Long live Xorg, I mean Xlibre
dedoimedo.com
dedoimedo.com
But yes, there are use cases it doesn't cover. Example. My elderly mom uses Linux laptops that I've rigged to (1) always have an SSH connection open to my server machine, with reverse tunnels, and (2) run x0vncserver.
Modern security people would cringe, but this is the real world. I can open her desktop any time, from 700km away, and fix serious disasters like: She accidentally double-clicked an email and it opened up in a tab that obscures her message list (Thunderbird). This has worked very well to keep her online and happily emailing.
Where is the equivalent for Wayland? I get the impression that "it shouldn't exist because security" and therefore won't. Luckily, the show's not over yet. I run Fedora. The main spin won't do it any more, but the MATE spin is perfect. It comes up in MATE and it uses X! Still happy. Other laptop installations I have running probably use Wayland and as long as nothing breaks, I don't care.
I periodically retry Wayland, and it does seem to be improving, albeit slowly. There are a few significant things that just aren't there, but mostly it feels like death by a thousand paper-cuts. I can't dock toolbars; I can't use xdotools; screenshares are flaky; I can't click and drag to upload to browsers.
I could live with Wayland, but the experience is still superior (for my use-cases) with X11.
For wlroots systems there's wayvnc.
For KDE headless Wayland just doesn't work. Unfortunately they are only considering a narrow range of usecases, this has kind of always been the case since the whole "1 graphical session per user" thing, which doesn't map to a lot of use cases (though you can work around it it's very unintuitive).
I hope the XFCE devs can come up with something and that we can get good RDP support for that at least.
I don't get why its such a big deal that software that:
1. no one wants to develop 2. is completely free 3. no longer being developed
is such a problem, its free. if its so important to you, why not contribute yourself? Should these people be forced to contribute to projects that they want to be free of against their will?
And if push came to shove, they'd probably just live without it if they couldn't keep being lazy about it.
> Modern security people would cringe, but this is the real world. I can open her desktop any time, from 700km away, and fix serious disasters like: She accidentally double-clicked an email and it opened up in a tab that obscures her message list (Thunderbird). This has worked very well to keep her online and happily emailing.
I'm not sure why anyone would mind the security of that setup? Provided that your server isn't compromised, that arrangement should provide both confidentiality and integrity, and if SSH is compromised then we all have bigger problems.
Unfortunately Wayland devs seem to have become user hostile in a way similar to the systemd devs (your use case being incompatible or unsuported is your problem, shut up and let us rearrange the OS etc) on top of the software just not being very good. Basic things like running video terminal emulators just doesn't work as well as it does on X (comparing Xterm on X to whatever on Sway always seemed to have much higher latency on my hardware, even moving the window around seems to lag a frame or two behind where it should be.)
At this point wayland itself has gotten pretty old, doesn't support what most desktop Linux users need day to day (at least enough to replace X) and is so unpleasant to deal with I don't think I'll be trying it again. It's a shame, the bar isn't that high. Then again maybe X11 is the oldest still in use graphics API for a reason.
I occasionally write native GUI apps (not electron-based), and for the current automation application I am working on Wayland is an absolute non-starter[1].
Like the other poster, every few years I would give Wayland a try, but as of today, 17-June-2025, Wayland is still lacking features that I want.
I have no objection to using it, I just need it to be a replacement for X.
[1] My application uses X11 FakeEvent. Did not find a similar thing for Wayland.
Wayland just straight doesn't work and the push to move everyone to it looks ridiculous from my perspective.
Word on the street is Nvidia is doing a much much better job, for a year or so now. But, like, you are using a GPU that sway used to make you type "--i-wont-buy-an-nvidia-gpu-again" and now makes you type --unsupported-gpu to use.
It's not Wayland's fault if your video card can't do the pretty same sensible reasonable kernel calls asked of it without crashing. I realize that you might not really care about the distinction, I sympathize highly that it just sucks, and no one in open source likes this (Google image search "Linus Torvalds Nvidia"; 2025 only a bit better than 2012 if your bug report here really true I guess). But fault & culpability matters, and Wayland does way way way less special magic & is way more straightforward with how it handles the display subsystem than X, which half ignores the kernel & has its own absurd driver subsystems and mountains of jank overlapping extensions to do what kernels and GPUs just do these days. GPUs have it easy under Wayland!
Users don't care about your beautiful code and architecture if your product doesn't even work. Making excuses doesn't help anyone - if X can work fine with Nvidia drivers, Wayland's failure to do so is a problem with Wayland.
The world has no ability to make Nvidia's drivers good. If Nvidia can't build drivers that work, there's nothing we can do about it. Defending a situation where hackers have no ability to improve or work a situation is unhackerly, dumb. Consumers are free to remain ignorant, but this situation of where we go and what we do has consequences & meaning to the hacker, and the facts and technics ought matter.
