A set of merge requests were opened that would effectively drop X.Org (X11) session support for the GNOME desktop and once that code is removed making it a Wayland-only desktop environment.
Going along with Fedora 40 looking to disable the GNOME X11 session support (and also making KDE Plasma 6 Wayland-only for Fedora), upstream GNOME is evaluating the prospect of disabling and then removing their X11 session support.
This surely won’t be controversial.
For me this is a bit of a Cortés moment, X11 is not progressing and Wayland is not yet ready, so we are going to force the issue by removing an option!
Yes they are taking a page from the corporate playbook today; that being, “if people aren’t doing what we want them to do, then we force them!” I don’t use Gnome so I like to think that the problems will be minimal, but I do use lots of GTK software and even some Gnome programs and of course some of the accessibility stuff.
I still don’t buy the argument that X11 can’t be updated, seeing what people did with the id games. Ray-tracing in Quake, Brutal Doom, etc etc. Someone else said it best; we have the source code, so anything is possible”. I think considering all of the things that have already been bolted onto X11 like 3D hardware support and compositing, this has already been proven. But now that we are almost there, they want to trash the whole thing and start over, wreaking havoc on backwards compatibility in the process.
X11 is a complete mess and all the bolted on crap is part of the problem. Not that wayland is a pristine piece of work. But, if the choices are invest in maturing wayland, or trying to raise the x11 sunken ship, maybe forcing the matter isn’t such a bad thing. If all things were functionally equal, wayland would best x11. It’s also funny to me how the same people who yell about security, keep a death-grip on x11.
Let the arguing commence…
friedchicken,
Things would be much less controversial if wayland devs committed to finishing xwayland. Of course nobody is entitled to this, but I really think all of this fuss could have been avoided without resorting to power plays with project managers who are more respectful of user needs.
I generally agree but acknowledge the fine line there can be between backwards compatibility and over-committing to the past at the sacrifice of the future. If the point is to finally lay X11 to rest, it’s probably not a great idea to encourage clinging to it. Change often comes with growing pains that are difficult to live through, and sometimes it has to be forced. Do we still want to have the `X11 problem` 5+ years from now? I don’t. When it’s time to move on, it’s time to move on. Sometimes it’s better to just get it over with and continue living, without the baggage of the past weighing you down.
friedchicken,
Yes, but wayland devs should have learned of their own inadequacies when ubuntu initially rejected them over a list of broken things. However instead of actually addressing those issues, they waited things out and persuaded ubuntu to lower the bar instead so wayland could get through without solving them. This isn’t progressive 🙁
I’m truly not a Luddite, even with respect to wayland…. but the functional regressions of wayland do irk me and others. IMHO the most appropriate way to bring more people on board isn’t to use a stick but instead to simply take user requirements more seriously. A lot of the broken functionality could technically be added back into xwayland so that fewer people have to suffer breakages, that didn’t happen though and they’re using the “it’s good enough for me, so it must be good enough for you” fallacy.
Sure. It’s one thing to move on when the new solution works satisfactorily, but another altogether when it doesn’t. That’s what makes it an issue for some of us.
@Alfman
I fully get reluctance to commit to something new that isn’t quite ready for prime time. The problem with that can be a lack of urgency while promoting the `works good enough for me` attitude. Sometimes the best way to expedite fixes & support is by breaking things. I’m not scared of growing pains and am willing to suffer in the short term when it means not continuing to suffer in the long term under the weight of outdated baggage. Sometimes you have to rip the bandaid off and get it over with.
friedchicken,
I get what you area saying, but it’s not a simple matter of reluctance when the wayland breakages make it unfit for purpose for some users. If that’s not addressed first, then users will continue using X and I don’t think it’s reasonable to tell them they are wrong to do so.
@Alfman
There’s always collateral damage. For people who can’t/won’t deal with the growing pains, I’d advise them to stick with what works (for them, for now) with the firm caveat that they’re choosing to live in a burning house. If it’s that or moving into one still under construction, those aren’t great choices. This change is happening though and laying in smoldering ashes is the least attractive to me.
Someone else said in another post something like ‘you only get so far riding a dead horse’. I don’t like being a guinea pig or beta tester and for that reason I’m historically slow to adopt new/change. My take here is the result of asking two simple questions; Does Wayland have a future, and does X11? Respectively, the answers are yes and no. That’s why I prefer the priority & resource commitment be to maturing Wayland quicker at the expense of getting out of the way of X11’s inevitable death.
The analogy is flawed: “mature product that works” != “burning house”.
Again though, until wayland gets the functions people need, it doesn’t matter what analogy you try to use, you cannot fault people for using what works over what doesn’t work.
To that end though, had wayland been better managed from the start with an eye towards what people would need and were expecting, the transition would have been done by now. It’s really frustrating when users get blamed for bad management.
> But, if the choices are invest in maturing wayland, or trying to raise the x11 sunken ship,
You’re missing the key point here.
