Gnome developer proposes removing the X11 session
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Gnome developer proposes removing the X11 session
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Re: Gnome developer proposes removing the X11 session
#2Go for it, I say.
It would be one of many in a long line of backward compatibility missteps they continue to make; and would help shore up my reasons for me to recommend other WMs, as well likely encouraging other developers to bring some of GNOME's good stuff elsewhere.
Re: Gnome developer proposes removing the X11 session
#3X can easily support per-display DPI -- clients just have to eschew the legacy global DPI setting. The Xrandr extension knows the dimensions of each display in both pixels and millimeters from its EDID. Clients interested in making adjustments based on per-display DPI could simply use those values obtained from Xrandr. These values can be wrong, of course -- monitors have been known to lie in their EDID reports -- but they'd be wrong in Wayland too.
Of course, no one actually wants to do this work because there is a deep-seated intent to salt the earth where X once stood.
Re: Gnome developer proposes removing the X11 session
#4X can easily support per-display DPI -- clients just have to eschew the legacy global DPI setting. The Xrandr extension knows the dimensions of each display in both pixels and millimeters from its EDID. Clients interested in making adjustments based on per-display DPI could simply use those values obtained from Xrandr. These values can be wrong, of course -- monitors have been known to lie in their EDID reports -- bu…
xrandr is not sufficient for this. One needs a way for users to configure the per monitor DPI. And have the configuration available to X clients. Currently the only cross DE mechanism for this is Xft.dpi and its global, not per monitor.
Re: Gnome developer proposes removing the X11 session
#5Wayland is no way ready
- O proper screen recording support
- broken screen sharing
- No proper global keyboard shortcut
- No push to talk support
- Their developers are seriously crazy on their design decisions.
- Several problems with multiple screens
Re: Gnome developer proposes removing the X11 session
#6GNOME (and many others) have spent years telling anyone who has issues with Wayland that lead them to run an X session to report bugs, and has put a lot of effort into fixing those bugs. This seems like a reasonable next step.
> This plan seems to The Reg's FOSS Desk to be strong-arming people into adopting Wayland.
Or, more reasonably, to maintain less code for alternate paths in favor of fixing the issues that lead people to use those alternate paths.
Wayland has bugs. X has bugs. Fixes to one largely don't help users of the other. Every bit of effort spent fixing a bug in X to help the fraction of users still using it is effort that could have gone into fixing the bugs in Wayland that leave people using X in the first place. A project taking a step like this allows it to consolidate those efforts.
Re: Gnome developer proposes removing the X11 session
#7I understand the reasoning here, and frankly supported. I've been using X11 while having an available Wayland session because some applications are subtly broken on Wayland - discord has weird text input issues, same thing with Emacs, and Wezterm just flat out doesn't work on Wayland with Nvidia GPUs. However, the slow breakage I've seen with X11 has caused me to start migrating. To explain, every now and then on X11 my screen will simply go black for a couple of seconds. It happens often enough where I'm no longer willing to accept in. And so thus I've moved to Wayland. And frankly, with a little bit of effort, I've found work-arounds for all of my issues - Wezterm works if you disable wayland, Emacs 29 works fine, and Discord is acceptable in the browser. And thus, I think that disabling X11 is a good idea because finally it would force people to actually make things work well under wayland, instead of being able to rely on X11 as a fallback.
Re: Gnome developer proposes removing the X11 session
#8GNOME (and many others) have spent years telling anyone who has issues with Wayland that lead them to run an X session to report bugs, and has put a lot of effort into fixing those bugs. This seems like a reasonable next step. > This plan seems to The Reg's FOSS Desk to be strong-arming people into adopting Wayland. Or, more reasonably, to maintain less code for alternate paths in favor of fixing the issues that lead…
Yup. I think consumers of FOSS rarely understand the amount of effort that goes into maintaining code, whether that is keeping the test infrastructure up to date, fixing bugs, or adding new features.
In many cases, a large codebase like GNOME will undoubtedly have huge swaths of unmaintained code that doesn't have good test coverage and corresponds to rarely used features of the software. It also becomes a frustrating game of whack-a-mole when attempting to fix bugs in software with inadequate test coverage.
Another infrequently acknowledged point: writing tests isn't simple, it requires you to have thorough understanding of all the moving parts involved. If the current maintainers do not understand the architecture in some obscure corner of the software, then there is a significant upfront cost to expanding existing tests around that code -- time that can be spent improving frequently used parts of the software.
When nobody steps up for maintenance despite welcoming patches and calling for new maintainers, there is simply no reasonable option besides "remove this unmaintained source of bugs that none of the maintainers know how to properly test"
Re: Gnome developer proposes removing the X11 session
#9Wayland is no way ready - O proper screen recording support - broken screen sharing - No proper global keyboard shortcut - No push to talk support - Their developers are seriously crazy on their design decisions. - Several problems with multiple screens A proper refactor of X11 should have been the way to go and there should had been X12 with modern technologies
> proper screen recording support
> broken screen sharing
Both work perfectly here with pipewire installed. I can do screen recording, and share my screen in video meetings in Firefox.
> No proper global keyboard shortcut
System-wide keyboard shortcuts already work, through the desktop. The ability for an arbitrary application to request a global keybinding is in progress and expected to become available soon.
> No push to talk support
Completely valid; that's the near-future global keybinding support mentioned in the previous point.
> Several problems with multiple screens
Such as? Reported bug URLs?
For the record, there are other known issues with Wayland, and they're being worked on; nobody's claiming Wayland is perfect at this point, just that the solution is to fix it rather than assuming it's doomed because it doesn't do some specific thing.
> A proper refactor of X11 should have been the way to go and there should had been X12 with modern technologies
Wayland is X12; it's designed and endorsed by the folks who worked on X11.
Re: Gnome developer proposes removing the X11 session
#10Wayland is no way ready - O proper screen recording support - broken screen sharing - No proper global keyboard shortcut - No push to talk support - Their developers are seriously crazy on their design decisions. - Several problems with multiple screens A proper refactor of X11 should have been the way to go and there should had been X12 with modern technologies
get to work,we're counting on you