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?
>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.
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.
I haven’t booted into an X11 environment in maybe 4 years. Wayland has been fine (Fedora + Gnome, Fedora / Arch + Niri). I think this is one of those issues where hardcore users overestimate how much anyone else cares or will notice.
> I think this is one of those issues where hardcore users overestimate how much anyone else cares or will notice.
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.
I used X when I started with Linux in my high school. When I finally stopped tolerating macOS almost a decade ago, I started with Wayland only, and never looked back. I even ditched Krita in favour of Gimp, solely because Gimp supports Wayland (from version 3, and on 2.99 before that). To this day, I don’t understand X, like at all. It’s all some super complicated pile to me. While I don’t understand Wayland either, it’s super simple to interact with as a user. That’s all I care about, especially given that Wayland is better with security, multiple displays, has a smaller code base, and whatnot. Each time I see someone says Wayland is unusable to them, I wonder whether that’s some edge case they have, or is it just some habit. I’m happy I don’t need X for anything, so I just wait till most apps would support Wayland.
Remember x11 was initially a client server model, where multiple clients could access a single x11 server. This brought a lot of complexity we don’t use these days
For certain jobs, I've done development for Linux while also having a Windows box for other things. Opening Linux GUI apps remotely on my Windows desktop is nice and allows me to consolidate my displays. This is an edge case, for sure. How well does Wayland support this?
AFAIK it's more or less still being worked on. Since Wayland has no support in the core protocol, it's an add-on which needs the compositor to forward input and output streams and then something to compress the video and forward it (+input events) further over the network. I can't say that I got it to work so far, though screen sharing in MS Teams(!) running in MS Edge for Linux does work and uses much of the same functionality. That is with KDE and kwin-wayland.
> Remember x11 was initially a client server model, where multiple clients could access a single x11 server. This brought a lot of complexity we don’t use these days
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.
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)
I've been using Gnome for years, but, honestly, it just isn't good: seems like it's optimized for very basic use. Something as simple as adding launcher to a panel now requires an extension.
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.
As discussed earlier on HN, KDE these days has been the most usable desktop for many users. It is mostly stable, feature rich and can be customized easily.
Yes, fuly agree. And enough time has passed with it being robust and performant that the old bores who used to go on about KDE performance have finally given up bleeting on about that.
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
This was good to read, thanks. Last experience with KDE is probably almost 30 years ago when it was so sluggish I quickly gave up on it. With Gnome being _the default_ in some sense given Ubuntu's control of desktop Linux, it never even came to mind to give kubuntu a try, I think I will.
I tried KDE on several different occasions this year, and each time the bottom panel froze on me when trying to configure it, usually within the first minute or two. It felt a bit like I was still using KDE4 when it was first released.
I think I've had some panel hangs up until a couple of months ago. It was usually some tray plugin (happened after particular changes in the network or sound system configuration) or multi-screen configuration change related. In any case, the workaround for a hanging or spazzed out desktop shell is: open krunner (it's a different process, should still work) and run plasmashell --replace.
To me a larger version number doesn't signify a more mature codebase, it signifies less mature developer and developer culture, that doesn't care about backward compatibility and semantic versions.
I was working on a carousel library a few months ago. I had made a few stress-test demos so that I could catch obvious issues while I was adding things and tweaking things.
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.
Firefox remains very conservative on enabling modern features on X11. Some distributions force them on, but otherwise it's up to the user to figure out how to do that.
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
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.
> Firefox remains very conservative on enabling modern features on X11.
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)
If you want that feature, then the display server doesn't need to be the one to support it when the display server lets applications obtain and control window positions.
Wayland doesn't let you do that, and it's a deliberate choice.
We know it's a deliberate choice. It's just wrong.
>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.
> Maybe some graphics nerds with weird monitor setups are geeking out about fractional pixel coordinates and multiple refresh rates.
They're complaining too because Wayland upscales everything (quadrupling the number of pixels and trashing performance) in order to downscale it for fractional scaling.
> 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
I don't resent it. x11 is laggy and poorly supported on modern desktops, even if all the bugs were fixed it would be a pretty sore daily driver experience. Without Wayland I'd still be dual-booting into Windows, the same likely goes for every Steam Deck owner.
x11 desktops can and will continue to exist, and users will choose whichever one they prefer.
I love Linux and vastly prefer it to Windows, but whenever people tell me Linux is vastly more stable than Windows, I think of the whol X11/Wayland saga.
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.
Linux is extremely stable. There are some exploits for it, but generally you are very unlikely to accidentally get a virus on it. If you don't update your software, it could potentially run for YEARS without a reboot on Linux. Maybe that is possible on Windows but I have yet to see it really.
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.
what's the drive to use a nix but 'actively dont want to know' about 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.
Modern unix gives me the choice to know a lot about some parts and stay ignorant about others. I don't think there's anything wrong with being real into, say, the network stack and wanting other nerds to handle the GUI for you.
