8 ms·

Gnome Mutter Now "Completely Drops the Whole X11 Back End"

40 points by throwaway7489 11mo ago

marginalia_nu 11mo ago
A decade of a their trademark hard line "you're holding it wrong" ethos will likely already have driven away what people might object to this sort of change.
- tokai 11mo ago
  Anti-Gnome people really need to get over it. We get it, just don't use their software.
  - deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
  - philipallstar 11mo ago
    I think you misread that comment.
  - thisonetimeonly 11mo ago
    It’s just the way, innit? People love to (rightly) bump their chest and say Linux is great for how customisable and open it is, but then go bananas the moment one software decides to do something different. “Openness, customisation and freedom of choice are great—unless you are offering a software that doesn’t behave exactly like we want it to, then it should not exist as option for anyone, ever.”
    - yjftsjthsd-h 11mo ago
      Yeah, no. Let me fix that: Openness, customisation and freedom of choice are great—unless you are offering a software that absolutely refuses to allow customization and freedom of choice, and actively attempts to impose its limitations on the rest of the ecosystem[0], in which case you will get pushback. [0] My favorite example is https://trac.transmissionbt.com/ticket/3685#no1 https://trac.transmissionbt.com/ticket/3685#no1
      - ragnese 11mo ago
        There are multiple angles. As the stewards of GTK, they should, IMO, try to keep it flexible and customizable to whatever extent is manageable and reasonable. This post is about Mutter, which is a window manager, which should have very little to do with the app "ecosystem". They can, and should, do whatever the hell they want with Mutter, GNOME Shell, Nautilus/Files, etc. Even in the link you posted, they're talking about GNOME, not GTK.
        marginalia_nu 11mo ago
        When I complain about Gnome driving away users with hostility, it's mainly their GTK stewardship I talk of. That, and things like primarily designing the interface for a touch screen, despite PC touch screens not really taking off. Very out of touch.
        xethos 11mo ago
        > things like primarily designing the interface for a touch screen, despite PC touch screens not really taking off. That was actually an absolute godsend using the Pinephone, and IMO laid the groundwork for the Librem 5 (and modern Linux-on-Mobile interfaces) to take root. I do not believe PostmarketOS would be doing as well as it is if they didn't have apps that play nicely with touch. You don't use it, and you don't appreciate it, and that's fine. I'd say it most defintitely has a place though, without even touching on the chicken-and-egg bit about touchscreen / mobile Linux not taking off vs Gnome pushing for touchscreen / adaptability before it goes mainstream
        marginalia_nu 11mo ago
        I really don't understand why we need to absolutely ruin desktop UIs in order to have mobile interfaces. For web UIs it may be argued as a necessary evil as designing multiple front-ends is expensive and reactive UIs can theoretically be made to exist and shown in small demos to be decent, but when designing desktop applications?
  - throwmeaway307 11mo ago
    until they suddenly drop the other not-their software. as they've done to X11
  - reidrac 11mo ago
    I've never believed on that dichotomy: either you are happy with everything a project does, or you are a hater. Why? That was precisely what drove me away from the project after many years. I don't use the software anymore and, for the most part, no changes they make affect me, but Gonome 3 should be treated as an example of an awful way of driving change by burning bridges and hurting the community. I haven't thought about this for many years now, but I would have expected RH to do better.
    - iamnothere 11mo ago
      Just to add: well-founded criticism is not being a “hater”, nor is forking or leaving a project over irreconcilable disagreements. Being a hater is repeatedly publishing absurd screeds, attempting to organize smear campaigns to pressure devs, and using sock puppets to flood social media with negative comments in order to influence users. Sadly there are a few very loud haters in the FOSS community. If someone is calling you a hater over a difference of opinion, they are just wrong. That said, if you’ve been on the other end of frequent attacks from haters, it’s understandable that you might be overly sensitive to it!
      - deleted 11mo ago
        [deleted]
      - BoredPositron 11mo ago
        I don't see well found criticism in ops statement just blunt ragebait.
        iamnothere 11mo ago
        I was just adding to the comment I replied to. There’s a lot of grey area between hater and die-hard supporter but that often isn’t acknowledged in these flame wars.
      - embedding-shape 11mo ago
