It’s fucking weird people have such strong opinions about issues like X11 and systemd. They’re meant to be working in the background away from the user, and that’s exactly how I treat them. Actually systemd still provides some functions a user might have to interact with manually, for X11 I’m just baffled.
When I take an uber, I don’t care whether the car has an automatic or manual transmission.
I think the average user wouldn’t care, Linux just attracts nerds. And I think it’s totally fine and even good that people care how their computer works—it shows that users care about their software working for them, rather than just wanting to go along with whatever is given to them. I think a lot of the positions people take about these things are very silly, but I’d still prefer someone to have a silly opinion about X11/Wayland or pid 1 than to not have an opinion at all. It’s nice that users are being actively involved in deciding what they want their system to be; it’s a nice change from the average user who’s like “well microsoft is screenshotting my screen every 5 seconds and feeding it into copilot now, guess I’m going along with that”.
When I take an uber, I don’t care whether the car has an automatic or manual transmission. But I care what MY CAR has! Especially since there isn’t a shop for my car and I have to do all my own maintenance. Like, init/systemd is a huge architectural change, it’s weird to you that people who depend on their computer to perform whatever function gives their life meaning and viability want to have a functional grasp of their system? That’s a big change to absorb for essentially no practical benefit to the problem domain.
I found that systemd actually simplified all the things I was doing on sysvinit. BUT, I did hold out until Debian testing stopped supporting sysvinit, and I think waiting gave me a better experience.
With X11 -> Wayland, the main thing holding me back finding a tiling compositor that will work under Plasma and is packaged for Debian and the learning at least the basics. My XMonad configuration isn’t that special, but I’m really quite used to not having to re-arrange my own windows, and being able to move/resize/refocus all with the home row and modifier keys. So, I’m probably going to wait until Debian testing ships a Plasma that doesn’t support X11, and have to do some learning then.
Gnome forced me onto Wayland a few weeks ago and I’ve been dealing with issues ever since. Some issues even affecting the most basic level tasks like typing text, imagine dealing with that in 2025. Following your analogy, if the Uber with the fancy new transmission came to a halt every kilometre, you’d care too.
I used to use some features that only worked on x11. Slowly I found alternatives or workarounds on wayland. So I understand the sentiment. Imagine you book an uber but it’s electric so they say you can’t book a ride that’s too long
I love your metaphor because it is exactly the kind of pedantry that is usually at play with X11 vs Wayland.
“I can’t take an electric uber because it has an effective range less than 400 miles!”
Who the fuck takes a uber to a destination over 4 hours away?
A normal person rents a car, takes a bus, catches a train or buys a plane ticket. Ain’t no one faring a uber for a long trip to another city. But that’s exactly the kind of complaints from people obsessively clinging to X11. They have a hyper specific use case or workflow that almost no one else uses.
I understand and agree. Anyone who has a super specific use case that means they still use X11, go ahead, no one is stopping them. But to complain or trash Wayland on that basis is asinine. Every single change in paradigm breaks someone’s workflow, that’s impossible to avoid. But the responsible thing to do is to adapt either with new tools and resources, or with a slight change in workflow. They act like people are taking away their toy, when in reality it is just adding to the pile of available toys. But they are upset because their toy is old and won’t get repaired anymore, while the new toy is slightly different but a bit easier to clean and repair, so they get upset at the other kids for playing with it. Ignoring that the new toy doesn’t make the old toy disappear.
I had a friend who collected CRTs and VHS players right at the turn from DVD to bluray. He didn’t argue to kill LCDs, HD video or CDs. He didn’t wrote to Sony to complain that he couldn’t find VHS on Walmart anymore or that his hyper specific CC format didn’t work on DVD the exact same way it did on VHS. He accepted that tech culture shifted and that to keep his hobby up he had to take up a lot of the upfront work of maintaining old tech alive. He learned to repair old CRTs and VHSs and keeps them running for libraries. Even collaborating to digitize particularly niche historical content.
