Nothing new is being created with x11 and the people from freedesktop don't seen to be thrilled to maintain it. I don't think should change just for the sake of changing, but I'd start looking to migrate whatever you use that depends on x11.
The X Window System (X11) is a protocol with multiple implementations. Sure, the X.Org Server (Xorg) was the most popular by a huge margin, but there were quite a few others (e.g. XFree86, Xming, XWayland), though over time most were discontinued for one reason or another.
X11 and Wayland do differ in an important way: in X11 window managers (GNOME, KDE, i3, whatever) all sat atop the Xorg server; whereas in Wayland there’s only the compositor, so GNOME, KDE, Sway, whatever, all essentially include their own equivalent of Xorg (which could be fully integrated, or factored into a library, such as Mutter, KWin, wlroots).
Please cite a single independent implementation of an X11 protocol server.
It's pretty hard to find but ~25 years ago I was using Xi Graphics Accelerated-X which had 3D acceleration long before Xfree86.
Update: but yes I imagine it had some code from original MIT release.
For completely independent one you can have a look at WeirdX/WiredX, which was written in Java and even supported antialiasing and transparency for core protocol (something that Xfree86 people claimed to be impossible to implement).
It's surprisingly hard to find this stuff today: https://web.archive.org/web/20250220140358/http://www.jcraft...
The commercial ones (Xsun, Xsgi, Hummingbird, DESQView/X etc.) were all based on MIT code.
But if you use really old nvidia gpu you can have a mixed experience with wayland. Which is a fair problem to complain, but you can't blame that on wayland and call that lack of freedom. That problem was caused by the lack of freedom coming from nvidia gpus and how locked down they are and how nvidia for many year has been hostile towards linux desktop.
It’s achieved developer and very tech savvy IT pro freedom. If you can deal with command lines and debugging systems you are not a user. You’re a computer professional.
If OSS wanted to bring freedom to users its primary focus would be radical simplification and UI/UX.
That's open source being used by developers to provide a closed service to users. Users experience it as an opaque closed service.
SaaS backed by open source is actually the most closed model of software, more closed than closed-source software run locally.
Personally, I've never used a proprietary driver with either.
True.
But does not address the fact that Wayland is a bad solution to X11's problems, and that its architecturally broken from inception.
I have a more stable experience with wayland today than I had with x11. Which to be fair was not only because of wayland but because desktop linux as a whole has made a lot of progress in the last years
Most of the issues and slow adoption were because the core protocol was deliberately kept extremely minimal, and agreeing on all the needed extensions took a long time. Don't take it from me, but rather from KDE developer Nate Graham: https://pointieststick.com/2023/09/17/so-lets-talk-about-thi...
As such, anyone who tried it early probably had to deal with a pretty large amount of non-working stuff, but by now the platform is capable of most features people require and the biggest remaining bottleneck is that software needs to use these new APIs.
Most people won't care, but for a number of us Wayland is stubbornly refusing to support functionality we see as dealbreakers.
I believe the main holdup is a desire for Wayland to be usable with e.g. VR interfaces where there is no simple 2d grid.
Out of curiosity, how do you want the file manager to behave? And did you write your own or are you using an existing one that works that way?
The VR stuff is a poor excuse - just fail on that scenario. Nobody that cares about window positioning will have an issue with that.
My file manager defaults to re-opening a window for any directory to a previously snapshotted location, like the Amiga Workbench did. And, yes, I wrote my own. It's a few hundred lines of of a quick and dirty Ruby hack talking directly to a pure Ruby X11 binding, which is anothe reason I stick with X - I can throw things together quickly for X. The amount of ceremony, or big additional dependencies, needed for Wayland is ridiculous.
I'm using my own terminal, wm, and file manager. They use X11, and I have no interest in changing that, because I have no need to as long as X11 works on my hardware and that won't change anytime soon. Everything I don't do in a terminal, I do in a browser.
EDIT: To add some more context for why I have no interest in changing that: 1) my wm is 1568 lines of code at the moment. If anything, that is more than I'm happy with. With Wayland I'd need to write my own compositor. Way too much work even with reusing e.g. wlroots.
