Wayland - yay or nay?

kpedersen said:
I like the simplicity of the Wayland Linux display system in many ways (it feels a bit like writing graphical software for MS-DOS again). But I don't feel that Wayland will have a substantial enough ecosystem worth committing time to until after our grandkids professional lifetime.
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That's exactly what it is. Back in the day when they floated the idea of Wayland the consensus among Linux gamers was that X did not offer the same gaming performance as gaming on Windows did. Windows allowed games to write directly to graphic card RAM while with X only the Xserver could write to the frame buffer, through the kernel. And apps must communicate with the Xserver through the X protocol. All this takes time. This is what the gamers complained about. And so here we are.

X is legacy (old) software as well. As Wayland newly written code by people who we assume have learned from the mistakes of the past is supposed to be more resilient to shenanigans to circumvent it to access RAM it's not supposed to. The fact that Wayland bypasses X protocol overhead accessing the graphics card as directly as the kernel allows it better performance just as MS-DOS apps had access to the graphics card RAM.

I don't use Wayland here because I still run apps on my machines in my basement while sitting at my desk with my laptop inserted into its base station here on the second floor of my home (with CAT6 running from the basement to various rooms of this 113 year old house). A powerful laptop generally used as an X terminal in the traditional sense. You can't do this with Wayland (except with Xwayland).
 
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