7 ms·

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 wit

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.

user3939382 10mo ago
Goodbye to any trace of freedom left on Linux when you combine this with proprietary graphics drivers.
- happymellon 10mo ago
  Only Nvidia use proprietary graphics drivers?
  - blueflow 10mo ago
    vmxgfx has similar issues.
    - happymellon 10mo ago
      If you are using VMWare then the proprietary video driver is probably the least of your issues.
- dminik 10mo ago
  Freedom is dead when a single implementation is replaced with several competing implementations implementing an open standard.
  - chrismorgan 10mo ago
    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).
    - the_why_of_y 10mo ago
      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.
      - marwis 10mo ago
        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.com/weirdx/ https://web.archive.org/web/20250220140358/http://www.jcraft...
        the_why_of_y 10mo ago
        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.
- gabrielgio 10mo ago
  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.
  - user3939382 10mo ago
    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.
    - api 10mo ago
      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.
      - jasonvorhe 10mo ago
        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.
- jasonvorhe 10mo ago
  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?
ur-whale 10mo ago
> 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.
- gabrielgio 10mo ago
  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
  - exe34 10mo ago
    X11 is far more stable now since they stopped improving it! I haven't had a crash in 15 years.
    - bigyabai 10mo ago
      Hardware-accelerated x11 is buggier than software-accelerated Quartz Compositor, on my machine.
      - exe34 10mo ago
        Reality might hit me in the face if I ever get a new machine, but my 13 year old laptop works flawlessly.
- ColonelPhantom 10mo ago
  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-this-wayland-thing/ 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.
vidarh 10mo ago
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.
- tokai 10mo ago
  Are you also still running python2?
  - vidarh 10mo ago
    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.
    - tokai 10mo ago
      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.
      - vidarh 10mo ago
        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.
exe34 10mo ago
x11 being in maintenance mode is the best thing that happened to it for my use case. It hasn't crashed in 15 years.
- 1313ed01 10mo ago
  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.
  - exe34 10mo ago
    and one without the features I use. ssh -X is a must.
    - throwaway7356 10mo ago
      > 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...
      - exe34 10mo ago
        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.
lousken 10mo ago
https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver
graemep 10mo ago
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?
- ColonelPhantom 10mo ago
  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?
  - graemep 10mo ago
    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.
- NoGravitas 10mo ago
  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?
irthomasthomas 10mo ago
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.
- ColonelPhantom 10mo ago
  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.
  - InvertedRhodium 10mo ago
    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.
    - Spivak 10mo ago
      I mean don't worry, once there's no more X11 you won't have to switch it into Wayland mode anymore.
  - irthomasthomas 10mo ago
    Just installed fresh and logged in to Wayland. Sudo password stopped working. After fixing that it kept opening some window and refused to close. Even without those bugs none of the accessibility tools work.
DonaldFisk 10mo ago
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.
- NoGravitas 10mo ago
  Yes, XWayland is intended to continue to be available indefinitely.

user3939382 10mo ago

Goodbye to any trace of freedom left on Linux when you combine this with proprietary graphics drivers.

happymellon 10mo ago
Only Nvidia use proprietary graphics drivers?
- blueflow 10mo ago
  vmxgfx has similar issues.
  - happymellon 10mo ago
    If you are using VMWare then the proprietary video driver is probably the least of your issues.
dminik 10mo ago
Freedom is dead when a single implementation is replaced with several competing implementations implementing an open standard.
- chrismorgan 10mo ago
  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).
  - the_why_of_y 10mo ago
    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.
    - marwis 10mo ago
      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.com/weirdx/ https://web.archive.org/web/20250220140358/http://www.jcraft...
      - the_why_of_y 10mo ago
        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.
gabrielgio 10mo ago
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.
- user3939382 10mo ago
  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.
  - api 10mo ago
    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.
    - jasonvorhe 10mo ago
      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.
jasonvorhe 10mo ago
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?

ur-whale 10mo ago

> 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.

gabrielgio 10mo ago
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
- exe34 10mo ago
  X11 is far more stable now since they stopped improving it! I haven't had a crash in 15 years.
  - bigyabai 10mo ago
    Hardware-accelerated x11 is buggier than software-accelerated Quartz Compositor, on my machine.
    - exe34 10mo ago
      Reality might hit me in the face if I ever get a new machine, but my 13 year old laptop works flawlessly.
ColonelPhantom 10mo ago
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-this-wayland-thing/ 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.

vidarh 10mo ago

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.

tokai 10mo ago
Are you also still running python2?
- vidarh 10mo ago
  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.
  - tokai 10mo ago
    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.
    - vidarh 10mo ago
      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.

exe34 10mo ago

x11 being in maintenance mode is the best thing that happened to it for my use case. It hasn't crashed in 15 years.

1313ed01 10mo ago
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.
- exe34 10mo ago
  and one without the features I use. ssh -X is a must.
  - throwaway7356 10mo ago
    > 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...
    - exe34 10mo ago
      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.

lousken 10mo ago

https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver

graemep 10mo ago

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?

ColonelPhantom 10mo ago
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?
- graemep 10mo ago
  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.
NoGravitas 10mo ago
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?

irthomasthomas 10mo ago

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.

ColonelPhantom 10mo ago
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.
- InvertedRhodium 10mo ago
  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.
  - Spivak 10mo ago
    I mean don't worry, once there's no more X11 you won't have to switch it into Wayland mode anymore.
- irthomasthomas 10mo ago
  Just installed fresh and logged in to Wayland. Sudo password stopped working. After fixing that it kept opening some window and refused to close. Even without those bugs none of the accessibility tools work.

DonaldFisk 10mo ago

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.

NoGravitas 10mo ago
Yes, XWayland is intended to continue to be available indefinitely.