> but people on either side can not fathom the existence of the other as anything other than some sort of bad-faith exercise in contrarianism.
I do not understand this position. Why attack Wayland? X.Org works, it would probably work for another 10 years, XWayland maybe 20 years. If X.Org is such a marvel surely someone would maintain it.
There are a lot of options to support X.Org — programming, hiring, donations, asking company to buy license from the vendor that maintains it. Companies buy all sort of licenses, office suits, editors, I have not seen buying Linux licenses.
> I do not understand this position. Why attack Wayland? X.Org works, it would probably work for another 10 years, XWayland maybe 20 years. If X.Org is such a marvel surely someone would maintain it.
Because most people are dependent on distributions to provide them with a standardised setup, packages and security updates, and few distros have proven willing to support more than one option for a component as central and dominant as the display server. Sysvinit also works, und unlike Xorg doesn't even have the problem that graphics hardware will eventually leave it behind; and yet, it is now basically impossible to avoid systemd and its many tentacles if you want a mainstream-compatible Linux experience with timely security patches, because its proponents have successfully persuaded every major distro to adopt it and drop everything it replaced. Wayland, unfortunately, is not willing to exist as just another option until it has reached feature parity with X11; rather, it is competing with it for a limited resource (distro support) now, and poised to go in for the killing choke.
In other words you believe distro maintainers does bad job. They push product that is not ready.
I've seen enough arrogant quotes from systemd developers. But it solves user problems. Arch Linux was first among systemd adopters, boot become much quicker. And I think it solves maintainers problems, that's why it was adopted so quickly.
Oh, I've heard GNOME also helped adoption, but is it systemd fault or GNOME fault? I believe GNOMEs. As I know OpenBSD does not run systemd so it is possible if people care enough.
I do not use PulseAudio, but I have not tried since 2008 (pushed by Ubuntu, wrong choice). Maybe it works, ALSA works so I do not care. If I cared enough about ALSA, I'd support its development like maintaining Firefox ALSA backend.
> Wayland, unfortunately, is not willing to exist as just another option
I do not believe this is developers attitude, more like your opinion. You would gain nothing by attacking Wayland. Some developers would burn out sooner, same developers that could have implemented features you need. And lets face it no one wants to work on XFree86, not you, not me, hardly anyone. Because it is a mess:
> The size isn't so much the issue, it's the design. The xfree86 ddx seriously believes that you have one video card driving one monitor with one keyboard and one mouse, and anything beyond that only works well because we sank a ton of effort into it. (It used to have code to disable interrupts! From userspace! What could go right.)
> X is a tremendously successful project whose core design and reference implementation do not reflect how computers work anymore, in ways that make it painful to develop and maintain as the system display server.
I do not understand this position. Why attack Wayland? X.Org works, it would probably work for another 10 years, XWayland maybe 20 years. If X.Org is such a marvel surely someone would maintain it.
There are a lot of options to support X.Org — programming, hiring, donations, asking company to buy license from the vendor that maintains it. Companies buy all sort of licenses, office suits, editors, I have not seen buying Linux licenses.