Everyone deserves freedom. Tinkerers and regular users, software engineers and grandmas, artists and Paint users.
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.
This stuff just kinda works on Linux too. This discussion is for distro maintainers (think of them like OS packagers) and power users. If you just install Ubuntu or Bazzite or whatever, it should just work
I mean if you are a normal user and most people are, you absolutely do not need to care about both Wayland and X11. Distributions ship with working configurations. It just works.
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.
Transition to Wayland opened so many user experience regressions. Many are solved today, or at least partially solved but...
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.
The "Transition to Wayland" from a user experience pov is the slowest car crash of all time. We are like 1.5 DECADES in at this point.
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.
Kde's new Plasma Login Manager / Plasma Login (backend/frontend) have been coming along nicely (replacing sddm), and include remote login support. Just announced this past spring but very active. https://blog.davidedmundson.co.uk/blog/a-roadmap-for-a-moder...
That's exactly what I was talking about before. Tried on newest fedora but that simply isn't it. It's remote support to an existing session. Names are misleading.
Remote assistance, NOT remote logins. It can be used as support when someone is already went to that computer, authenticated and has a full gnome session opened.
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 don't want to argue on semantics. Currently you can't start a graphical session completely remotely using any protocol (RDP, VNC, no machine, whatever).
> 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.
There are no headless sessions on Wayland. At all.
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.
What I want is to be able to start a session remotely after a reboot, and continue that same session when I get back home. And conversely start a session while at my desk at home and resume that same session remotely. Without any weird limitations.
In other words, how RDP works on Windows.
So you're saying that is still not possible I take it.
I have no idea what issues folks are talking about. I use vanilla gnome for my work and personal use case (given with well supported GPUs, read: no Nvidia). All the features work. Zoom/screen share/obs etc.,
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.
Sadly, I recently had to switch back from Wayland to xorg because clients are getting so memory hungry. My eight year old gpu only has 2gb of vram, which I constantly run out of. Some part of the gfx stack should handle swapping out vram to main ram but it apparently isn't.
Anecdotally, I strongly doubt this is true, although my environment is probably quite biased. I know a ton of people who use Gnome, some who use KDE, and I think roughly all of these people use them with Wayland. The standalone-WM users I know are also mostly on Sway or other Wayland ones. The only real X11 holdouts seem to be people using X11-only DE's, such as Xfce or Cinnamon.
> I think roughly all of these people use them with Wayland.
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.
Xfce is working on Wayland session support. It is working now with some limitations (limitations on what you can embed in the panel are all that's left, I think).
Pretty much possible to use gnome and x11 (until now).
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.
Be aware that Debian's xwayland depends on x11-common, so your number here will be the combined total of Xorg and Wayland.
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.
One of the big problem I am/was facing with Wayland is the performance when accessing a VM with SPICE and virt-viewer. You basically had to use X11 on the host and the guest for everything to work in an optimal way.
Do anybody knows if any progress have been made on this front?
AFAIK spice just has been succeeded, i forget for what exactly but after the switch everything was better one worked out it the box. I think for virtIO…
Makes sense to move to something actively maintained. I don’t use GNOME, but I have been on Wayland for years in both KDE and tiling WMs. It works great while on X11 I would often get weird flickering and stuttering issues (some NVIDIA bug I could never track down). Anyway, if the X11 die-hards want it to survive, they need to organize an effort to maintain it, not yell at everyone who wants to build something better.
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.
It's a deliberate decision so it will never change. I'm not surprised that Wayland doesn't allow this (and a great many other things, e.g. window icons) but I am surprised that anyone uses Wayland despite that.
Yes, there's a wayvnc project (you need a wlroots compositor tho, so no GNOME). You can start a compositor in headless mode and then connect to it with a fully wayland client like wlvncc
Another nail in the coffin. Bye, Red Hat. Bye, NGOME. Non GNU OldIBM Mediocre Environment.
I wish GTK4 dies in IBM hands too, for the good. XFCE can go back to a community supported GTK3 anytime.
x11 is in maintenance mode at this point and Gnome is not going anywhere. Gnome is used (and financed) by major distributions.
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.
I had assumed that XWayland is a drop-in replacement fo X11, and will be available indefinitely.
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.
For my part, I have no intention of moving off X11 for the next decade at least. The only app I use that I don't fully control is a browser, and the worst case fallback is to run the browser in a Wayland compositor that runs on X.
What a weird question. I have no use compelling use-case for python2. I have plenty of use-cases for X, such as the fact that none of my software other than my browser has Wayland support, including my window manager.
Nothing weird about it, it makes perfect sense with what you are posting. I find it weird that you react like that to a simple question. Just probing what kind of old software you use, cause it tells a lot depending.
It was weird because you implied (and still are) that it'd mean I was hanging on to old, superceded software that has adequate replacements. I'm not. So this is telling us more about your assumptions.