In my eyes, it’s the same deal as conservatives coping with the changing world. There is a version where they just shut up and let the rest of the tech landscape improve while they happily stick to the X they know (X.org or even XLibre).
Yes, the people who refuse to either upgrade to Win11-compatible hardware or move to an OS compatible with their existing hardware will eventually get left behind. Both in terms of security and compatibility. It’s happened many times, from the fall of AGP in favour of PCIE, to every time Intel inroduced a new CPU socket. X11 is the next.
Unless I’m terribly misunderstanding the word’s meaning (or anglophones once again redefined a word to reflect their current sensibilities), “conservative” doesn’t automatically imply politics, just that someone is resistant to new ideas. A person who only listens to music produced before the 20th century and goes into a rage when video game music composers are mentioned is a conservative, but not in terms of political views.
There are still existing issues with wayland that do not exist on X11. I’m talking, using last-gen consumer grade hardware that will break basic applications like, who knows, a web browser. Meanwhile the “upside” are extremely marginal to a lot of people. Different screen scaling isn’t implemented using proper DPI on most implementations, variable refresh rate is not something most people care about (I sure don’t care that my second monitor is capped at 120Hz instead of 144Hz because of my first monitor), etc.
So, yeah, for some people, it’s not a matter of preference, it’s a matter of having a stable, working system vs. a broken system where basic features are not a given.
If you took an uber and the car was a horse-driven carriage and your seat was a hole in a rotted plank, you’d complain.
I’d have to change desktop environments, because my current one only has “experimental” support in the latest version, and my distro is years behind, anyway. Your choices are pretty much KDE, Gnome or building your own desktop with a standalone window manager, and I don’t like any of those options.
It’s fucking weird people have such strong opinions about issues like X11 and systemd. They’re meant to be working in the background away from the user, and that’s exactly how I treat them. Actually systemd still provides some functions a user might have to interact with manually, for X11 I’m just baffled.
When I take an uber, I don’t care whether the car has an automatic or manual transmission.
I think the average user wouldn’t care, Linux just attracts nerds. And I think it’s totally fine and even good that people care how their computer works—it shows that users care about their software working for them, rather than just wanting to go along with whatever is given to them. I think a lot of the positions people take about these things are very silly, but I’d still prefer someone to have a silly opinion about X11/Wayland or pid 1 than to not have an opinion at all. It’s nice that users are being actively involved in deciding what they want their system to be; it’s a nice change from the average user who’s like “well microsoft is screenshotting my screen every 5 seconds and feeding it into copilot now, guess I’m going along with that”.
When I take an uber, I don’t care whether the car has an automatic or manual transmission. But I care what MY CAR has! Especially since there isn’t a shop for my car and I have to do all my own maintenance. Like, init/systemd is a huge architectural change, it’s weird to you that people who depend on their computer to perform whatever function gives their life meaning and viability want to have a functional grasp of their system? That’s a big change to absorb for essentially no practical benefit to the problem domain.
I found that systemd actually simplified all the things I was doing on sysvinit. BUT, I did hold out until Debian testing stopped supporting sysvinit, and I think waiting gave me a better experience.
With X11 -> Wayland, the main thing holding me back finding a tiling compositor that will work under Plasma and is packaged for Debian and the learning at least the basics. My XMonad configuration isn’t that special, but I’m really quite used to not having to re-arrange my own windows, and being able to move/resize/refocus all with the home row and modifier keys. So, I’m probably going to wait until Debian testing ships a Plasma that doesn’t support X11, and have to do some learning then.
Gnome forced me onto Wayland a few weeks ago and I’ve been dealing with issues ever since. Some issues even affecting the most basic level tasks like typing text, imagine dealing with that in 2025. Following your analogy, if the Uber with the fancy new transmission came to a halt every kilometre, you’d care too.
Same here. All amd. 13 year old cpu. Wayland has a ton of issues and 0 noticeable improvements for me.
Nvidia?
Not even, amd on both my laptop and desktop, but still lots of issues. None of them major, but it adds up.
