Are there any things in Linux that need to be started over from scratch?
I'm curious how software can be created and evolve over time. I'm afraid that at some point, we'll realize there are issues with the software we're using that can only be remedied by massive changes or a complete rewrite.
Are there any instances of this happening? Where something is designed with a flaw that doesn't get realized until much later, necessitating scrapping the whole thing and starting from scratch?
We needed a new X with some of the archaic crap removed. I.e. no one needs X primitives anymore, everything is its own raster now (or whatever it's called).
Evolving X would have given us incremental improvements over time... Eventually resulting in something like Wayland.
I'm no fanboy of any video card. I just have ton of laptops with NVidia in them, and the bigots making Wayland never gave a darn about our plight... and then they started pushing distros to switch before they did anything to fix it. Their callous attitude toward the largest desktop linux userbase is insulting and pushing the distros before they fix the problem should be criminal. Every one of them should be put away for trying to ruin Linux by abandoning it's largest desktop user base. We dislike them, dislike them so much.
Now, will it keep us from using that crap when it finally works? No. We don't have much choice. They've seen to that. x11 will go the way of the dodo. But can we dislike them forever for dragging us through the mud until they were finally forced to fix the darn thing? Yeah. Wish them nothing but the worst.
What was stopping X just undergoing some gutting? I get it's old and covered in dust and cobwebs but look, those can be cleaned off.
"Scoop out the tumors, and put some science stuff in ya", the company that produced that quote went on to develop the most advanced AGI in the world and macro-scale portable on-demand indestructible teleportation.
Simply put, no one with the necessary skills has come forward and demonstrated the willingness to do the work. No programmer I've ever met enjoys wrestling with other people's crufty old code. It isn't fun, it isn't creative, and it's often an exercise in, "What the unholy fsck was whoever wrote this thinking, and where did I put the 'Bang head here' mousepad?" So getting volunteers to mop out the bilges only happens when someone really wants to keep a particular piece of software working. It's actually more difficult than getting people to contribute to a new project.
So getting rid of X's accumulated legacy cruft isn't impossible, but I suspect someone would need to set up the "Clean up X" foundation and offer money for it to actually happen. (I'm no happier about that than you, by the way.)
Aye - there was definitely a lack of motivation there. It seems the X teams (XF86 and later Xorg) sorta ran out of juice at some point. Maybe Wayland has reinvigorated them since it's much more exciting to write new code than fix old cruft.
You're telling me a project that has taken 15 years and is just now getting decent nvidia support and which may someday allow applications to position their own windows is rousing success? Compared to a rework of an existing codebase? That has all the signs of a "we bit off more than we could chew".
It'll work, in the end. But 15 years of work on a migration from X11->"X12" or something would have likely been easier. Especially if they didn't ignore nvidia along the way.
Says the guy that believes its propaganda 😂
Blaming the developers of wayland instead of the company, who refuses to cooperate with them. You are really smart.
Have you seen the codebase from x11. Multiple developers who have worked on x11 for decades say its not worth the time to fix it. It was not designed to run on modern systems. Yet here you are all knowing and you saying it they are wrong. You know better.
X11 is dead, get over it and move on.