Let’s make a change from the usual car analogy. I will use planes.
They’re both aeroplanes.
Wayland is an aeroplane. Maybe it’s an F-35B: a VTOL supersonic jet: it can do some really cool stuff. It’s amazingly fast, and it can land on an aircraft carrier, or a helipad.
X.org is an aeroplane too. Let’s say it’s a Quest Zodiac.
What the Wayland fans miss is that it is not a comparison of equals.
Both are aeroplanes. You can get in both and fly from A to B. From Paris to London say.
The Zodiac is a seaplane. It can land and take off from both land and water.
It doesn’t matter how fast the F-35B is, if you land on water, it will be destroyed forever.
Also, you know, one costs billions and one costs tens of thousands.
But while one is supermodern and can cover that distance in 20min, and it’s really cool, the other can land half way.
Also one costs $100M and the other costs $2M. So you can have 50 of one for the price of 1 of the other.
X runs over networks. It’s the seaplane. Wayland doesn’t.
X runs on Linux, all the BSDs, all the proprietary Unixes, OpenVMS, Z/OS, and almost every graphical OS including RISC OS.
Wayland runs on 2: Linux and FreeBSD and nothing else.
Adopting Wayland is really, really expensive because of about 25-30 existing Linux desktop environments, only 2 fully support Wayland in their current releases: GNOME and KDE. All the rest must be ported (a big cost in manpower and effort) or lost (a big cost in freedom of choice).
Some of the most widely used Linux desktops: Cinnamon, Xfce, LXDE/LXQt, and don’t forget the millions of Chinese users with UKUI and DDE, *only run on X.*
Just because the neophiles love Wayland, it doesn’t matter: there are hundreds of millions of happy users of X and moving them will be really, really expensive.
And it still won’t be able to land on water. Well, it will, but only once and you probably won’t survive the experience.
@lproven
No need for the horrible analogy, I’m not missing any key points. X11 is on its way out whether you like it or not. Your assumption that anyone not rejecting the adoption of wayland is a neophile, is sorely misguided along with the farce of negligible expense to maintain X11. I’d suggest people who think this is just about a `new shiny` are missing all the key points. The extremes you present better serve your own opinions than they do the truth. Wayland is not a massive steaming pile of broken shit requiring all the riches of the world to fix. In fact, a lot of users are ‘testing’ it and happy with the results. The writing is on the wall for X11 and no amount of lashing out will change that.
The slow agonizing death of X11 and the sluggish maturing of Wayland don’t keep me up at night but I do applaud the Gnome devs and anyone else who understands clinging to the past is not the best use of resources. At least not in this regard.
No, they just don’t care about what ever use case you have for x11 because its not theirs and you aren’t paying them to keep it around for that use case.
Exactly!
This is a real “training material” for Google:
https://goomics.net/50/
Things are either “deprecated” or “not ready”. However as soon as the new thing becomes somewhat ready, it, too, would be deprecated for the next shiny thing.
Though to be fair, XOrg has been around for almost 20 years now.
That’s exactly my issue with this. Gnome can and Should set the default as they wish. But there is no need to remove support that is already there and will remain functionally stable (with it having reached feature maturity already). Eventually people will migrate because it has features they want/need. Until then, let people use X if they wish, if they have bugs, fine, maybe they get fixed, maybe not. But the choice remains for them to weigh
Adurbe,
Good point and reasonable too. After-all wayland itself was given the benefit of doubt with bugs. However with the way things are being run you just know some will be motivated to introduce new X bugs maliciously so that it won’t work even though it wasn’t buggy. It’s like the US house of representatives where a few deviants can throw wrenches into the works and feel entitled to do so until they have their way.
@kbd
I can’t say much about X11 or Wayland one way or the other, but I’m a stickler for maintaining compatibility.
It’s just too easier to throw out perfectly good hardware or source code just to sell someone’s preferred alternative as better. I get sometimes there are new ideas and hardware, but I can’t accept that slash and burn is a viable way to make use of them!
GNOME removing features that people use but they think they know better than anyone. What a shocker!
Some of the comments in that Phoronix article are insane. “You have a GeForce or Radeon RX card that doesn’t work with Wayland? Too bad, throw it away and install a Radeon HD 7xxx card from 2012 that AMD no longer supports but Wayland does!” While I’m not a fan of Nvidia in general, the default response to “your software doesn’t work with the user’s hardware yet” most definitely should not be “it’s the user’s fault, they should throw away/downgrade their hardware”.
Wayland is supposed to be about the future, but that just seems like a backwards way of thinking to me.