I can't emphasize enough how gross this mercenary position is though. X developers were fed up, en masse. The whole project had thoroughly rotted, was unsustainable, had no path forwards to use modern video techniques. It sort of works, but also, it's insecure as hell, and a terrible leaky foundation. We get to claim where politically we are in the axis: are we going to be conservative people, who resist and are afraid of change forever? Or will we have hope and excitement at progress and hope for better futures? Doing nothing and investing nothing and only having a "shit just needs to work" is a refusal to inform yourself, one that makes you quite conservative. There's reasons to be in that camp, and especially for less open-source more consumeristic people who owing to the conditions of their environment have a very strong trained helplessness where there's no sense contemplating alternatives since your hands are tied anyways. But I find it repulsive & immature to be so short, so anti-informed, so un-nuanced, and hopeless and lacking ambition.
As ever, Yegge's Notes from the Mystery Machine Bus, on the political axis of technologies, https://gist.github.com/cornchz/3313150
Unfortunately, it doesn't do what i need, today. So what am i supposed to do? I'm going to keep using what does what i need until a viable alternative emerges. Nothing political about it.
I don't care about the details of why it won't work, I'll just keep using the product that does work.
The number of paragraphs used to explain why the non-working product does not work would be better spent simply pointing people to the working product.
That said, I do think the parent post is probably experiencing a very very rare issue. There are plenty of people using Nvidia ⨯ Sway now quite successfully.
Was this part really necessary? The people who care more about working software are pathetic and lowlife? Really?
> I get that folks are going to stay on X because Nvidia refuses to work with open source.
I dunno if you've noticed, but there are one or two other dealbreakers that keep people off of Wayland.
When you said:
> I don't care about the details of why it won't work, I'll just keep using the product that does work.
I see active dis-interest like that as damaging to open source as a whole. It's a mercenary in-it-for-me view, one that's not investing any caring.
But that's not active disinterest.
I mean, what do you want people to do? Use the product that doesn't work for them?
Do you routinely go out of your way to switch to products that cannot (and will never) do what you need it to do?
Which products are these, that you use even though they can not do what you need?
Before Wayland, it was not sunshine and rainbows. For a long time, a lot of shit just did not work and there was no way to make it work. Nvidia did not care. It took Linux Trovalds shitting on Nvidia to make them care a little. It took YEARS for Nvidia on the Linux desktop to be decent.
And, to this day, a lot of Nvidia features just do not work, even on X. You get a MUCH better experience on Windows.
Wayland cannot see the Nvidia source code because nobody can. They're trying their best, but they're not going to regress to old ass versions of stuff to get it to work and they're not gonna throw spaghetti at the wall. Nvidia needs to step up because they decided they're the only ones who can develop the driver. There's nothing anyone can do.
Have they? Or have others refused to work with them, refused to make compromises, and refused to offer stable interfaces for them to target. Don't pretend like none of this "antagonism" wasn't self inflicted.
2. Nobody can work with them anyway because their drivers are closed sourced. They decided they should be the only ones developing them, so be it. If they upstreamed them they would get thousands of contributor's worth of help.
2. Directly contributing code is not the only way to work with someone.
Gnome did land eglstream support by the way, xwayland as well. I think kde too at some point (not sure about that).
Nvidia had a lot of options on the table: - allow nouveau to reclock gpus or, better, collaborate with them so that at least there's one usable driver. - follow the community consensus and go with GBM straight away. Didn't seem to be a problem in the first place as it's what they are doing now. - open source their driver like other manufacturer and be part of mesa.
Community had one option: dedicate a lot of time and effort to create a whole code path for nvidia only and having to debug it against a black box driver
This article is proving my point. People were not willing to work with Nvidia and would prefer to stick to their unstandardized Mesa specific approach with gbm. As a path forward Nvidia tried proposing a cross platform open standard that would solve not only wayland's use case, which to me appears as Nvidia going above in investment.
>allow nouveau to reclock gpus
Nouveau able to if they load the proper firmware onto the GPU.
>at least there's one usable driver
It's quite a stretch to call it usable and would not make sense to be the default experience for the average user.
>follow the community consensus and go with GBM straight away
As I mentioned GBM was tightly coupled with Mesa, so that wasn't directly possible.
>open source their driver like other manufacturer and be part of mesa.
This is an unreasonable demand, that would never happen. Saying that Wayland won't work on Nvidia hardware because they won't open source the driver and port it to Mesa just shows how stubborn and uncooperative one is as opposed to trying to find solutions to deliver user value.
>dedicate a lot of time and effort to create a whole code path for nvidia only and having to debug it against a black box driver
There was never anything nvidia only in this situation. The only "only" was gbm being a proprietary API that was only a part of Mesa.