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.
I'm curious, what were you hoping to learn about their use of python 2? If you had specific questions, it would be helpful if you ask those, instead of trying to ask through euphemisms.
If it was maintained (security fixes and platform support only), but with no other changes, it would be a very tempting alternative to python3 for the many times API stability is valuable.
And wayland is in broken mode. KDE keep changing the default back to wayland after each update, and every time my linux systems are broken until I switch back to x11.
What is broken for you? At this point, starting from roughly KDE 6, Wayland has been pretty much flawless for me. KDE 5.27 was pretty much fine already as well.
Fractional scaling is awful on Wayland if the application relies on XWayland to work. Drives me up the wall having to find the various flags to force Wayland mode.
Do you have more specifics? I just tried it on my machine (Fedora 42, Plasma 6.5.1 Wayland, Konsole 25.08.2, Radeon 780M) and it seems fine for me. Does it only occur occasionally/under specific circumstances for example?
I've never seen similar issues using a variety of terminals on Gnome, Sway, or Niri. Haven't used Konsole or Plasma, but I wonder if it's maybe a driver issue?
It would be sad if, after all those years, it was still missing anything significant. Maintenance mode sounds like a good thing, not something that makes me tempted to switch to some less stable alternative.
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...
I suspect you don't really guess that. There are differences between the two cases. For example, security threat models are a thing. Something can be secure against the threats it will face. I don't ssh -X into servers I don't already trust. There is no arbitrary code being run.
I don't know the implementation details but I can't really complain about the state of wayland today. It used to be annoying to get working many years ago (worse because I had a nvidia gpu). But today I drive a nigthly build of niri, run it by just spawning an dbuss session and everything works. Bluetooth audio, screen sharing, fractional scaling, no tearing, no font blurring. Every utility I needed has been created and works quite nicely (e.g.: wdisplay). I can even play video games with HDR support.
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
I don't think it's true that anything is architecturally or fundamentally broken in Wayland (though if you disagree, I'm very curious what you think is so deeply broken).
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.
Window positioning is one that on its own is sufficient to make me ignore Wayland, as it means that without my own compositor with my own extension, I can't get a file manager that will behave how I want it.
Most people won't care, but for a number of us Wayland is stubbornly refusing to support functionality we see as dealbreakers.
That's fair! I believe that window positioning also works on XWayland, though, so running your file manager that way should still work with the rest of the system being Wayland (and Gnome has no plans to drop XWayland afaik).
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?
It's managing the desktop too, so I'm not sure that'd work unless running Xwayland in "rootful" mode, in which case I might just as well run X.
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.
The only file managers that run on Wayland are the weird "flat" kind with "is" that prevent you from doing anything that didn't match their poorly conceived use cases
I don't think I understand what you mean. Do you mean wayland is not usable with nvidia proprietary driver? I remember that being annoying but possible many year ago (with sway --my-next-gpu-wont-be-nvidia thingy).
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.
The “what’s the harm” here is the systemd conversation all over again basically. If you pipe everything through a single point of failure black box users have already lost, when you combine it binary blob drivers that shouldn’t exist it’s worse. Linux is doomed in achieving its most important goals which are user freedom, not someone’s idea of pretty UI imposed at the expense of that. If that’s what users want they should buy a Mac. If you want to get locked out of your OS for eye candy we have that.
Where is this Wayland black box then? If anything, Wayland made this situation significantly better: the X11 server was exactly this 'single point of failure black box' you are describing. Wayland replaces this with a much simpler protocol with multiple independent implementations (notably Mutter/gnome-shell, KWin, wlroots-based ones such as sway, and Smithay-based ones such as niri).
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.
What nonsense, especially if framed in a such an absolutist way leaving no room for nuance. Millions of people are storing their data on self hosted or 3rd party run managed OSS services on multiple platforms. Sure, it is not all perfect, UX might be an issue here and there but compared to having to relearn using some proprietary app redesign every other year because some Product Manager needed a promotion, a lot of OSS stuff is perfectly usable, stable and secure.
That’s because of extractive economics from tech not because of any failure or weakness of open source. If tech economy was in equilibrium open source would be massively popular. Polished alternatives are subsidies by extraction economics.
What's the substance behind this claim? It keeps on being repeated but I don't get what it's actually about. Is there anything proprietary about Wayland that I'm not aware of? What's the difference between proprietary drivers using X11 and Wayland?
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).
There were plenty of those, including commercial ones.
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).
X11 desktop environments are dying, but it doesn't mean that X11 is dead. XWayland is still a thing so you can still run your X11 apps on Gnome.
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, ...).
I think waypipe should generally do what you want, though TBH so far when I need to run a remote GUI app, I just have them display to XWayland out of habit.
The work done in the 80s and 90s was for very different hardware than now, when accelerated graphics wasn't the norm. MS made that mandatory with Aero and then Windows 8 a long time ago, Apple's been at it for even longer.
