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GNOME 50 completes the migration to Wayland, dropping X11 backend code

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Re: GNOME 50 completes the migration to Wayland, dropping X11 backend code

#151

Post by tapoxi »

eqvinox wrote: post #142
ColonelPhantom wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: GNOME 50 completes the migration to Wayland, dropping X11 backend code

#152

Post by eqvinox »

tapoxi wrote: post #151
eqvinox wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Re: GNOME 50 completes the migration to Wayland, dropping X11 backend code

#153

Post by mx7zysuj4xew »

ColonelPhantom wrote: post #87
vidarh wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

Re: GNOME 50 completes the migration to Wayland, dropping X11 backend code

#154

Post by mx7zysuj4xew »

pjmlp wrote: post #29
mx7zysuj4xew wrote: post #3

X11 is not going anywhere. If anything it's Gnome adding another nail to its coffin

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"

Re: GNOME 50 completes the migration to Wayland, dropping X11 backend code

#155

Post by sph »

aweiher wrote: post #149
Gigachad wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 screenshare on Wayland on Microsoft Teams of all things without issues.

Buy supported GPUs.

Re: GNOME 50 completes the migration to Wayland, dropping X11 backend code

#156

Post by sph »

hulitu wrote: post #130
wongarsu wrote: post #2

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 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.

Then there’s the Linux approach: bump the major version when Linus feels the minor number is too large.

Re: GNOME 50 completes the migration to Wayland, dropping X11 backend code

#157

Post by marwis »

the_why_of_y wrote: post #133
chrismorgan wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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;…

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...

Re: GNOME 50 completes the migration to Wayland, dropping X11 backend code

#158

Post by jbaber »

serf wrote: post #115
rich_sasha wrote: post #94

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.

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 ; wha…

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.

Re: GNOME 50 completes the migration to Wayland, dropping X11 backend code

#159

Post by coldtea »

erelong wrote: post #116

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 suppor…

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.

Re: GNOME 50 completes the migration to Wayland, dropping X11 backend code

#160

Post by the_why_of_y »

marwis wrote: post #157
the_why_of_y wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (some…

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.

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