Wayland is a garbage heap and no amount of dev time will ever make it good. Of course, any time this is pointed out you'll get the old "it's just a protocol!" and "security!" responses from the drones that do not have a right to have an opinion about this in the first place. Many of which are probably being paid to peddle the "wayland is the future!" propaganda and likely most are just bots. It's pretty much impossible to have an open discussion about the state of it and other bad things happening in the *nix/Linux ecosystem since you'll get dog piled on anywhere you bring it up on the web (and on most non-web discussion platforms). I've seen plenty of people get openly offended if you dare to question the project or related projects (systemd is a good example). But if you wait a few days and watch those people they'll always within a day or so tell someone else that they 1) aren't a developer and 2) only care about playing video games. In other words. They're the types of people that only ended up on a UNIX clone because Microsoft Windows finally got bad enough to run them off for good.
Redhat's (IBM) only concern is supplying their primary customer with a sorta-working OS that can be used as an excuse to endlessly bill them for support contracts. Beyond that they don't care about anyone else aside from keeping everyone else from starting or using an OS they don't control. Since if something new became the new default they'd have to spend 15-20 years again attempting to seize control over the development of the project.
IBM's primary customer is the US military/Government and their primary source of income now is billing that primary customer. Who has an endless supply of tax dollars to throw at IBM. Most tech companies these days are like this. They're all hoovering up an unlimited flow of tax dollars through Government contracts. The same source of money is being used to fund development for 99% of "FOSS" projects out there. So it's no wonder so many people willingly go along with it all the way up to Linus. They don't want the free money to stop.
If things like systemd and wayland were actually good they wouldn't have had to spend billions of dollars running a propaganda/shilling campaign and taking over all the major distros to force those new defaults. Everything in Linux land is quickly morphing into Fedora on purpose. Every time you go looking at who has control of any big distro you'll see the same companies listed as their current employer or in their employment history. All of those large companies have deep ties to the US Government and military. Just like all of the major universities (MIT, UC Berkeley) and the professors serving at them have been making most of their money through National Science Foundation grants through the US Government/Military (and organizations like DARPA) which again just serve as a way to funnel the endless slush fund that is the tax payer's money into private hands.
Wayland was never intended to be good is what I'm saying. It was never intended to serve as a better general purpose GUI for the average user or even the business user. It was only ever intended to force more vendor lock-in and be used to develop closed military/Government applications. Any pretense about "security" you should replace with "vendor lock-in" and "not allowing the user to poke at it".
I'm afraid Xlibre is not the answer either. At least not with the current leadership involved. If anything it only serves as a boogeyman to point at for the same camp that's been preventing actual development on Xorg for over a decade now. I am always suspicious when I see something like that getting lots of attention and "drama" around it when projects like Arcan have been around for over a decade now. Arcan is doing things that are actually exciting. It supports all X11 protocol and wayland protocol applications. It has real security sandboxing and real IPC. It allows you to move any running application between multiple machines over any type of network using drag+drop. It (mostly) just works and has managed to attract funding.
But go on any place where software is discussed about you'll discover that 99% of those people that feel the need to respond to every useless X11 vs. wayland thread have never heard of it. You'll see that despite multiple attempts by the author, contributors and users to spread the word that their threads are almost always deleted or on placed like reddit flooded with botted downvotes. No tech news website publishes articles about it either.
I've seen the same thing happen to many projects over the years. Where discussion about them are soft-censored for years until the author eventually gives up on the project and loses interest in building anything new all together. Since they can't attract people that could help but more importantly they can't even attact users to help test things. But somehow every bad re-write of some 30+ year application will get major attention all over the web for simply mentioing "Rust" or some other flavor of the week new language in the title. Even though the re-write doesn't do half of what the old application did and any security benefits are pure fantasy.
It's frustrating to see all these people getting paid all this money from Government/Military contracts constantly yammering on about how much they love "freedom". When they spend their days trying to eliminate the average user's freedoms to run the software they want on their systems. By forcing worse stuff as the new default. Fear mongering about security on systems where there are hardware level backdoors. Supporting global MitM attacks like cloudflare and all the others coming from the major "CDN" providers. Breaking open standards in favor of letting companies like Google run amok. Using obvious soft censorship and when that fails open censorship. Labeling people all kinds of mean names and particpating in so-called cancel culture (aka digging up things they said in private and attempting to get their fired/cut off their meager income stream). Blantantly lying through their teeth about anything and everything as long as their lies are pushing the company/Government/their employer's wishes.
The old GNU license and the "freedoms" it was supposed to allow debate is old hat. But a lot of users are still under the false impression that the GNU license somehow prevents these projects from being taken over. But even a surface level look at the situation with Linux over the past 2 decades will show you that the license never prevented that from happening. These projects were taken over from the inside by throwing money at them (and people willing to ruin them). Instead of simply taking the code and using it the GNU license forced a full take over at the political/cultrual level of the project(s). Which is how we ended up with the thousands of Linux distros morphing into systemd+Linux kernel. In other words: What fedora/IBM ships today every "downstream" distro ships tomorrow - a couple of years from now. The Debian release of 2028 is simply whatever IBM forced as the new default in 2026. Gentoo is the same thing. It's Fedora, instead now you're building it from source yourself (which now requires an internet connection at all times of course and I hope you trust all the binaries being pulled in from random unverified servers).
I've said it before but the age of having your own system and running what you want to run on it is quickly coming to an end. We had a good run between about the early 90s-early 2020s. But the loop hole is quickly closing. The future is much like what we had in the past: dumb terminals accessing mainframes/servers. For the vast majority of users this is already the reality. The sad part is most of them like it that way. All the yammering on about "freedom" is mostly fluff. We already have plenty of people that "fucking love FLOSS" doing nothing but using it to run Steam and Google Chrome (same thing). Who couldn't care less about their base tools being swapped out for tools with a restricted license agreement that can't do half of what the old tools did. But tell them the Windows-only kernel level anti-cheat stuff for flavor of the month popular video game is coming to their "FOSS" OS and they'll sing your praises from the roof tops and spam everywhere they can that it's finally the year of the UNIX desktop.
