentation. Then I found some cool new compositor that I wanted to try, and it ran alright so I went to configure it to my keyboard layout (I could kind of get by on QWERTY to test that it ran but I'm not gonna live like that), and hey wlroots implements keyboard configuration so it should be easy right? Yeah, so it turns out wlroots provides the ability to support kb layouts, but every compositor has to actually wire up that code and this one didn't. And that's the most recent time I gave up on wayland.
> Xorg wasn't the only X11 implementations either. Fragmentation in the X Windows space did reduce over time as the open source impl sprinted and ahead and won out over everyone else by miles, but it did exist for many years.
Agreed; I've actually run into other X servers that were worse and I'm glad Xorg won (which is unusual; usually I prefer diverse implementations, but it turns out I prefer one working implementation).
> Most people are only familiar with an X11 space that already had 25 years of maturing and consolidation on it.
X is 39 years old[1]. Wayland is 14 years old[0]. If it's going to take another 11 years for Wayland to catch up I'm going to just wait for Arcan or whatever replaces Wayland.
Ultimately, Wayland is where all the energy is. It has shortcomings but is good enough and all future work (HDR for example) is going to be done on Wayland.
People will standardize the wayland implementation, just like they standardized the X11 one.
To tell you the truth, I'm not even aware if this is underway, or whether the computer I'm using right now uses some flavor of x11 or of wayland. But you can be certain that if every distro adopts it, every distro will have the same flavor. That problem is for early adopters only.