Wayland exists because, thanks to hardware innovations, there's a better way to do the job than what was possible in the 80s.
We'd have had a lot fewer problems if Wayland had been X12, in the sense of taking an approach of gradual iteration, even if they went at it fairly aggressively.
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.
Rumors of Gnome's demise seem greatly exaggerated to me. It's still the default DE in nearly all major distributions, and it doesn't seem to have incurred major mindshare or marketshare hits recently. I feel like most of the 'complainers' already abandoned the Gnome ship with the release of GNOME 3.
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.
KDE got better some ways, but I would really like to be able to write an applet without learning QML and everything that goes with it. The learning curve feels higher than when I wrote my first Android app.
X11 isn't going anywhere because distros will ship XWayland for a long time to ensure compatibility with existing X11-only applicatin.
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.
> 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.
Does this mean we finally get proper drag-n-drop support back? [1]
[1] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/file-roller/-/issues/4
Is that why that broke? I've got more than a few expletives on the tip of my tongue right about now.
I'm curious to what extent things in this article have been fixed:
"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?
Most of the arguments sound irrelevant:
>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.
KDE, MATE, Cinnamon.
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.
I haven’t booted into an X11 environment in maybe 4 years. Wayland has been fine (Fedora + Gnome, Fedora / Arch + Niri). I think this is one of those issues where hardcore users overestimate how much anyone else cares or will notice.
> I think this is one of those issues where hardcore users overestimate how much anyone else cares or will notice.
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.
Wayland is buggy as hell for me. Im not particularly invested in X11 but at least it works.
Nvidia GPU? Their drivers have been broken on Linux for a long time now. I've had no bugs on my steam deck or on asahi linux with wayland.
Are simple things like screensharing working now, without crashing in the worst possible moments?
I was under the impression that PipeWire fixed all issues with both screen sharing and desktop audio when it was introduced years ago.
I screenshare on Wayland on Microsoft Teams of all things without issues.
Buy supported GPUs.
I have a RTX 5060TI that works smooth as butter on Arch+X11. Mix of office tasks, gaming on 1440p and AI workloads all without issues.
Steamdeck doesn't use Wayland.
Gamescope, the main compositor of Steam Deck (the one that drives Gaming Mode), uses Wayland. It is just the desktop mode that doesn't.
I used X when I started with Linux in my high school. When I finally stopped tolerating macOS almost a decade ago, I started with Wayland only, and never looked back. I even ditched Krita in favour of Gimp, solely because Gimp supports Wayland (from version 3, and on 2.99 before that). To this day, I don’t understand X, like at all. It’s all some super complicated pile to me. While I don’t understand Wayland either, it’s super simple to interact with as a user. That’s all I care about, especially given that Wayland is better with security, multiple displays, has a smaller code base, and whatnot. Each time I see someone says Wayland is unusable to them, I wonder whether that’s some edge case they have, or is it just some habit. I’m happy I don’t need X for anything, so I just wait till most apps would support Wayland.
Remember x11 was initially a client server model, where multiple clients could access a single x11 server. This brought a lot of complexity we don’t use these days
For certain jobs, I've done development for Linux while also having a Windows box for other things. Opening Linux GUI apps remotely on my Windows desktop is nice and allows me to consolidate my displays. This is an edge case, for sure. How well does Wayland support this?
AFAIK it's more or less still being worked on. Since Wayland has no support in the core protocol, it's an add-on which needs the compositor to forward input and output streams and then something to compress the video and forward it (+input events) further over the network. I can't say that I got it to work so far, though screen sharing in MS Teams(!) running in MS Edge for Linux does work and uses much of the same functionality. That is with KDE and kwin-wayland.
Speak for yourself. I use it every day.
Same. As my main dev environment.
That's the whole point and I sure use it every day.
Starting a GUI app on any machine on the network and have its windows display on my local screen is vital functionality.
> Remember x11 was initially a client server model, where multiple clients could access a single x11 server. This brought a lot of complexity we don’t use these days
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.
I'm happy for you!
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)
Mouse warping does not work in XWayland. Thus, I still use X11.
David (UI details) beats Goliath.
https://www.phoronix.com/news/SDL-Lands-Wayland-Pointer-Warp
Wayland and SDL got support this summer.
And Xwayland has had support for past 10 years: https://www.phoronix.com/news/XWayland-Pointer-Confinement
I've been using Gnome for years, but, honestly, it just isn't good: seems like it's optimized for very basic use. Something as simple as adding launcher to a panel now requires an extension.
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.
As discussed earlier on HN, KDE these days has been the most usable desktop for many users. It is mostly stable, feature rich and can be customized easily.
Yes, fuly agree. And enough time has passed with it being robust and performant that the old bores who used to go on about KDE performance have finally given up bleeting on about that.
