Wayland breaks the tools I use to make a living

Posted by junkblocker 9/13/2025

Wayland breaks the tools I use to make a living(rykarn.se)

74 points | 73 commentspage 2

jrm4 9/14/2025|

Again.

<expletive> ANY Linux project that strongly breaks backwards compatibility.

Not surprised that it's still messing with people even this late in the game.

pkulak 9/14/2025||

I maintain a few Linux projects in my spare time.

I don’t really care about your opinion here.

dismalaf 9/14/2025|||

No one is forcing anyone to use Wayland. There's DEs that use X11 and have no plans to move to Wayland.

Also no one is preventing this app from working, for whatever reasons the devs just haven't got it working.

Open source software is about freedom. Freedom to say fuck backwards compatibility or freedom to use X11 for the next 100 years.

Also the freedom for the X11 devs to say they don't want to maintain it anymore...

cmxch 9/14/2025||

Intentional breaking of Xorg to frustrate use isn’t freedom. It’s harm.

dismalaf 9/14/2025||

Who broke it? It works. It's still there. Plenty of distros use it still...

The maintainers just got sick of maintaining it and moved on...

jrm4 9/15/2025||

This is such a "technically true, the worst kind of true" take.

Whatever group or person "got Wayland going" collectively or individually made a clear choice to abandon a lot of load-bearing standards, and its disengenuous to not recognize that; and I think why people (like me) still complain is to note that this was at least arguably a mistake.

Wayland's rollout was long and terrible, and more cooperation (as opposed to what actually happened, which was likely "move fast and break things because advancement and shiny things since we are now much more corporate" might have been better.

dismalaf 9/15/2025||

"Abandoning" standards was done because X11 was the standard and it was too complicated for even the X11 maintainers to want to deal with. Wayland, for better or worse, splits up a lot of responsibilities and even offloads some to the app developer...

Linux has nothing to do with cooperation. It's a survival of the fittest scenario. People make things, then other people either adopt them or don't.

Gnome has a working screen reader on Wayland. They have APIs for accessibility on Gnome. Should RH/Gnome be responsible for all the Wayland compositors and DEs that haven't implemented it? Should they be responsible for a proprietary app that chooses not to work with what they're given?

Again, X11 exists, works, and no one is forcing it to go away. Devs can ignore Gnome/Red Hat things and do whatever they want. Or they can make their own thing work. Blaming others for not doing work they're too lazy to do is wild...

jauntywundrkind 9/14/2025|||

Fuck any statements that are absolutist?

Personally I think a full forever commitment to the past is a form of folly which I can only laugh at the premise of.

charcircuit 9/14/2025||

xwayland still exists for backwards compatibility.

yjftsjthsd-h 9/14/2025||

xwayland exists for application compatibility, but is essentially worthless for a11y tools

charcircuit 9/14/2025||

Accessibility wasn't strongly broken so I didn't think that commentor was talking about that.

yjftsjthsd-h 9/14/2025||

The article we're talking under is titled "Wayland breaks the tools I use to make a living" and talks about how Wayland breaks a11y tools. The root comment says breaking backward compat is bad. What would they be possible be talking about except for Wayland breaking existing X11-based a11y tools?

charcircuit 9/14/2025|

Wayland is a protocol for talking between the compositor and an application.

AT-SPI is a protocol for talking between the compositor and an accessibility reader.

It's not in Wayland's jurisdiction to define how AT-SPI should be used.