Re: X11 vs Wayland: KiCAD story -> BSD Desktop.

On Wed Jun 18, 2025 at 3:33 PM BST, Dmitry Salychev wrote:
>
> Tomek CEDRO <tomek@cedro.info> writes:
>
>> https://www.kicad.org/blog/2025/06/KiCad-and-Wayland-Support/
>>
>> Some big projects seem to talk out loud about compatibility and
>> maintenance issues of "modern" solutions as well as "enforced changes"
>> ideologies in Open-Source :-)
>>
>> I like the "Linux is already a small section of the KiCad userbase"
>> statement, that seems to confirm my old saying "Open-Source is much
>> bigger than Linux, Linux is only small part of Open-Source" (aka
>> "Linux is Open-Source, but Open-Source is not only Linux").
>>
>> "Linux mindset" clearly means "enforced changes" and
>> "self-incompatibility" which may be nail to its coffin in the long
>> run. More and more people can see that clearly now.
>>
>> As European countries seem to ditch Microsoft solutions in the gov/edu
>> areas and there is a very strong push now towards Open-Source,
>> unfortunately still towards Linux as the first candidate, this may be
>> a great chance for BSD to come out and take a lead with its solid
>> roots and long term compatibility as the well established Desktop
>> Environment. This opportunity should not be missed.
>>
>> I hope this will also be a good time to reveal Open-Source drivers
>> problems, lack of development support from vendors, maybe gain funding
>> from the governments, and that Linux will not lead this mess anymore.
>> We should all have a common base for stable useful versatile and
>> self-compatible drivers that can be used along on all Open-Source
>> operating systems :-)
>>
>> Have a good day folks :-)
>> Tomek
>
> I don't think that this is the project's mindset to aggressively compete
> with GNU/Linux in general. I don't think that gov/edu folk really care
> about actual replacement for Windows as soon as it'll be working just
> fine to satisfy their needs either (they might even think... that
> FreeBSD is another GNU/Linux distribution!).
>
> For example, I'll be running Xfce as long as it'll be necessary to have
> a properly working KiCad and try Wayland stuff occasionally to have an
> idea how im/mature it became. Not the other way around.
>
> Regards,
> Dmitry

I agree with you on the first paragraph. Governments should pick what
they know will work the best. FreeBSD works very well, but I hardly
doubt that government employees will know what it is. I also believe
that even if they did know, they would likely believe that not enough
software supports FreeBSD, so there wouldn't be a point in using it.
This is quite the pessemistic view indeed, but I believe it is easy to
get things right if you think of governments pessemistically.

Coming from GNU/Linux (as well as non-GNU systems such as Alpine Linux)
after using Wayland for a long time, I recently moved back to X.org not
because X.org is better, but Wayland was too annoying to set up for me
in FreeBSD. Common painpoints being xdg-desktop-portal (which was
already a security risk but I would need it for sharing my screen which
I do a lot) and a rare instance of one compistor not working due to the
port I was using for drm-kmod. Contrastingly, everything worked in X11
as soon as it was installed, which also contrasted my experience with
X11 in NixOS.

-- 
Artur Manuel (amadaluzia)