2) My file manager is more of a basic desktop launcher. That is fine, and intentional. I may add some features to it. But the reason I'm using that rather than any of the over a dozen options I've tested is that most of them either never had or have ripped out spatial features, and the ones that had some spatial features didn't act the way I wanted them to. I want Amiga-like semi-spatial features of being able to selectively snapshot icon and window placement ("semi-"spatial because traditional spatial would imply a single instance of a window for a given path; I just want default placement to be the same as last time I snapshotted it). Wayland on purpose refuses to allow that, and so I'd need to hack on a compositor or write my own to be able to support the most important feature to me in the file manager.
I'm not going to tolerate my usability being reduced just to switch away from software that does what I want it to, to software that offers me nothing new that I want and takes away features I do want.
Reminds me of sites that required ActiveX to run arbitrary code on the user side when visiting a web site outside a sandbox. Turned out to not be ideal from a security point of view.
But I guess `ssh -X` users still miss those times...
For example, terminal transparency using Konsole on KDE flickers for me.
Its nearly there, but not quite. Maybe Gnome has no such issues?
Plasma v: 6.3.6, Ryzen 7 5800U with integrated graphics. Happens every time I use Konsole with transparency.
I regularly write code which relies on a working X11. I have written a virtual machine which makes X11 calls to do 2D graphics and event handling, as well as applications which compile to the virtual machine code. If X11 and now XWayland cease to be available, not only would I have to rewrite large parts of my virtual machine, but also rewrite all the 2D graphics code in applications. All so that I can stand still when the rug is being pulled from under my feet. I'm sure there are others in a similar predicament.
I may be naive about this, but as X11 just works, and has done for decades, it should require little to no maintenance, so why the need to withdraw it? I don't expect, or require, any additional functionality.
Yup, my feeling as well.
Wayland was sold as a sorely needed fix to X11 long-standing problems.
The fact that X11 had problems that sorely needed to be fixed is indeed true.
The fact that Wayland is the solution is unfortunately not.
Just because something is the next gen project does not mean it actually succeeded in fixing what it planned to.
xorg-server is gone from the linux desktop. Gnome and KDE use wayland shells by default, and that's what users get when they download a Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora/whatever ISO.
Well, no. Stand-alone Xorg is probably declining on the Linux desktop, but "gone" is inaccurate.
- Sent from i3
Feel free to find volunteers to fulfill their shoes.
E.g. instead of the Xwayland approach, you could've already ditched "half" of Xorg if you stripped most of the server-side drawing primitives and server-side font support and moved them to Xlib, handling it client side, and then made it clear someone else would need to take over maintenance of Xlib, and "started over" with a stripped down Xcb.
You could've validated further restrictions by letting clients opt in to them with extensions before "flipping the switch" and restricting them by default when the damage was acceptable.
Even if we then eventually reached a point where there'd be a schism, odds are it'd be far smaller. And certainly far less time would've been wasted.
The real work was done in the 80s/90s through a consortium of universities and corporations
Then one day, some nobody shows up and in their infinite wisdom decides: I know better than all the 100s of people before me.
And now we have to listen on and on about how this nobody was somehow a "major developer"
Wayland exists because, thanks to hardware innovations, there's a better way to do the job than what was possible in the 80s.
>> Wayland exists because, thanks to hardware innovations, there's a better way to do the job than what was possible in the 80s.
They've been adding nails to the coffin for 25+ years now. How many more do you think it's going to take?
The big reason why I want to keep X11 besides backwards compatibility is the ability to run GUI apps remotely, even from a server that has zero graphical capabilities. But these do not really apply to desktop environments. If you want to remote a full desktop rather than individual applications, there are better options (VNC, RDP, ...).
Really the only high-profile 'switch' in recent times I can think of is that Fedora promoted KDE to be first-class ('edition') alongside Gnome, instead of delegated to a more second-class spin. And while KDE is a bit more conservative in this regard, I believe that in the long term KDE also wants to go Wayland-only at some point.
