In my view, this project itself shows some of the reasons why Wayland is the right path forward.
On X, we had Xorg and that is it. But at least Xorg did a lot of the work for you.
On Wayland, you in theory have to do a lot more of the work yourself when you build a compositor. But what we are seeing is libraries emerge that do this for you (wlroots, Smithay, Louvre, aquamarine, SWC, etc). So we have this one man project expecting to deliver a dev release in just a few months (mid-2026 is 4 months from now).
But it is not just that we have addressed the Wayland objection. This project was able to evaluate alternatives and decide the smithay is the best fit both for features and language choice. As time goes on, we will see more implementations that will compete with each other on quality and features. This will drive the entire ecosystem forward. That is how Open Source is supposed to work.
Because Wayland only does essential low-level stuff such as display and graphics it forced people to start coming up with a common Linux desktop (programming) interface out of nowhere to basically glue everything together and make programs at least interoperate.
Such an effort to rethink Linux desktop alone could've been a major project on its own but as having something was necessitated by Wayland all of it has become hurried and lacking control. Anything reminiscent of a bigger and more comprehensive project is in initial stages at best. If Wayland has been coming on for about ten years now I'll give it another ten years until we have some kind of established, consistent desktop API for Linux again.
X11 did offer some very basic features for a desktop environment so that programs using different toolkits could work together, and enough hooks you could implement stuff in window managers etc. Yet there was nothing like the more complete interfaces of the desktops of other operating systems that tied everything together in a central, consistent way. So, Linux desktop interface was certainly in need for a rewrite but the way it's happening is just disheartening.
I am not an American but I am quite sure that HIPPA regulates the data, not the profession. You can be managing school bus routes and, if you reveal the wrong information about a special needs child, it can be a HIPPA violation.
HIPAA, but no, it’s the other way. Healthcare providers and associated entities are regulated by the law. If you tell me, as a regular non-doctor person in a non-medical setting, that you have the flu, I can share that information with anyone else without violating HIPAA.
There was so much misinformation about that during COVID. “Do you have a cough or fever?” “You can’t ask me that! HIPAA!” “Sir, this is a Wendy’s.”
In both of the cases people criticize the Ladybird founder for, he was explicitly asking to avoid conflict. If you do not have time to read up on it, maybe temper these accusations with that knowledge.
He was first branded as a fascist when a non-contributor to SerenityOS submitted a bug or a pull request to change male pronouns to something else. Kling asked to keep the project contributions and discussion technical and not political. That is it. His crime was the classic “asking me not to be political is political” drama.
Next, and admittedly worse, he said something related to Charlie Kirk like “I hope more people engage with words and not fists”. Since Charlie Kirk was a massive douche, people do not like implying that there was anything good about him. While I get this, the idea that this comment confirms Andreas Kling to be a fascist is, well, a bit fascist for my taste.
Kling is famous for starting his videos with “Hello friends”, he has hundreds of good natured videos online, he is very open and humble of his experiences with drug addiction, and he lives in a country that is almost exclusively left wing by US standards. He seems far better behaved than his critics. I am going to have to see a bit more evidence than the above to start boycotting Ladybird over his politics. But that is just me I guess.
Ladybird is further ahead than Servo, at least with what it can render and how correct it is. But Ladybird is a lot slower at this point.
One reason of course is that Ladybird wrote its own JavaScript engine while Servo uses SpiderMonkey.
Ladybird scores over 500 on https://html5test.co which is better than Firefox 60. And Ladybird is not too far behind Safari on the Web Playform Tests (ahead of Servo).
I am running the latest version of Firefox, but I said it was better than version 60 of Firefox (years old). I am certainly not suggesting that Ladybird is more feature complete than modern Firefox. Ladybird is pre—Alpha.
But the fact that Ladybird scores over 500 and you are getting 546 in Firefox tells us how advanced Ladybird is getting.
When I tried Servo a month ago, it was scoring around 400.
As somebody that was around at the time, this is not at all a stretch.