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
This was good to read, thanks. Last experience with KDE is probably almost 30 years ago when it was so sluggish I quickly gave up on it. With Gnome being _the default_ in some sense given Ubuntu's control of desktop Linux, it never even came to mind to give kubuntu a try, I think I will.
I tried KDE on several different occasions this year, and each time the bottom panel froze on me when trying to configure it, usually within the first minute or two. It felt a bit like I was still using KDE4 when it was first released.
I think I've had some panel hangs up until a couple of months ago. It was usually some tray plugin (happened after particular changes in the network or sound system configuration) or multi-screen configuration change related. In any case, the workaround for a hanging or spazzed out desktop shell is: open krunner (it's a different process, should still work) and run plasmashell --replace.
Mate (aka Gnome 2) is also fine.
[flagged]
Comments like these are less than worthless. If you're going to contribute, say something meaningful.
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Gonna tell him what?
I was mostly surprised by the "Gnome 50" part. Last I remembered Gnome was still version 3. Turns out they jumped from 3.38 to version 40
They are not planning to go Gnome 4, hence Gnome 3.40 became 40. Just like Emacs went from 1.12 to 13.
> I was mostly surprised by the "Gnome 50" part. Last I remembered Gnome was still version 3. Turns out they jumped from 3.38 to version 40
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.
To me a larger version number doesn't signify a more mature codebase, it signifies less mature developer and developer culture, that doesn't care about backward compatibility and semantic versions.
Then there’s the Linux approach: bump the major version when Linus feels the minor number is too large.
I was working on a carousel library a few months ago. I had made a few stress-test demos so that I could catch obvious issues while I was adding things and tweaking things.
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.
Firefox remains very conservative on enabling modern features on X11. Some distributions force them on, but otherwise it's up to the user to figure out how to do that.
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
Oh! That’s interesting. Thank you.
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.
> Firefox remains very conservative on enabling modern features on X11.
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)
I don't understand how Wayland is becoming the norm when it can't even restore window positions yet.
Why does the display server have to restore window positions?
If you want that feature, then the display server doesn't need to be the one to support it when the display server lets applications obtain and control window positions.
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...
We know it's a deliberate choice. It's just wrong.
>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.
> Maybe some graphics nerds with weird monitor setups are geeking out about fractional pixel coordinates and multiple refresh rates.
They're complaining too because Wayland upscales everything (quadrupling the number of pixels and trashing performance) in order to downscale it for fractional scaling.
Support for rendering directly at the target resolution has been there for years, at least in major compositors such as KDE's KWin and GNOME's Mutter.
https://wayland.app/protocols/fractional-scale-v1
> 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
Wayland deliberately chose to break user workflows. Is it any surprise that users resent Wayland?
I don't resent it. x11 is laggy and poorly supported on modern desktops, even if all the bugs were fixed it would be a pretty sore daily driver experience. Without Wayland I'd still be dual-booting into Windows, the same likely goes for every Steam Deck owner.
x11 desktops can and will continue to exist, and users will choose whichever one they prefer.
Because the display server refuses to let anyone else set or restore window positions.
Tiling window managers are the future.
I love Linux and vastly prefer it to Windows, but whenever people tell me Linux is vastly more stable than Windows, I think of the whol X11/Wayland saga.
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.
Linux is extremely stable. There are some exploits for it, but generally you are very unlikely to accidentally get a virus on it. If you don't update your software, it could potentially run for YEARS without a reboot on Linux. Maybe that is possible on Windows but I have yet to see it really.
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.
what's the drive to use a nix but 'actively dont want to know' about 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.
Modern unix gives me the choice to know a lot about some parts and stay ignorant about others. I don't think there's anything wrong with being real into, say, the network stack and wanting other nerds to handle the GUI for you.
Everyone deserves freedom. Tinkerers and regular users, software engineers and grandmas, artists and Paint users.
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.
This stuff just kinda works on Linux too. This discussion is for distro maintainers (think of them like OS packagers) and power users. If you just install Ubuntu or Bazzite or whatever, it should just work
I mean if you are a normal user and most people are, you absolutely do not need to care about both Wayland and X11. Distributions ship with working configurations. It just works.
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.
Blocked in my location. Did a quick search only to find that it's blocked in many other locations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35314374
https://web.archive.org/web/20251114122702if_/https://linuxi...
Transition to Wayland opened so many user experience regressions. Many are solved today, or at least partially solved but...
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.
The "Transition to Wayland" from a user experience pov is the slowest car crash of all time. We are like 1.5 DECADES in at this point.
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.
There are slower ones, like IPv4 to IPv6 transition. Jokes aside, in Linux any transition happens instant or never.
Kde's new Plasma Login Manager / Plasma Login (backend/frontend) have been coming along nicely (replacing sddm), and include remote login support. Just announced this past spring but very active. https://blog.davidedmundson.co.uk/blog/a-roadmap-for-a-moder...
