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"reduces fragmentation" wtf lol. If it wasn't for flatpak making it easy to run proprietary / obscure apps on my weirdo little distro (Void Linux, one of the few remaining non-systemd distros) I would have switched to something mainstream like Debian long ago. People are gonna go with the distro that supports (i.e. has non-broken packages for) the apps they use. Having a cross-platform package manager makes it easier for small independent distros to exist and be useful, not harder.
EDIT: And while it's true that Wayland adoption kills obscure X11 window managers, Wayland adoption also spawns a wide range of obscure Wayland compositors. Think hyprland, wayfire... It's by far not all Gnome and KDE! If anything, we can expect more people making Wayland compositors as hobby projects, if Waylands claims about a simpler codebase are to be believed.
In conclusion: this is a stupid argument lmao
I use Void too, but not Flatpak. You can use xbps-src to repackage those obscure pieces of software, you do know that, right?
I use flatpak because I enjoy the sandbox as well. Nice to know that a zeroday in some obscure internet-enabled program won't automatically grant the hacker access to my entire home directory. And as for xbps-src, I might as well submit my package to the official repos while I'm at it. Don't get me wrong, I do want to eventually contribute to Void's repos in some way, but when I have time for that. And right now, I don't have time to essentially become a package maintainer just to be able to use the apps that I need to use.
Yeah, but not everything gets accepted. Like, for example, I use Viber and they won't accept it because it doesn't do version numbering when doing releases... and you have no idea when they will update. Basically, short of unpacking the deb and checking the version in the ELF binary, there is no way to know which version you're running. So, I just post those obscure or out of date software templates on GH and other places.
I've also submitted a few times in the official repo... for things I know that I use reglarly and can maintain. Basically, most of them don't have that many updates, like once or twice a year, so that's why I opted to submit and maintain them, lol 😂.
If anything, we can expect more people making Wayland compositors as hobby projects, if Waylands claims about a simpler codebase are to be believed.
They are not. Wayland compositors have to do a lot more of the same thing in every compositor than window managers ever had to. So many in fact that their whole central design idea has to be corrected for by everyone using wlroots to implement those common parts to get anywhere anyway which means wayland compositors in other languages without wlroots bindings are less likely.
have to do a lot more of the same thing in every compositor than window managers ever had to
Yes, but is that not entirely expected? As far as I understand, compositors are complete implementations of Wayland's display server specification, whereas window managers are just a helper program that, well, manages windows, while Xorg does the heavy lifting required to fully implement the X Window System protocol. So the only real difference that I see is that, in the X world, the "common parts" are managed by a separate process (Xorg), whereas in the Wayland world, they are managed by a separate library (wlroots). So a hobbyist developer trying to make a window manager in some obscure language would need to figure out how to communicate with Xorg in that language, whereas a developer trying to make a compositor in some obscure language would need to write wlroots bindings for that language. Maybe I am just ignorant, but those seem like comparable efforts to me.
And lastly, in the X world, the only (widespread) implementation of the X Window System protocol is Xorg, but, in the Wayland world, there are compositors that use wlroots, and those that don't. So wouldn't that alone indicate more fragmentation / diversity? Sure, there are more X window managers than Wayland compositors out there, but X11 has also existed for longer. In short, I don't see how the Wayland system is more adverse to diversity of implementations than X
I see wlroots as the bad workaround for the bad design decision to not have a single implementation in Wayland.