I do think there are long-term benefits in many cases, it just depends on available resources. There are plenty of projects that desperately need a rewrite for maintenance reasons alone so you might as well examine if language switch is worth it. It’s not like there aren’t a lot of success stories, even if there’s projects like sudo-rs where we’re, at best, not sure if there’s tangible benefits.

At this point I think the “thoughtful” C programmer is a myth and I don’t mean this as an insult. Even the most careful and experienced C gurus still make mistakes that would be much harder to make, if not categorically prevented in something like Rust. A lot of very secure C software is small in footprint, has had stable requirements for years, experienced thousands of hours of real world testing by users and the scrutiny of security experts. What I’m saying is: it should be easier to write secure software, especially with complex requirements or large attack surfaces.

I disagree that C has a notably smaller footprint than Rust for most purposes and system integration is in some cases harder in Rust precisely because of the notorious upfront implementation cost that prevents a lot of potential bugs.

Mozilla, where Rust was originally conceived, have already talked about this risk factor ages ago when they were still working on Servo. Reimplementing battle-tested software in a different language can result in logic bugs being introduced, which no programming language can really prevent. Many times they will actually reintroduce bugs that have already been historically fixed in the original implementation. This doesn’t invalidate the benefits of moving to a very memory safe language, it just needs to be taken into consideration when determining whether it’s worth the risk or the effort.

Honestly I have no idea whether sudo-rs is a good idea or not, but I have my doubts that any of the other people (especially the very vocal kind) chiming in on this do. Any time Rust is involved in the Linux community, a lot of vocal critics with very little knowledge of the language or programming in general seem to appear.

Getting comfortable with legacy software is completely valid as long as you’re aware of the potential disadvantages. Shitposting online about it or worse being wrong on the internet are different stories.

That’s not the same thing as shitposting online about your grievances with Wayland.

Did you try it that with Gnome? I heard that some input methods suffered with the wayland transition because mutter makes some weird choices. From my personal experience, libinput works great with a wacom tablet, so I’m assuming you ran into an issue with a specific DE.

Let me rephrase that: it sounds like a niche problem to have for an end user. It also doesn’t sound like a fair complaint, because no long-term replacement to X was ever going to be drop-in the way you seem to expect.

Alright then, since everyone assumes I’m here to participate in this shitty flamewar instead of genuinely asking what someone is talking about: the article does a pretty good job of explaining what the idea is behind not giving applications absolute coordinates to position their windows in. If that isn’t enough and you’re one of those people who insist that it must be those evil Wayland devs pushing their security agenda down everyones throats, then you might consider how much of a pain this was for any WM that wanted to do something like scrollable workspaces or managing a device that doesn’t have a standard screen shape. If anything, giving apps access to global coordinates the way X did, just makes them less portable to other environments. There are trade-offs here and you might disagree with the compromise we landed on for now, but all of this has already been discussed for years so at this point I really don’t care for snarky commentary from people who aren’t willing to contribute towards the changes they want to see.

If that was the case then maybe I’d have more patience for disingenuous shit like this.

I wasn’t really asking you but thanks for chiming in I guess.

That sounds like a fairly niche problem to have.

Which one are you talking about?

I will concede that not every obscure feature has been kept but the vast majority of users are now better served by wayland compositors. I have no idea what you mean by “project”, but if they had no concerns for backwards compatibility, then XWayland wouldn’t exist.

Stopping work on X11 because it’s been an unmaintainable mess for ages doesn’t really count as “forcing” anything upon anyone. I won’t pretend that Wayland protocol development hasn’t seen plenty of disagreements, but it is still a collaborative process.

Your disagreements seem fairly vague to me and I can’t help but think that the “pigheaded” label is somewhat ironic, after your first paragraph.

They are even free to thanklessly maintain X11 for all the other contrarian fossils, because the developers sure aren’t doing it anymore.

Missing feature != Inability to customize