First, Linux was created FOR the 386. Linus Torvalds had one and wanted to unlock its power.
As you say, Windows 3.0 is certainly no stretch.
That leaves only Windows 95. The minimum spec at launch was a 386 with 4 MB of RAM. Realistically, you needed 8 MB to do anything.
Here is an article from 1993 saying that manufactures are beginning to drop the 386 from their product lines. That is, this is when people stopped being able to buy 386 machines brand new.
The 486 was the dominant chip in 1993 but there were still a lot of 386 machines being sold to that point when.
When Windows 95 shipped, people would certainly have been trying to run it on those machines.
When Windows 95 was released, people famously lined up to buy it like they were getting tickets to a rock concert. It was not just sold with new hardware. Back then, it was normal for people to pay money to buy a new operating system to run on hardware they already owned.
Of course Windows 95 certainly helped sell Pentiums. Pentium would have dominated new sales but a typical PC in service in 1995 would have been a 486 and there were still plenty of 386 machines in use.
ReactOS has delt itself a massive blow by hiding so much of their progress.
The project has insisted on creating Windows Server 2003. Probably very little of the software you want to run works on Windows Server 2003. Certainly no modern web browser will.
There has been some movement in recent months though. They have a 64 bit version. They are implementing NT6 APIs. They are implementing UEFI. They are looking at WDDM drivers. The have synced with Wine 10.
If ReactOS can produce a version that can run a modern browser and maybe a half-way recent Office suite, I think a lot of people would change their mind about the potential.
If they can support modern GPU drivers, it is possible they could even gain some traction in that space. Lots of work to do but not impossible.
I hesitate to say this as you seem very knowledgeable but you are missing some pretty massive facts that destroy your argument here.
There are already literally billions of RISC-V chips in the wild. Qualcomm alone has shipped a billion or more. They wrote an article back in 2023 where they disclosed that they had already shipped 650 million of them by that point. Andes Technology has said that there are 2 billion chips using their IP. A recent industry report suggested that RISC-V could represent 25% of the global SoC market by 2030. That is based on growth trajectory, not speculation.
RISC-V is not some obscure ISA that cannot get any traction.
There are a dozen or more credible competitors designing modern 64 bit RISC-V CPUs. Most of them have shipped silicon. Some have shipped multiple generations. Has any ISA ever had so many independent companies independently creating core designs (not designs from a single source like ARM)?
Tenstorrent alone likely made $500 million dollars in 2025. Easier to confirm is that they closed a $650 million funding round.
NVIDIA has announced CUDA support for RISC-V. I do not remember them doing that for SPARC, or POWER, or SuperH.
The current RISC-V standard, RVA23, includes advanced instructions for things like vectorization and virtualization. Many large, important industry players are involved in designing future extensions as well.
RISC-V is an officially supported platform in many mainstream Linux distributions including aggressively commercial ones like Red Hat Enterprise Linux but also foundational ones like Debian and its derivatives (like Ubuntu).
GCC and Clang have excellent support for RISC-V. FFMPEG just released hand-written vector optimizations for RISC-V. Again, can we say this about any of the platforms you mentioned?
It's a pretty inescapable fact on the ground that RISC-V has an absolute mountain of support in the industry. And starting this year, multiple vendors will be shipping cores faster than you can license from ARM.
On X, we had Xorg and that is it. But at least Xorg did a lot of the work for you.
On Wayland, you in theory have to do a lot more of the work yourself when you build a compositor. But what we are seeing is libraries emerge that do this for you (wlroots, Smithay, Louvre, aquamarine, SWC, etc). So we have this one man project expecting to deliver a dev release in just a few months (mid-2026 is 4 months from now).
But it is not just that we have addressed the Wayland objection. This project was able to evaluate alternatives and decide the smithay is the best fit both for features and language choice. As time goes on, we will see more implementations that will compete with each other on quality and features. This will drive the entire ecosystem forward. That is how Open Source is supposed to work.
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