Such people will smugly tell you things like just fork it and contribute! and you didn't contribute so you don't have a right to complain!. As if all the soft and open hard censorship isn't happening and there isn't a long list of people that have died under mysterious circumstances who were once in a position to prevent some of what's happened from happening. The lucky people have had to endure obscurity and blacklisting from their peers. Others have not been that lucky and have paid the ultimate price for trying to uphold the "freedoms" this "hacker culture" we all ended up in used to promote.
We all didn't end up using an OS designed in the 1970s-1980s in the 2020s by mistake. Many other projects were quietly squashed over the decades because they weren't the creation of the US military/Government. Our beloved UNIX didn't end up becoming a little worse with each passing decade either. It was done very much on purpose. Our hardware doesn't come with built in hardware level backdoors for no reason. Our network connections aren't monitored for no reason. A copy of every packet we send over said network isn't made for no reason. This technology they're trying to commercialize now (so-called LLM/AI) isn't new either. It wasn't created just so people with no talent could crap out "content" while paying some server farm to generate it either. Its purpose is the same purpose it had when it was originally created decades ago: crawling through mountains of data quickly. In other words. Its only real purpose is making the security state we all live under a little more powerful and keeping tabs on everyone forced to live within it.
They never gave a crap about the end user's security. At least not beyond being the only ones that are able to spy on them and hoover up all the data they generate. They have to crawl through it and store anything juicy forever. Just in case they ever need to blackmail you in the future or to keep tabs on how their proapganda is flowing through the so-called "social networks".
This isn't to say all of these people contributing to these problems are actively malicious. Many of them just wanted to earn paper to exchange for food. But the latter are a bigger problem than the former and they're just as "evil" at the end of the day. If you go turn over the rocks within the "community" where all of this stuff is flowing out of you'll find plenty of both of those types. The rest are just the so-called sheep who'll go along with whatever they think is coming from a position of authority. The followers. The ones that don't have the right to have an opinion in the first place.
Chasing Linux is a lot like chasing rabbits. It can only end up one way: failure. One could argue that chasing rabbits is more productive. At least you'll get some execerise and maybe you'll happen upon a Hooka smoking caterpillar (or at the very least a hippy with some good LSD). Chasing after what's happening over there can only end badly for any other UNIX clone OS. The cancer will only end up metastasizing and next thing you know it'll be so deep in the system it'll be impossible to ever remove it. The entire project will have to be taken out back like a rabid dog and shot for the good of everyone that might come into contact with it.
The fact is we already had solutions to all of these problems in the early 90s. But people seem hell bent on refusing to learn from the past. You'd think at least one person would have had the good sense to look at something like Plan9 and see that doing GUI stuff fully in userspace was a bad idea. But common sense is not very common anymore it seems. On the dark side they love to talk about how they'll never break userspace. But then they'll turn right around and yank your drivers out from under you and replace them with some LLM generated garbage no one even bothered to test on anything but one system they had laying around. Then they have the gal to tell you to "get with the times" because your PC wasn't built after 2015.
I am ranting but I'm sure you take my point. The future is not looking that bright and since FreeBSD seems so hellbent on chasing things happening in another kernel's userspace which is now mostly being programmed by people that openly brag about automating everything (including the project's leader) things will get much much worse going forward. Things have already been so bad for so long I can't remember the last time there are any good news about anything happening in the IT sector or compsci as a whole.
In fact, things have gotton so bad in the last decade that I'm starting to regret the fact that I wasted my youth learning all of this stuff. If I'd known everyone else was going to sell out for a meager amount of cash like this I would have did more productive things in my youth and found a different field to have a career in. With the way things are now in the tech world I'd been better off becoming a politician or hustling preacher. I would have made more money and I wouldn't have helped contribute as much to the security state being built up all around us right now.
Enjoy the little time you have left to hack on things socially. Pretty soon you aren't going to be allowed to talk about anything at all without handing over your Government ID. Real collaboration has already been taken away for most things. The moment you step out of line and don't parrot what's coming out of IBM and friends is the moment all you access gets taken away. Already seen plenty of people blacklisted just in the past few years for saying the wrong thing or being born in the wrong country. It hasn't even gotten that bad yet. By 2036 I seriously doubt someone like you will be allowed to operate the blog you do without handing over a Government ID in return for the "privilege" of having a wordpress blog. Nor will I be allowed to post on one of the few web forums.
Funny how all those so-called "freedoms" quickly end up turning into a "privilege" isn't it? You'll see that doublethink happening pretty often in most "tech communities" these days. When they talk about GNU it's a "freedom" but the moment anyone points out a problem with the software using it is a "privilege" and anyone that refuses to buy into the obvious doublethink is <insert mean word here> (they really like using "Nazi").
The whole GNU vs. BSD (and other licenses) or the whole Linux vs. BSD thing is the same lame trick we see pulled everywhere else. X11 vs. Wayland is the same thing really. You get shoehorned into little teams and anyone that isn't a fan of one team is obviously from the other. If you're one of the few the team-think doesn't work on then you're just ignored or censored. Meanwhile, everything continues to get worse with each passing day and any real progress is stopped. Hence why the two-party system within so-called democractic nations is so effective at preventing the populations from doing anything about the real problem. People like being on teams, they like taking sides, they like yelling at the other team and they love sucking up to what they perceive to be someone in a position of authority over them.
I can't believe they keep getting away with it.