Intel is the company that hates its customers the most with the constant socket changes for minimal gain (sometimes detriment) AMD has an excellent track record of supporting old hardware and has open sourced just about anything they can (codecs and other licensed stuff is not up to them to open source) AMD has also pressured some of the parties in their previous license agreements to open up. There is a reason AROS, AmigaOS, Haiku, Linux, BSD, Mac and just about every console out there prefer AMD over NVIDIA. It is just better, and i am not talkong about peak performance, where amd also shines but with that useless RTX feature turned on and with SSAO yeah nvidia has specialized in that niche that noone wants, realy. Better lighting at the cost of 80% of fps? Really? That is what users wanted?
In pure polygon pushing and raster speed amd has held the crown since the Radeon Fury X. nvidia cheats.
I’m sorry you took my comment as a dig against AMD (or a praise of Nvidia), that was not at all what I was saying. I feel the same way about AMD vs Intel and AMD vs Nvidia as you, I was just pointing out how insane it is for a Wayland supporter to tell a user it’s their fault Wayland sucks on their hardware, and that it’s better to downgrade to a nearly 12 year old Radeon card that AMD no longer actively supports rather than use X11 while they wait for Wayland support to come to their hardware. It’s an incredulous proposition and is a perfect example of just how out of touch Wayland fanatics are.
Thank you for your response, i understand.
I just had to defend AMD from the implications of the original comment. As to this day a Radeon SDR /DDR radeon 7500/8500 still is supported and the king of them all is the rage2 that still gets updates from amd (they are the standard backplane opteron output as they are simple and cheap for amd to make.
You can get radeon 290X2 drivers for windows XP whislt nvidia gave up officially at 960 (non ti)
Last AGP card/best AGP card? amd 3850/4760. AMD cares about the legacy user.
Intel changed 14+ times socket during the era of am1 to am4.
Maybe I misunderstood AMD’s legacy support page, which lists the 7xxx series as no longer receiving driver updates:
https://www.amd.com/en/support/kb/faq/gpu-630
Still, the fact that AMD even continues to host legacy drivers for their users is admirable and one more reason to use them over the other guys.
NaGERST,
I hate that as well, although that’s a completely different topic!
To be fair, there’s quite a lot of demand for nvidia hardware in all platforms that have official support. I’m not a fan of proprietary drivers at all, but if you want the best GPU hardware for gpgpu, nvidia are very strong in that market. The main question for everyone is what tradeoffs they’re willing to make and whether AMD (or even apple) GPUs are “good enough” for them.
Yes, I understand why that seems wasteful, but GPUs being fast enough to rasterize hundreds of frames per second is wasteful too no? Manufacturers need some other features to sell, and ray tracing is such a feature. Early generations were extremely slow, but now that hardware can power ray tracing titles with 60+FPS, raytracing has become the new gold standard for graphics. Most specs today including higher resolution, higher frame rates, more color levels, ray tracing, etc. are good on paper but provide diminishing returns. I guess everyone can choose whether these are important for them.
Personally I don’t need RTX for gaming, but I do love having RTX enabled under blender! Graphics look good with near real time rendering. Could I make do without it? Sure, but to be honest I wouldn’t want to go back to slower renders. I only wish blender’s physics simulations were GPU accelerated because they are very slow on the GPU.
Edit: I only wish blender’s physics simulations were GPU accelerated because they are very slow on the CPU.
Don’t take a flame war between a known anti-Wayland troll and an exasperated Phoronix forum user as anything else than hyperbole. The “buy yourself a dumpster graphics card” was firmly sarcasm. It takes a bit to get to know the lay of the land on the Phoronix forum.
Soon they will tell us that motion blur will be mandatory in GNOME because people should not disciminate against hte visually impaired, but we can, and did, and intend to make it as impossible as possible to thwart any gnome user with a bad eyesight from getting
1: native resolution… na that is for chumps
2: working universal voice commands like in kde? … na that is for chumps
3: a window manager that you can control with buttons universally placed…. naa that is for chumps, let the app developers handle that shit.
4: basic shit? Naah let the chumps leave so we can have only the core fans left and start from scratch.
5: WHAT FANS? You have none left, we all hate you and what you have done to the linux desktop. GTK3 delayed the transition of many to linux distros to a more modern system, Almost all moves by the gnome team has been restrictive or regressive.
I wish them all the best in reverse for what they have done to the linux desktop community.
IDK, anytime Gnome pisses me off with one of their decisions, I have to take a step back and reflect on why and what my priorities are vs my values. It makes the most sense to me, to abandon any principles of how I think things should work and learn the way that gnome devs want it to work. Cause at the end of the day its a tool I use to do stuff. The less I’m fighting the tool the better. There are other options If I want to play with a tool that works differently, but they end up breaking in the end, and I find myself using gnome again with all of its warts. I’m not a fan, I’m a user.
I’ve just realised none of my friends or professional contacts use Gnome anymore (this, or they are too embarrassed to say). All these controversies create a lot of noise in the press but to me Gnome is now a niche desktop in an increasingly smaller niche of desktop OSes. Which is pity, despite all its flaws, Gnome 2 made Linux desktop quite popular.