I used to use some features that only worked on x11. Slowly I found alternatives or workarounds on wayland. So I understand the sentiment. Imagine you book an uber but it’s electric so they say you can’t book a ride that’s too long
I love your metaphor because it is exactly the kind of pedantry that is usually at play with X11 vs Wayland.
“I can’t take an electric uber because it has an effective range less than 400 miles!”
Who the fuck takes a uber to a destination over 4 hours away?
A normal person rents a car, takes a bus, catches a train or buys a plane ticket. Ain’t no one faring a uber for a long trip to another city. But that’s exactly the kind of complaints from people obsessively clinging to X11. They have a hyper specific use case or workflow that almost no one else uses.
Or maybe they’re developers that are tired of the wheel being reimplemented?
Eg.
https://www.jwz.org/blog/2025/06/wayland-screenshots/
Every single person has different problems and priorities, and until hyper specific use cases/workflows work on Wayland, many will stay on Xorg.
I understand and agree. Anyone who has a super specific use case that means they still use X11, go ahead, no one is stopping them. But to complain or trash Wayland on that basis is asinine. Every single change in paradigm breaks someone’s workflow, that’s impossible to avoid. But the responsible thing to do is to adapt either with new tools and resources, or with a slight change in workflow. They act like people are taking away their toy, when in reality it is just adding to the pile of available toys. But they are upset because their toy is old and won’t get repaired anymore, while the new toy is slightly different but a bit easier to clean and repair, so they get upset at the other kids for playing with it. Ignoring that the new toy doesn’t make the old toy disappear.
The problem is many distros are going to stop shipping Xorg, because it is “not needed” anymore.
That’s where the adapt part comes in.
I had a friend who collected CRTs and VHS players right at the turn from DVD to bluray. He didn’t argue to kill LCDs, HD video or CDs. He didn’t wrote to Sony to complain that he couldn’t find VHS on Walmart anymore or that his hyper specific CC format didn’t work on DVD the exact same way it did on VHS. He accepted that tech culture shifted and that to keep his hobby up he had to take up a lot of the upfront work of maintaining old tech alive. He learned to repair old CRTs and VHSs and keeps them running for libraries. Even collaborating to digitize particularly niche historical content.
In my eyes, it’s the same deal as conservatives coping with the changing world. There is a version where they just shut up and let the rest of the tech landscape improve while they happily stick to the X they know (X.org or even XLibre).
I mean, I’d love to, but…
Getting left behind is the natural and inevitable consequence of obsolescence.
Huh, why do I hear someone shouting about Windows 11 requiring TPM?
Yes, the people who refuse to either upgrade to Win11-compatible hardware or move to an OS compatible with their existing hardware will eventually get left behind. Both in terms of security and compatibility. It’s happened many times, from the fall of AGP in favour of PCIE, to every time Intel inroduced a new CPU socket. X11 is the next.
Bring in politics is a choice
You aren’t wrong though
Unless I’m terribly misunderstanding the word’s meaning (or anglophones once again redefined a word to reflect their current sensibilities), “conservative” doesn’t automatically imply politics, just that someone is resistant to new ideas. A person who only listens to music produced before the 20th century and goes into a rage when video game music composers are mentioned is a conservative, but not in terms of political views.
There are still existing issues with wayland that do not exist on X11. I’m talking, using last-gen consumer grade hardware that will break basic applications like, who knows, a web browser. Meanwhile the “upside” are extremely marginal to a lot of people. Different screen scaling isn’t implemented using proper DPI on most implementations, variable refresh rate is not something most people care about (I sure don’t care that my second monitor is capped at 120Hz instead of 144Hz because of my first monitor), etc.
So, yeah, for some people, it’s not a matter of preference, it’s a matter of having a stable, working system vs. a broken system where basic features are not a given.
If you took an uber and the car was a horse-driven carriage and your seat was a hole in a rotted plank, you’d complain.
I’d have to change desktop environments, because my current one only has “experimental” support in the latest version, and my distro is years behind, anyway. Your choices are pretty much KDE, Gnome or building your own desktop with a standalone window manager, and I don’t like any of those options.