HN Reader

I always wondered why they didn't start with this, like the way Pipewire basically inserted itself in place of pulse/jack.

This is something I did a few months ago, with Xwayland on top of Weston running in kiosk mode.

It was kind of a pain in the ass -- Xorg with extra steps. (Xwayland is a build of Xorg with a Wayland DDX.) I'd much rather just use Xorg with the modesetting driver.

This project only exists so that the author -- who has significant pull within the Alpine project -- can "get ahead of" Xlibre, adoption of which is considered a violation of the Alpine code of conduct.

"It is intended to eventually replace the classic X.org server in Alpine, thus reducing maintenance burden of X applications in Alpine, but a lot of work needs to be done first."

OT but what's the use case for running gui applications in alpine? I've mostly seen it used as a container OS on servers. Are people using it for kiosks?

I think this probably makes more sense for people who want to keep using x11 environments than trying to fork/maintain xorg.

Very naive question, but what is the difference between this and XWayland?

From the README:

"Wayback is an experimental X compatibility layer which allows for running full X desktop environments using Wayland components. It is essentially a stub compositor which provides just enough Wayland capabilities to host a rootful Xwayland server."