That's exactly what I was talking about before. Tried on newest fedora but that simply isn't it. It's remote support to an existing session. Names are misleading.
In Gnome, the option is in Settings -> System -> Remote Desktop.
You can enable the rdp server there. It does allow opening new sessions remotely. It works fine.
"gnome-remote-desktop" does exactly that - providing (amongst other capabilities) a way to handle remote logins: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-remote-desktop
Remote assistance, NOT remote logins. It can be used as support when someone is already went to that computer, authenticated and has a full gnome session opened.
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.
Please just click in the link, read the README! It offers: - remote assistance - headless multi user remote login - headless (single user)
I don't want to argue on semantics. Currently you can't start a graphical session completely remotely using any protocol (RDP, VNC, no machine, whatever).
I don't use GNOME, or GDM, or RDP, but isn't https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-remote-desktop#headless... describing 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.
Have you actually tried setting it up on Wayland yourself?
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've used it. It works fine. You connect with RDP, get a gdm login screen, and can log in.
Thank you, I will definitely test it soon.
It's not explicit from the link, but does it allow the headless login to be resumed from console and vice versa?
I tried some solutions in the past but they did not support that, which is a deal breaker.
There are no headless sessions on Wayland. At all.
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.
What I want is to be able to start a session remotely after a reboot, and continue that same session when I get back home. And conversely start a session while at my desk at home and resume that same session remotely. Without any weird limitations.
In other words, how RDP works on Windows.
So you're saying that is still not possible I take it.
I have no idea what issues folks are talking about. I use vanilla gnome for my work and personal use case (given with well supported GPUs, read: no Nvidia). All the features work. Zoom/screen share/obs etc.,
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.
Sadly, I recently had to switch back from Wayland to xorg because clients are getting so memory hungry. My eight year old gpu only has 2gb of vram, which I constantly run out of. Some part of the gfx stack should handle swapping out vram to main ram but it apparently isn't.
Is it an Nvidia?
What a strange title. X11 is still more popular than Gnome, and formulating a wish like a fact doesn't make it so.
Anecdotally, I strongly doubt this is true, although my environment is probably quite biased. I know a ton of people who use Gnome, some who use KDE, and I think roughly all of these people use them with Wayland. The standalone-WM users I know are also mostly on Sway or other Wayland ones. The only real X11 holdouts seem to be people using X11-only DE's, such as Xfce or Cinnamon.
> I think roughly all of these people use them with Wayland.
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.
KDE Plasma defaults to Wayland as of KDE 6, with X11 scheduled for removal whenever 7 is released.
I'm talking actual usage, not defaults, and nothing I said relates to future KDE plans.
Xfce is working on Wayland session support. It is working now with some limitations (limitations on what you can embed in the panel are all that's left, I think).
Pretty much possible to use gnome and x11 (until now).
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.
Such a statement is pointless with any data to back it up.
Do you have a source for that statistic?
Stats from Debian and Archlinux. i can't tell how reliable they are.
https://qa.debian.org/popcon-graph.php?packages=x11-common+g...
https://pkgstats.archlinux.de/compare/packages#packages=gnom...
Be aware that Debian's xwayland depends on x11-common, so your number here will be the combined total of Xorg and Wayland.
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.
One of the big problem I am/was facing with Wayland is the performance when accessing a VM with SPICE and virt-viewer. You basically had to use X11 on the host and the guest for everything to work in an optimal way.
Do anybody knows if any progress have been made on this front?
SPICE is slowly being phased out by Redhat, so I'm doubtful we'll see improvements on that front any time soon.
That would be a bummer !
And with X11 support gone we would have to downgrade to VNC to access our VMs?
AFAIK spice just has been succeeded, i forget for what exactly but after the switch everything was better one worked out it the box. I think for virtIO…
Makes sense to move to something actively maintained. I don’t use GNOME, but I have been on Wayland for years in both KDE and tiling WMs. It works great while on X11 I would often get weird flickering and stuttering issues (some NVIDIA bug I could never track down). Anyway, if the X11 die-hards want it to survive, they need to organize an effort to maintain it, not yell at everyone who wants to build something better.
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.
https://archive.ph/2OaGe
I can’t believe apps still can’t position their own windows
It's a deliberate decision so it will never change. I'm not surprised that Wayland doesn't allow this (and a great many other things, e.g. window icons) but I am surprised that anyone uses Wayland despite that.
one thing I've asked in the past, is there a headless vnc for use in a wayland only environment, ala xvncserver (and related forks)
Yes, there's a wayvnc project (you need a wlroots compositor tho, so no GNOME). You can start a compositor in headless mode and then connect to it with a fully wayland client like wlvncc
Site is blocked by origin server in India.
Mighty presumptuous to think everybody uses Gnome. I've spent decades using neither Gnome nor KDE.
