What do anti-vaxxers, flat earthers, 9/11 truthers, and pro-Wayland activism all have in common? All of them are characterized by a blithe rejection of facts to embrace a narrative of victimization by a vague authority. In the case of Wayland, the “vague authority” is an angry developer, who thinks that criticism is a conspiracy theory. “Wayland is amazing!” is a conspiracy theory in itself, with no basis in truth, and its supporters have spent years harassing X.org maintainers, contributors, and users. And it’s time for it to fucking stop.
Maybe X.org doesn’t work for your precious use-case. More likely, it does work, and you swallowed some propaganda based on an assumption which might have been correct 7 years ago. Regardless, I simply don’t give a shit about you anymore. I’ve tried appealing to reason and rationally debunking each lie that some X.org detractor flavor-of-the-week is touting to tow the party line, but it didn’t work. So my new approach is “fuck you”. None of the X.org detractors have a clue. They don’t understand X.org, they don’t understand Wayland, they don’t understand Linux graphics or OpenGL or Vulkan or anything else in the stack. They don’t even understand what it’s like to use X.org, because at most they might have spent 5 minutes installing it, realized that something was — gasp — different than Wayland, and then uninstalled it and wrote their angry blog post.
It has a real cost, you know, being a dick to maintainers. It’s not good for our mental health. We’re out here trying to make things better. X.org fixes unfixable problems with Wayland, and might have invented some new, fixable problems in the process — most of which have been fucking fixed already, and years ago! We’ve sacrificed our spare time to build this for you for free. If you turn around and harass us based on some utterly nonsensical conspiracy theories, then you’re a fucking asshole.
If you really want to live in your propagandized world of X.org lies, then fine. You’re gonna maintain Wayland yourself, because we’re not going to volunteer our time, sacrifice our weekends and evenings staying up late for your sake, just to maintain that broken pile of shit. You know what, if you fork it and prove that you know what you’re doing for a while, we’d probably just give you the keys to upstream so you can maintain it yourself. If you do know what you’re doing, though, you’ll soon realize you want nothing to do with that shitty codebase.
X.org works for everyone, and works for more people than is even possible with Wayland. Most of the lies you’ve heard about ways that it’s broken are just that: lies. And if you insist on living in that fantasy, then keep it to yourself, asshole.
(No sorries and no regrets to Mr. Devault.)