        > That said, if you’ve been on the other end of frequent attacks from haters, it’s understandable that you might be overly sensitive to it! Speaking mostly from personal experience, I don't know how the community at large is felling about it, but for me my reaction and experience has been the opposite. The more I come across haters, the less impact each one have on me, because I've seen it before, already know it not to be true, and don't have any needs to engage with any of it again. It's like the more it occurred, the more desensitized I got to it. Being falsely accused of things you know to be untrue felt really difficult at first, but forcing myself to be more confident in me really helped to not let that get to me and be able to move past it easier. More on topic, it's really easy to misjudge what is a "campaign" and what is someone feeling semi-strongly about something but writing really "convincingly" about it and what is someone just throwing a off-hand comment perhaps hastily formulated. We don't always know the intention, but we immediately jump to our first guess about the intention, but sometimes people are just casually pointing out stuff without actually having strong feelings about them.
- ragnese 11mo ago
  Probably yes. And, good. It's free software. I still use GNOME Shell, and the minute the make a change that I don't want to deal with, I'll change to something else. Easy as that.
neilv 11mo ago
I had to look up what "Gnome Mutter" is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutter_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutter_(software) > Mutter is a window manager initially designed and implemented for the X Window System, but then evolved to be a display server ("Wayland compositor"). It became the default window manager in GNOME 3, Gnome alienated some developers around the time of GTK 3, and there have sometimes been regressions, and some opinionated unconventional design choices that everyone else was stuck with. (At the same time there was much positive benefits from the efforts.) Even though I don't use the default Gnome desktop on most of my systems (I usually prefer XMonad or i3wm atop X11), I still end up using applications programs written to GTK and Gnome libraries. Maybe this even harder push by Gnome on Wayland will drive even more effort into the alternative software, and continue to fuel the healthy competition that (for better or worst) the Linux desktop is stuck with.
- HeinzStuckeIt 11mo ago
  How many X11 holdouts are still around, really? I'm a curmudgeonly old man fond of old tech, but I have still had a Wayland-only setup since early 2020; once Sway was there as a good tiling window manager, and Emacs got its Wayland-ready pure-gtk branch, there was no need to look back. I of course see people here and there on forums express discontent, but I don't think that demographic is big enough to drive both significant development and the adoption that makes development sustainable.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 11mo ago
    The trick is: If you use any sort of a11y tools, it's really hard to move to wayland. Things are improving, but it's slow going.
    - pseudalopex 11mo ago
      Or most remote desktop tools.
  - phantasmish 11mo ago
    SteamDeck's desktop mode was X11, last I checked.
lousken 11mo ago
Wayland is still years away from usable state. You still can't even autotype keepassxc passwords and there are still no good solutions for remote desktop sessions (at least I have not found any last time i checked)
- bigyabai 11mo ago
  Those are fair criticisms, but neither one of them is a dealbreaker for any OS that I use on a regular basis. As such, most Wayland sessions are perfectly usable to me.
  - lousken 11mo ago
    I am saying that, because it is a dealbreaker for me, as I have to login tens of times every day across different companies. Wish Yubikey and webauthn was implemented by everyone already
- saturn_vk 11mo ago
  > Wayland is still years away from usable state … for you, surely. I’m sure there are some wayland users. > autotype keepassxc passwords What is that? > remote desktop sessions IIRC, gnome comes with an ootb RDP solution that, last I tried, worked as advertised. I’m not a big remote user though.
  - throwaway7489 11mo ago
    > What is that? I believe they refer to KeePassXC's autofill feature, which autotypes credentials into other applications. I've never used this in X and won't use it on Wayland, as I prefer to keep all applications isolated. I Ctrl-C to copy and then manually paste the password. Wayland is better for this method because I know the clipboard is cleared once I close KeePassXC.
    - lousken 10mo ago
      That's nice, if you don't have to always copy both the username and password or if you don't have custom autotype set up. Also I disagree, if I do not trust my password manager, I should not be using it at all.
shevy-java 11mo ago
The GNOME/GTK devs are on a mission - they fight down all xorg users. That's not good.
- saturn_vk 11mo ago
  There are dozens of you. Dozens!
confirmmesenpai 11mo ago
Hyper-V connects to a VM desktop using XRDP which uses X. Will that stuff still work? Can you still use gnome through XRDP?
- pseudalopex 11mo ago
  They expect you to use GNOME Remote Desktop instead I think.
chuckadams 11mo ago
Being a GNOME thing, I imagine they'll eventually drop Wayland support too so as to not confuse users with options. (/s in this case, I'm actually all for dropping X11)
stuaxo 11mo ago
Really hoping window focus gets fixed, its been broken for me for about a year now, windows come up behind the one I'm using, end up typing into the wrong one etc.

