The Unintended Consequences Linux’s Wayland Adoption Will Have on BSD
'Like most people who use Linux as their daily driver, I’ve been pleased lately to see that Wayland is finally getting some serious traction and is on its way to being the default display server for most mainstream Linux distributions. It’s been a long trip from the days when we first heard that X was on its way out and that Wayland was on its way in — 15 years as a matter of fact — so the better performance, more svelte code base, enhanced security, and all of the other advantages that Wayland brings to the table being just about here for some of us, and already here for others, is indeed good news. But before we pop the cork on the champagne bottles and start the celebrations, perhaps we should consider that this good news for Linux might not be good news for those running BSD or one of the Unixes, which is something that normally would never occur to me to think about since I’ve never tried to use BSD. The only reason I’m thinking about it now is because this weekend I ran across a post by Chris Siebenmann, a Unix systems administrator at the University of Toronto’s CS Labs. Being a Unix guy by day (and I suspect a BSD guy by night), he’s all on what Wayland on Linux means to BSD/Unix stuck on X, and he’s been thinking about what Linux’s move to Wayland is going to mean for desktop BSDs and Unixes. “Once upon a time, the future of Unix desktops looked fairly straightforward,” he wrote. “Everyone ran on X, so the major threat to cross-Unix portability in major desktops was the use of Linux only APIs, which became especially D-Bus and systemd related things. Unix desktops that were less attached to tight integration with the Linux environment would probably stay easily available on FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and so on.” The main thing I got from that is that for a long time, the BSDs have benefited somewhat from Linux. In this case, because both operating systems use X, it was relatively easy (“relatively” probably being the key word here) to port most popular “Linux” desktop environments to BSD. The trouble is, according to Siebenmann, those days might be coming to an end.' -- source: https://fossforce.com/2024/07/the-unintended-consequences-linuxs-wayland-ado... Cheers, Peter
On Wed, 31 Jul 2024 15:07:35 +1200, Peter Reutemann quoted:
'... perhaps we should consider that this good news for Linux might not be good news for those running BSD or one of the Unixes ...'
Firstly, no-one cares about the proprietary Unixes any more. Every platform that is legally entitled to call itself “Unix” is either dead or dying. Secondly, the whole development model of the various BSD offshoots just seems designed to make things difficult for themselves. Consider that there are maybe half a dozen BSD variants, versus maybe 50× that number of Linux distros. Yet it is easier to move between Linux distros than it is to move between BSD variants. And further consider that that huge variety of Linux distros covers a much greater range of hardware configurations, usage philosophies, application scenarios, intended audiences and what have you than all the BSDs put together can manage. Look at the difference between Arch versus Gentoo versus Debian versus Red Hat, or consider purpose-built distros like TAILS or SystemRescue or Damn Small Linux, Windows workalikes like Deepin, or downright oddballs like GoboLinux, and of course heavily-customized embedded flavours like Android: as wildly different as they are, they are all built on the same Linux kernel. By contrast, every BSD variant seems to want to go its own way, right down to the kernel. This leads to a lot of duplication of effort, and that in turn limits their reach. In sum: Linux offers a huge variety of choice with minimal fragmentation, while the BSD world offers much less choice with much more fragmentation.
participants (2)
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Lawrence D'Oliveiro -
Peter Reutemann