Browser Development • Re: Linux Pale Moon with Qt toolkit

Apologies for the tangent.

I'm not even sure if Wayland is in a state where this hard push for it is even sane. It's missing core functionalities for a GUI server, and in fact departs hard from providing a uniform implementation for GUI applications to talk to as it offloads much of the interactive implementation to the DEs. In my opinion that is a big step in the wrong direction; as it is now it's a very restrictive compositor-only thing that gets in the way of app interaction, and it's asking every application and DE maintainer to (re)implement things that should, logically, be part of the software sitting where Wayland sits. In that light, you can actually see XWayland as a necessary component, here. Wayland basically splitting X-server up into two parts: one kernel-facing part (Wayland) and one UI-facing part (XWayland), where the latter implements a uniform interface Wayland should have provided but doesn't. In a way it's similar to the whole Pulse/ALSA deal: If you want to, you can talk to either as an application, where ALSA is more involved for the application because it's a lower level, and Pulse is ALSA+abstraction. The only difference is that Wayland goes in the opposite direction, and trying to enforce individual implementations on the application/DE side while not bothering to implement a uniform abstraction.

To refer to something I saw recently, talking about X11 vs. Wayland: DEs/window managers are supposed to sit on top of a common protocol stack that has a universal underlying system without deviations, and that is exactly what you get with X11. It's unambiguous and every piece of FOSS software running on top of that knows exactly what to expect; with it being as mature as it is, this is also not subject to rapid/breaking changes and everyone knows what is or isn't supported. There is no compromise between a protocol system that may have this or that in one DE/WM implementation but not being present in another. You don't have to choose which DE or WM you are targeting as an application. because you have X11, and only need to talk to X11.

X11 conforms also to any UNIX-like system as a uniform system. You can change the kernel, the userland, the entire baseline OS itself, but everything on top of that as seen from the software environment (actual applications) stays the same. You're not creating discrepancies that have to be (somehow) solved by application developers because they have already been solved in a uniform way in X11's protocol stack.