40 points by throwaway7489 11mo ago

A decade of a their trademark hard line "you're holding it wrong" ethos will likely already have driven away what people might object to this sort of change.

tokai 11mo ago
Anti-Gnome people really need to get over it. We get it, just don't use their software.
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
- philipallstar 11mo ago
  I think you misread that comment.
- thisonetimeonly 11mo ago
  It’s just the way, innit? People love to (rightly) bump their chest and say Linux is great for how customisable and open it is, but then go bananas the moment one software decides to do something different. “Openness, customisation and freedom of choice are great—unless you are offering a software that doesn’t behave exactly like we want it to, then it should not exist as option for anyone, ever.”
  - yjftsjthsd-h 11mo ago
    Yeah, no. Let me fix that: Openness, customisation and freedom of choice are great—unless you are offering a software that absolutely refuses to allow customization and freedom of choice, and actively attempts to impose its limitations on the rest of the ecosystem[0], in which case you will get pushback. [0] My favorite example is https://trac.transmissionbt.com/ticket/3685#no1 https://trac.transmissionbt.com/ticket/3685#no1
    - ragnese 11mo ago
      There are multiple angles. As the stewards of GTK, they should, IMO, try to keep it flexible and customizable to whatever extent is manageable and reasonable. This post is about Mutter, which is a window manager, which should have very little to do with the app "ecosystem". They can, and should, do whatever the hell they want with Mutter, GNOME Shell, Nautilus/Files, etc. Even in the link you posted, they're talking about GNOME, not GTK.
      - marginalia_nu 11mo ago
        When I complain about Gnome driving away users with hostility, it's mainly their GTK stewardship I talk of. That, and things like primarily designing the interface for a touch screen, despite PC touch screens not really taking off. Very out of touch.
        xethos 11mo ago
        > things like primarily designing the interface for a touch screen, despite PC touch screens not really taking off. That was actually an absolute godsend using the Pinephone, and IMO laid the groundwork for the Librem 5 (and modern Linux-on-Mobile interfaces) to take root. I do not believe PostmarketOS would be doing as well as it is if they didn't have apps that play nicely with touch. You don't use it, and you don't appreciate it, and that's fine. I'd say it most defintitely has a place though, without even touching on the chicken-and-egg bit about touchscreen / mobile Linux not taking off vs Gnome pushing for touchscreen / adaptability before it goes mainstream
        marginalia_nu 11mo ago
        I really don't understand why we need to absolutely ruin desktop UIs in order to have mobile interfaces. For web UIs it may be argued as a necessary evil as designing multiple front-ends is expensive and reactive UIs can theoretically be made to exist and shown in small demos to be decent, but when designing desktop applications?
- throwmeaway307 11mo ago
  until they suddenly drop the other not-their software. as they've done to X11
- reidrac 11mo ago
  I've never believed on that dichotomy: either you are happy with everything a project does, or you are a hater. Why? That was precisely what drove me away from the project after many years. I don't use the software anymore and, for the most part, no changes they make affect me, but Gonome 3 should be treated as an example of an awful way of driving change by burning bridges and hurting the community. I haven't thought about this for many years now, but I would have expected RH to do better.
  - iamnothere 11mo ago
    Just to add: well-founded criticism is not being a “hater”, nor is forking or leaving a project over irreconcilable disagreements. Being a hater is repeatedly publishing absurd screeds, attempting to organize smear campaigns to pressure devs, and using sock puppets to flood social media with negative comments in order to influence users. Sadly there are a few very loud haters in the FOSS community. If someone is calling you a hater over a difference of opinion, they are just wrong. That said, if you’ve been on the other end of frequent attacks from haters, it’s understandable that you might be overly sensitive to it!
    - deleted 11mo ago
      [deleted]
    - BoredPositron 11mo ago
      I don't see well found criticism in ops statement just blunt ragebait.
      - iamnothere 11mo ago
        I was just adding to the comment I replied to. There’s a lot of grey area between hater and die-hard supporter but that often isn’t acknowledged in these flame wars.
    - embedding-shape 11mo ago
      > That said, if you’ve been on the other end of frequent attacks from haters, it’s understandable that you might be overly sensitive to it! Speaking mostly from personal experience, I don't know how the community at large is felling about it, but for me my reaction and experience has been the opposite. The more I come across haters, the less impact each one have on me, because I've seen it before, already know it not to be true, and don't have any needs to engage with any of it again. It's like the more it occurred, the more desensitized I got to it. Being falsely accused of things you know to be untrue felt really difficult at first, but forcing myself to be more confident in me really helped to not let that get to me and be able to move past it easier. More on topic, it's really easy to misjudge what is a "campaign" and what is someone feeling semi-strongly about something but writing really "convincingly" about it and what is someone just throwing a off-hand comment perhaps hastily formulated. We don't always know the intention, but we immediately jump to our first guess about the intention, but sometimes people are just casually pointing out stuff without actually having strong feelings about them.
ragnese 11mo ago
Probably yes. And, good. It's free software. I still use GNOME Shell, and the minute the make a change that I don't want to deal with, I'll change to something else. Easy as that.