My poor xrdp setup
Another nail in the coffin. Bye, Red Hat. Bye, NGOME. Non GNU OldIBM Mediocre Environment. I wish GTK4 dies in IBM hands too, for the good. XFCE can go back to a community supported GTK3 anytime.
X11 is not going anywhere. If anything it's Gnome adding another nail to its coffin
x11 is in maintenance mode at this point and Gnome is not going anywhere. Gnome is used (and financed) by major distributions.
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.
I had assumed that XWayland is a drop-in replacement fo X11, and will be available indefinitely.
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.
Yes, XWayland is intended to continue to be available indefinitely.
For my part, I have no intention of moving off X11 for the next decade at least. The only app I use that I don't fully control is a browser, and the worst case fallback is to run the browser in a Wayland compositor that runs on X.
Are you also still running python2?
What a weird question. I have no use compelling use-case for python2. I have plenty of use-cases for X, such as the fact that none of my software other than my browser has Wayland support, including my window manager.
Nothing weird about it, it makes perfect sense with what you are posting. I find it weird that you react like that to a simple question. Just probing what kind of old software you use, cause it tells a lot depending.
It was weird because you implied (and still are) that it'd mean I was hanging on to old, superceded software that has adequate replacements. I'm not. So this is telling us more about your assumptions.
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.
I'm curious, what were you hoping to learn about their use of python 2? If you had specific questions, it would be helpful if you ask those, instead of trying to ask through euphemisms.
If it was maintained (security fixes and platform support only), but with no other changes, it would be a very tempting alternative to python3 for the many times API stability is valuable.
And wayland is in broken mode. KDE keep changing the default back to wayland after each update, and every time my linux systems are broken until I switch back to x11.
What is broken for you? At this point, starting from roughly KDE 6, Wayland has been pretty much flawless for me. KDE 5.27 was pretty much fine already as well.
Fractional scaling is awful on Wayland if the application relies on XWayland to work. Drives me up the wall having to find the various flags to force Wayland mode.
I mean don't worry, once there's no more X11 you won't have to switch it into Wayland mode anymore.
The problem is that I find Wayland to be a lot buggier than x11.
For example, terminal transparency using Konsole on KDE flickers for me.
Its nearly there, but not quite. Maybe Gnome has no such issues?
Do you have more specifics? I just tried it on my machine (Fedora 42, Plasma 6.5.1 Wayland, Konsole 25.08.2, Radeon 780M) and it seems fine for me. Does it only occur occasionally/under specific circumstances for example?
I have been testing and its Konsole 25.08.1, does not affect XFCE Terminal.
Plasma v: 6.3.6, Ryzen 7 5800U with integrated graphics. Happens every time I use Konsole with transparency.
I've never seen similar issues using a variety of terminals on Gnome, Sway, or Niri. Haven't used Konsole or Plasma, but I wonder if it's maybe a driver issue?
x11 being in maintenance mode is the best thing that happened to it for my use case. It hasn't crashed in 15 years.
It would be sad if, after all those years, it was still missing anything significant. Maintenance mode sounds like a good thing, not something that makes me tempted to switch to some less stable alternative.
and one without the features I use. ssh -X is a must.
> ssh -X is a must.
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...
I suspect you don't really guess that. There are differences between the two cases. For example, security threat models are a thing. Something can be secure against the threats it will face. I don't ssh -X into servers I don't already trust. There is no arbitrary code being run.
https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver
> x11 is in maintenance mode at this point and Gnome is not going anywhere
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 don't know the implementation details but I can't really complain about the state of wayland today. It used to be annoying to get working many years ago (worse because I had a nvidia gpu). But today I drive a nigthly build of niri, run it by just spawning an dbuss session and everything works. Bluetooth audio, screen sharing, fractional scaling, no tearing, no font blurring. Every utility I needed has been created and works quite nicely (e.g.: wdisplay). I can even play video games with HDR support.
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
X11 is far more stable now since they stopped improving it! I haven't had a crash in 15 years.
Hardware-accelerated x11 is buggier than software-accelerated Quartz Compositor, on my machine.
Reality might hit me in the face if I ever get a new machine, but my 13 year old laptop works flawlessly.
I don't think it's true that anything is architecturally or fundamentally broken in Wayland (though if you disagree, I'm very curious what you think is so deeply broken).
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.
Window positioning is one that on its own is sufficient to make me ignore Wayland, as it means that without my own compositor with my own extension, I can't get a file manager that will behave how I want it.
Most people won't care, but for a number of us Wayland is stubbornly refusing to support functionality we see as dealbreakers.
That's fair! I believe that window positioning also works on XWayland, though, so running your file manager that way should still work with the rest of the system being Wayland (and Gnome has no plans to drop XWayland afaik).
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?
It's managing the desktop too, so I'm not sure that'd work unless running Xwayland in "rootful" mode, in which case I might just as well run X.
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.