Personally I did switch from Gnome to KDE some time after Gnome 40, since I quite liked 3.x but the UI overhaul 40 did wasn't really my thing. It also helps that KDE got a lot better in recent years.
Also Wayland has some problem on my system (Thinkpad / Intel Xe) where it randomly just goes slow, this makes it an easy choice to try things other than Gnome.
I wouldn't bash GNOME as clearly plenty of work goes into it and having two decent DE is good for the ecosystem, but for me GNOME never struck a chord compared to the elegance of KDE - it just feels like the Duplo version compared to KDE
There is still no possibility to have proper remote sessions when using Wayland. On any Window Manager and any distro. It's such a shitshow when you go into details. Nothing works, including third party tools (like NoMachine) and I could find no real hope for actual solutions being designed.
The best you can go with "remote session" on Wayland is viewing a desktop session that was already opened by someone directly on the computer. You can partially work around this by... setting your account to be automatically logged in with no password :D And even then it's a crippled experience.
A basic feature I used for the past 25 years and helped me to learn linux and offer safe space for others to learn it as well. To work around work computer limitations. To use your best hardware wherever and whenever you want.
I currently had to ditch both my favorite distro and WM because of that. But at least we can make screenshots nowadays, so I guess it could be worse.
I tried some solutions in the past but they did not support that, which is a deal breaker.
You want proper headless session, set up X11 distro and use xrdp - it's really easy. But on wayland "remote support" to something that is already displayed on screen is all you can get now.
In other words, how RDP works on Windows.
So you're saying that is still not possible I take it.
So you literally CANNOT log in remotely :) If you are lucky, you can assist remotely to a session someone opened locally on that machine.
And it's like that on any other WM. KDE also has a deceiving option in settings that suggests full remote desktop, while it doesn't allow that.
> GNOME Remote Desktop supports integrating with the GNOME Display Manager (GDM) to achieve remote login functionality. This feature is only available via the RDP protocol. It works by the remote user first authenticating via a system wide password, which gives access to the graphical login screen, where they can login using their user specific credentials.
And then it seems to describe a pure-cli config process that you could set up once over SSH and then be able to RDP to the box thereafter.
Actually for that matter, the next section - https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-remote-desktop#headless... - appears to describe doing a single-user version of the same, explicitly running headless.
Please do.
I've seen too many threads like this based on a hunch and docs, while it just doesn't work.
I'll be more than happy to be proven wrong.
I use it very regularly. Particularly the headless part (where nobody is logged in physically, just a remote session).
I have a simple application written in QT6. It works on Windows, macOS, and X11/Linux. On Wayland/Linux, applications cannot move their own windows anymore, because "security". Good luck finding this in the QT documentation, it is there, but only at 3/dozens of places were it would be necessary, and 2/3 of those dont mention the word "Wayland". Great fun.
You can enable the rdp server there. It does allow opening new sessions remotely. It works fine.
Gnome has had remote desktop sharing I think since 46.
Settings --> System --> Remote Desktop
The "desktop sharing" tab is for setting credentials to share your logged in screen.
The "Remote Login" tab is for setting credentials to access GDM and login as any user (i.e. headless).
Wayland doesn't let you do that, and it's a deliberate choice.
See e.g.:
https://wayland-book.com/xdg-shell-in-depth/interactive.html
"However, a deliberate design trait of Wayland makes application windows ignorant of their exact placement on screen or relative to other windows."
And: https://hackaday.com/2025/11/11/waylands-never-ending-opposi...
>This decision affords Wayland compositors a greater deal of flexibility — windows could be shown in several places at once, arranged in the 3D space of a VR scene, or presented in any other novel way. Wayland is designed to be generic and widely applicable to many devices and form factors.
Do ANY of these other features work? Furthermore, all our applications are built basically as 2D grids of pixels. What click position do you get if you render the same window in some "novel" way like in two places at once? I don't especially care if any of their space-age bullshit works. It NEEDS to work for the apps we have, which are just pixel arrays. Many users have been ranting about this issue for years and all we get in response from Wayland wackos is basically "live with it!" Nobody has realized any actual benefits in functionality from switching to Wayland. Maybe some graphics nerds with weird monitor setups are geeking out about fractional pixel coordinates and multiple refresh rates. The rest of us are just dealing with issues for no benefit.