neilv 11mo ago

I had to look up what "Gnome Mutter" is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutter_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutter_(software) > Mutter is a window manager initially designed and implemented for the X Window System, but then evolved to be a display server ("Wayland compositor"). It became the default window manager in GNOME 3, Gnome alienated some developers around the time of GTK 3, and there have sometimes been regressions, and some opinionated unconventional design choices that everyone else was stuck with. (At the same time there was much positive benefits from the efforts.) Even though I don't use the default Gnome desktop on most of my systems (I usually prefer XMonad or i3wm atop X11), I still end up using applications programs written to GTK and Gnome libraries. Maybe this even harder push by Gnome on Wayland will drive even more effort into the alternative software, and continue to fuel the healthy competition that (for better or worst) the Linux desktop is stuck with.

HeinzStuckeIt 11mo ago
How many X11 holdouts are still around, really? I'm a curmudgeonly old man fond of old tech, but I have still had a Wayland-only setup since early 2020; once Sway was there as a good tiling window manager, and Emacs got its Wayland-ready pure-gtk branch, there was no need to look back. I of course see people here and there on forums express discontent, but I don't think that demographic is big enough to drive both significant development and the adoption that makes development sustainable.
- yjftsjthsd-h 11mo ago
  The trick is: If you use any sort of a11y tools, it's really hard to move to wayland. Things are improving, but it's slow going.
  - pseudalopex 11mo ago
    Or most remote desktop tools.
- phantasmish 11mo ago
  SteamDeck's desktop mode was X11, last I checked.

lousken 11mo ago

Wayland is still years away from usable state. You still can't even autotype keepassxc passwords and there are still no good solutions for remote desktop sessions (at least I have not found any last time i checked)

bigyabai 11mo ago
Those are fair criticisms, but neither one of them is a dealbreaker for any OS that I use on a regular basis. As such, most Wayland sessions are perfectly usable to me.
- lousken 11mo ago
  I am saying that, because it is a dealbreaker for me, as I have to login tens of times every day across different companies. Wish Yubikey and webauthn was implemented by everyone already
saturn_vk 11mo ago
> Wayland is still years away from usable state … for you, surely. I’m sure there are some wayland users. > autotype keepassxc passwords What is that? > remote desktop sessions IIRC, gnome comes with an ootb RDP solution that, last I tried, worked as advertised. I’m not a big remote user though.
- throwaway7489 11mo ago
  > What is that? I believe they refer to KeePassXC's autofill feature, which autotypes credentials into other applications. I've never used this in X and won't use it on Wayland, as I prefer to keep all applications isolated. I Ctrl-C to copy and then manually paste the password. Wayland is better for this method because I know the clipboard is cleared once I close KeePassXC.
  - lousken 10mo ago
    That's nice, if you don't have to always copy both the username and password or if you don't have custom autotype set up. Also I disagree, if I do not trust my password manager, I should not be using it at all.

shevy-java 11mo ago

The GNOME/GTK devs are on a mission - they fight down all xorg users. That's not good.

saturn_vk 11mo ago
There are dozens of you. Dozens!

confirmmesenpai 11mo ago

Hyper-V connects to a VM desktop using XRDP which uses X. Will that stuff still work? Can you still use gnome through XRDP?

pseudalopex 11mo ago
They expect you to use GNOME Remote Desktop instead I think.

chuckadams 11mo ago

Being a GNOME thing, I imagine they'll eventually drop Wayland support too so as to not confuse users with options. (/s in this case, I'm actually all for dropping X11)

stuaxo 11mo ago

Really hoping window focus gets fixed, its been broken for me for about a year now, windows come up behind the one I'm using, end up typing into the wrong one etc.