The only file managers that run on Wayland are the weird "flat" kind with "is" that prevent you from doing anything that didn't match their poorly conceived use cases
I have no idea what you are saying (with "is"??), but I don't think this is true: KDE Dolphin is very full-featured and runs natively on Wayland.
Goodbye to any trace of freedom left on Linux when you combine this with proprietary graphics drivers.
I don't think I understand what you mean. Do you mean wayland is not usable with nvidia proprietary driver? I remember that being annoying but possible many year ago (with sway --my-next-gpu-wont-be-nvidia thingy).
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.
The “what’s the harm” here is the systemd conversation all over again basically. If you pipe everything through a single point of failure black box users have already lost, when you combine it binary blob drivers that shouldn’t exist it’s worse. Linux is doomed in achieving its most important goals which are user freedom, not someone’s idea of pretty UI imposed at the expense of that. If that’s what users want they should buy a Mac. If you want to get locked out of your OS for eye candy we have that.
Where is this Wayland black box then? If anything, Wayland made this situation significantly better: the X11 server was exactly this 'single point of failure black box' you are describing. Wayland replaces this with a much simpler protocol with multiple independent implementations (notably Mutter/gnome-shell, KWin, wlroots-based ones such as sway, and Smithay-based ones such as niri).
Open source has never achieved user freedom.
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.
What nonsense, especially if framed in a such an absolutist way leaving no room for nuance. Millions of people are storing their data on self hosted or 3rd party run managed OSS services on multiple platforms. Sure, it is not all perfect, UX might be an issue here and there but compared to having to relearn using some proprietary app redesign every other year because some Product Manager needed a promotion, a lot of OSS stuff is perfectly usable, stable and secure.
> Millions of people are storing their data on self hosted or 3rd party run managed OSS services on multiple platforms.
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.
That’s because of extractive economics from tech not because of any failure or weakness of open source. If tech economy was in equilibrium open source would be massively popular. Polished alternatives are subsidies by extraction economics.
I don't understand how proprietary drivers with Wayland are supposed to be a bigger problem than proprietary drivers with X11, could you explain?
Personally, I've never used a proprietary driver with either.
What's the substance behind this claim? It keeps on being repeated but I don't get what it's actually about. Is there anything proprietary about Wayland that I'm not aware of? What's the difference between proprietary drivers using X11 and Wayland?
Freedom is dead when a single implementation is replaced with several competing implementations implementing an open standard.
Just so it’s clear:
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).
Every single X server you list is a fork of XFree86, and every X server I'm aware of is a fork of the original X11R1 (or later) release from MIT.
Please cite a single independent implementation of an X11 protocol server.
There were plenty of those, including commercial ones.
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...
Oh, WeirdX, that's one I hadn't heard of.
The commercial ones (Xsun, Xsgi, Hummingbird, DESQView/X etc.) were all based on MIT code.
Only Nvidia use proprietary graphics drivers?
vmxgfx has similar issues.
If you are using VMWare then the proprietary video driver is probably the least of your issues.
X11 desktop environments are dying, but it doesn't mean that X11 is dead. XWayland is still a thing so you can still run your X11 apps on Gnome.
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, ...).
I think waypipe should generally do what you want, though TBH so far when I need to run a remote GUI app, I just have them display to XWayland out of habit.
Wayland was created by X11 developers, as they decided keeping X11 going was beyond hope.
Feel free to find volunteers to fulfill their shoes.
They weren't "developers" more like a Jr intern asked to do some minor maintenance
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"
The work done in the 80s and 90s was for very different hardware than now, when accelerated graphics wasn't the norm. MS made that mandatory with Aero and then Windows 8 a long time ago, Apple's been at it for even longer.
Wayland exists because, thanks to hardware innovations, there's a better way to do the job than what was possible in the 80s.
I think we would have a lot less problems if wayland was called X12 /s
We'd have had a lot fewer problems if Wayland had been X12, in the sense of taking an approach of gradual iteration, even if they went at it fairly aggressively.
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.
There was a schism anyway (wayland vs mir). I was excited about both, though I never understood the difference between the two.
Rumors of Gnome's demise seem greatly exaggerated to me. It's still the default DE in nearly all major distributions, and it doesn't seem to have incurred major mindshare or marketshare hits recently. I feel like most of the 'complainers' already abandoned the Gnome ship with the release of GNOME 3.
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.
KDE got better some ways, but I would really like to be able to write an applet without learning QML and everything that goes with it. The learning curve feels higher than when I wrote my first Android app.
X11 isn't going anywhere because distros will ship XWayland for a long time to ensure compatibility with existing X11-only applicatin.
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.
> 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
> X11 is not going anywhere. If anything it's Gnome adding another nail to its coffin
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.
> adding another nail to its coffin
They've been adding nails to the coffin for 25+ years now. How many more do you think it's going to take?
Damn thing's more nail than coffin at this point!