They're complaining too because Wayland upscales everything (quadrupling the number of pixels and trashing performance) in order to downscale it for fractional scaling.
Only once ? They could do this 3 times. For smoothness. /s
x11 desktops can and will continue to exist, and users will choose whichever one they prefer.
It's worth noting that the "client" and "server" are flipped from what was typical: your screen on your desk is the server and the client is a program running on some expensive machine on a rack somewhere.
It's still really cool to be able to spin up a GUI app on a remote machine, and use it like it's running locally.
Starting a GUI app on any machine on the network and have its windows display on my local screen is vital functionality.
I don't think users that rely on accessibility featurescount as 'hardcore', and the majority of X->Wayland complaints i've heard center around all of that stuff.
Little of it has been remediated last I checked.
David (UI details) beats Goliath.
Wayland and SDL got support this summer.
And Xwayland has had support for past 10 years: https://www.phoronix.com/news/XWayland-Pointer-Confinement
Buy supported GPUs.
On my end I'm still waiting on several critical-for-me things to be fixed. (first and foremost noticeable mouse pointer lag, but also clipboard over-security, and missing XInput analog)
https://qa.debian.org/popcon-graph.php?packages=x11-common+g...
https://pkgstats.archlinux.de/compare/packages#packages=gnom...
You could try comparing xserver-xorg-core instead, but even then that'll only show you the number of submitters who have it installed, not the number that actually use it. The usual way to get a graphical desktop in Debian (task-desktop) pulls in both Wayland and Xorg, but uses the former by default.
The best estimate would be something like the number of xserver-xorg-core installs less the number of xwayland installs.
Using that method, it looks like there are roughly twice as many GNOME users as pure Xorg users.
Personally I have given up with wayland as in years ago. There will always be something I should not have wanted to do in the first place while using wayland. I would rather use x11 and have much better control.
While we're making unfounded statements based on our own anecdotal experiences: can't speak for Gnome users (very few in my circle), but for KDE and tiling window manager users, it's a lot of X11. Hard to say exactly, but would put it at ≥50% X11.
One carousel there had 16K slides.
On Windows both Chrome and Firefox managed that fine. They scrolled from start to end and back without issue and you could see, I think, all the frames in my 60Hz screen.
On GNOME and X11 (dual boot, so same hardware) Chrome was fine but there were issues with Firefox. I was curious so I logged out and logged in with Wayland. On Wayland Firefox was fine too, indistinguishable from Chrome.
I don’t understand hardware, compositors, etc., so I have no idea why that was, but it was interesting to see.
It's likely that some hwaccel flag in about:config wasn't turned on by default. Similarly, if you want smooth touchpad scrolling, you need to set MOZ_USE_XINPUT2
So old school throthling if you don't use the "right" version (Apple batterygate, Microsoft wordperfectgate). They could blame it on testing though (we only use Wayland and we are too lazy to test the X11 version)
My main Firefox in that setup is from the Mozilla repos, rather than the ESR version that is the default in Debian stable. So, it could very well be that. I will have to check to see what the ESR Firefox from the Debian repos does.
I am sympathetic to people who have a working setup and just don’t want to mess with their configuration anymore. Unless you’re on OpenBSD, though, that ship has long sailed in most *nix distros (even “stable” Debian). Long-term stability is underrated but hard to achieve.
I still scarcely know what these are. In fact I actively don't want to know about compositors and whatnot. When I want GUIs, I just want to see them.
I can list many crappinesses of Windows, but stuff like this kinda just works.
If you mean API/ABI stability, the question is far more nuanced. I think most Linux software you are likely to use will run on any Linux distro equally well, although you may require it to be rebuilt for your particular distro. In the worst case there is always Docker. Statically linked programs can work for a VERY long time across distros. Microsoft probably has a bigger commitment to backward compatibility right now, but Linux binary software can be carried forward for many years as well with few/no changes. The Wayland thing is going to upset this stability, but in theory XWayland should make the old stuff keep working.
