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)
Gnome Mutter Now "Completely Drops the Whole X11 Back End"
41–50 of 76 posts
Re: Gnome Mutter Now "Completely Drops the Whole X11 Back End"
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
> 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
Re: Gnome Mutter Now "Completely Drops the Whole X11 Back End"
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. Competition in this space has been everything except healthy. Wayland people have been essentially sabotaging X11 development. Example: people wanting to keep X11 alive have been literally banned from the f…
> Example: people wanting to keep X11 alive have been literally banned from the freedesktop.org infrastructure Yeah - that has been my experience with ebassi etc... too. Also prior to that with Poettering. These people seem on a mission, a crusade. Anyone not conforming to this will be ignored or isolated/banned.
In Poettering’s defence: his software worked/works.
It’s a big change but it wasn’t pushed at early stage: he had a working implementation. No fluff, no bs. After fedora first and rhel later, other distributions followed but nobody’s getting sabotaged or prevented from working on other init systems.
Don’t even get me started on gnome though, and their progressive dumbing down of gnome as a desktop environment…
Re: Gnome Mutter Now "Completely Drops the Whole X11 Back End"
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 though…
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 call…
> 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.
Re: Gnome Mutter Now "Completely Drops the Whole X11 Back End"
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. Competition in this space has been everything except healthy. Wayland people have been essentially sabotaging X11 development. Example: people wanting to keep X11 alive have been literally banned from the f…
Probably a better reference. https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/12/the_price_of_software... > fascistoid appoach that wayland people had all along the way Ironic to promote a far right dev, and demonizing folks who are sick of his shit.
I have no idea about the affiliations of that dev and i have zero interest in defending/promoting or condemning his personal opinions.
That being said: i will gladly run working software written from a far right developer rather than half-assed broken software written by a far-left developer. Politics does not influence my choices in software (quality does).
Anyway, the thing is: fascist behaviours aren’t an exclusive monopoly of far right people.
I still stand by my point that wayland people have had a fascistoid behaviour all along.
Re: Gnome Mutter Now "Completely Drops the Whole X11 Back End"
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 though…
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 call…
I'd say GNOME and the community were both at fault. GNOME 3 was awful when it rolled out and the devs didn't really listen to the community at all (they didn't have to, but they probably should have taken more feedback). The community at the time was also absolutely toxic and I can't blame GNOME for tuning it all out.
GNOME is much better these days than it was, but I feel like Linux did pay a price for the disruption -- between GNOME, Unity and all that mess, there was ~10 years where all the desktops that a new user was likely to encounter were just half baked solutions for a problem that most people couldn't entirely agree on.
Re: Gnome Mutter Now "Completely Drops the Whole X11 Back End"
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 call…
I'd say GNOME and the community were both at fault. GNOME 3 was awful when it rolled out and the devs didn't really listen to the community at all (they didn't have to, but they probably should have taken more feedback). The community at the time was also absolutely toxic and I can't blame GNOME for tuning it all out. GNOME is much better these days than it was, but I feel like Linux did pay a price for the disruptio…
I can agree with this to an extent. Projects that grow to a certain level of importance start to face new problems around community relations and governance, and it isn’t always a smooth transition. Generally speaking I think GNOME is doing better with this now.
Re: Gnome Mutter Now "Completely Drops the Whole X11 Back End"
#48I had to look up what "Gnome Mutter" is: 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 unconve…
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 si…
For me at least, Emacs' pure GTK port isn't enough! You'll have to pry EXWM[0] from my cold, dead hands, so until Emacs can act as a Wayland compositor I'm staying on X. That and also Wayland still doesn't seem to support Hyper as an independent modifier.
Re: Gnome Mutter Now "Completely Drops the Whole X11 Back End"
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> 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'…
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?
Re: Gnome Mutter Now "Completely Drops the Whole X11 Back End"
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 call…
I don't see well found criticism in ops statement just blunt ragebait.
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.