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).
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.
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.
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.
For example, terminal transparency using Konsole on KDE flickers for me.
Its nearly there, but not quite. Maybe Gnome has no such issues?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
wongarsu•1h ago
ernst_klim•1h ago