Most popular distros on common hardware "just work" these days and can be used easily by normal people. You might be confused if you tried to migrate a binary executable forward or between distros and it didn't work, but it is mostly developers and admins who think about such things.
just need to fulfill some software necessity?
The two most major OSs out there specialize in catering to users that don't want to know how the thing works -- it seems like you're swimming against the current a little bit, no?
also I don't think that anyone has ever called any nix stable and had software politics and human-stuff in mind ; what's meant is that it doesn't crash and burn when you're trying to use it.
Linux obviously has this nerdy root culture because it hardly cannot. But the freedom it brings is for everyone.
This is especially important in a time where MS has clearly stopped caring about Windows in the way they did in the 90s and 2000s, they largely don't care about consumer windows anymore, as long as Excel and all the enterprise shit stays locked in. So there's nothing stopping them from shoving ads and spyware (windows account) into every inch of the OS because they hope most users won't do anything, and if some small % switch to something else, oh well.
And macOS has clearly also stopped being cared for - most of apples revenue is iPhones and services. They mostly just want to sell overpriced hardware to corpos who need Xcode and to users who are in their walled garden.
We need to respect these users and bring the freedom to them that we all deserve.
Also - I'm a software engineer myself, and if I may be so bold, I like to think im a pretty good one. Certainly well positioned to understand how Linux works. And indeed I have spent enough time debugging weird shit that I suspect I know more than the average Linux bear.
And I STILL have no patience for X vs wayland bullshit. Draw the pixels or get the fuck out of my face. I literally don't care except which one lets me use 2 hiDPI monitors + the laptop display with fractional scaling and closing and reopening the laptop lid isn't some kind of bizarre edge case event. Wayland managed to get that right on Gnome for me as of late. I have a vague understanding of why, but largely just want Gnome to figure this crap out for me so I can run IntelliJ, PyCharm and vscode at the same time without weird artifacting.
Most of the people complaining about the transition just like to nitpick about low level pieces of technology which don’t actually impact their usage at all. It was the same with systemd for at least a decade.
Do anybody knows if any progress have been made on this front?
And with X11 support gone we would have to downgrade to VNC to access our VMs?
"Think twice before abandoning X11. Wayland breaks everything!"
https://gist.github.com/probonopd/9feb7c20257af5dd915e3a9f2d...
In my experience Wayland always had problems, so depending on how XWayland works, I'd probably have to drop Gnome if there's no X11 support that's functional and I imagine a lot of others would need to do so (until X11 support is reinstated)
What are some better Gnome alternatives that support X11?
Gnome has been going in this direction for many years now, where it seems to ship based on the principle of "works on my machine." Gnome is also the driving force behind Wayland. Go figure.
>Wayland breaks everything! It is binary incompatible, provides no clear transition path with 1:1 replacements for everything in X11, and is even philosophically incompatible with X11
Being binary compatible is a moot point, 1:1 replacement for "everything in X11" are not an issue if the subset you need works or has good replacements, and being "philosophically incompatible" is part of the point of using it.
>Even the most basic, most simple things (like xkill) - in this case with no obvious replacement
Yes, you can't use Xkill to kill a Wayland-based application- wasn't that a given. You can use regular kill or whatever means your DE provides (several do).
If your workflows depend on regular use of xkill, you have bigger problems than it not being available for Wayland.
Multi touch gestures work on laptops as smoothly as they were on a mac. HDR has started working recently even in my browser. VRR has been working for almost a couple of years.
It doesn't break, most mem leaks that gnome was known for all gone. Almost all the cli X specific tools I use (mostly clipboard stuff) are all available. Initially when I switched I did see like a 10~15% increase in battery usage albeit being smooth.
wongarsu•2mo ago
ernst_klim•2mo ago
hulitu•2mo ago
I think GTK is version 5, so they have to converge somewhere.
This is an old trick from SW developers to show a suppose maturity: bump the version number.
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sph•2mo ago