> This article is proving my point. People were not willing to work with Nvidia and would prefer to stick to their unstandardized Mesa specific approach with gbm. As a path forward Nvidia tried proposing a cross platform open standard that would solve not only wayland's use case, which to me appears as Nvidia going above in investment.
Kwin, gnome and xwayland did end up supporting eglstream, it was shit, people blamed wayland because it became a sport, nvidia did go gdm in the end and the eglstream backends which were a waste of time were dropped.
> Nouveau able to if they load the proper firmware onto the GPU.
Nvidia explicitly prevented them to do so by not providing the ability to load any firmware...
> As I mentioned GBM was tightly coupled with Mesa, so that wasn't directly possible.
It absolutely was and their driver is using GBM now as a proof.
> This is an unreasonable demand, that would never happen. Saying that Wayland won't work on Nvidia hardware because they won't open source the driver and port it to Mesa just shows how stubborn and uncooperative one is as opposed to trying to find solutions to deliver user value.
Why so? Most manufacturer do so.
> There was never anything nvidia only in this situation. The only "only" was gbm being a proprietary API that was only a part of Mesa.
GBM is specific to mesa maybe but far from proprietary what world do you live in? :D
Something is better than nothing.
>nvidia did go gdm in the end and the eglstream backends which were a waste of time were dropped.
If the wayland project was run better and there was proper collaboration this waste could have been avoided.
>Nvidia explicitly prevented them to do so by not providing the ability to load any firmware...
How would the GPU know? They should be able to do exactly what the real driver does to load the firmware.
>It absolutely was and their driver is using GBM now as a proof.
Only years later after due to Nvidia contributing code to allow for it to dynamically load backends. This wasn't a case of Nvidia ignoring an existing way for them to have a backend.
>Why so? Most manufacturer do so.
Because it's a trade secret and potentially can not be legally be open sourced. It also is a competitive advantage for nvidia not to. Plenty of companies also develop closed source drivers. Nvidia is not unique.
>GBM is specific to mesa maybe but far from proprietary
Recheck the definition of "proprietary." Compare how many GPUs and operating systems support OpenGL vs supporting GBM. GBM being exclusive to Mesa makes it proprietary.
But choice and competition is one of the best things about Linux, so if a small group is upset about losing X11 and self-organize to carry the torch, more power to them. Build a great alternative, and maybe present yourself as a choice rather than being so reactionary. You're not a rebel, you're just in a niche and that's OK.
You have a choice: acknowledge that Wayland is faster, more user-friendly, and more secure, or remain tied to technologies from the 1990s.
Since Ubuntu has adopted Wayland exclusively for its new LTS release, I've noticed over the past few days that much of the criticism comes from Windows users who rely on RDP to configure Red Hat or CentOS with a GUI, or something similar. These users have become accustomed to the lack of security in Xorg to perform their tasks. Now, they must reconsider how they maintain their Linux machines.
In any case, I was unaware that Wayland was becoming the new systemd. Perhaps this is because I have been using it for more then four years, starting with bullseye (sid) / GNOME, and for about two years with FreeBSD / Sway. I use these systems daily at work without any major issues.
It’s less about change and more about outright breakage. Wayland does not support me.
> You have a choice: acknowledge that Wayland is faster, more user-friendly, and more secure, or remain tied to technologies from the 1990s.
Wayland may be faster, it’s certainly more secure (in the same sense that a system embedded in a ton of concrete and dropped to the bottom of the ocean is more secure), but I’m not convinced that it’s more user friendly. It’s certainly not friendly to me, since it does not allow me to run my window manager of choice.
I’m not convinced that the technologies of the 1990s were necessarily all that bad, either. Yeah, there were some assumptions which turned out not to be the case in reality. And yeah, there is a ton of cruft. And yeah, no-one would design X11 the way it is today. But, you know what? X11, unlike Wayland, works for me.
I would love to use Wayland, honestly. That’s not a lie. But it doesn’t work. And from what I can see it doesn’t want to work.
When selecting technology, I always consider my specific use case. For instance, at work, I need to manage multiple open windows simultaneously, so I rely on tiled windows across four monitors. To ensure stability and avoid OS issues, I use GNOME with Pop Shell on Debian. On my smaller laptop, where mobility and keyboard-only navigation are priorities, I've found Sway to be an excellent replacement for dwm.
The key point I want to emphasize is the importance of identifying your unique use case. Once you understand your needs, you can choose the tools that best meet those requirements. The tool itself isn't the ultimate goal; it's about finding what works best for your specific situation. Typically, there are plenty of tools available that can solve your problem or fit your use case.
I'd characterize the wayland ecosystem as only just barely production ready (for typical desktop use) today. I don't think it was ready when I switched to it. As but one example, to this day drag and drop between windows still doesn't work reliably for me (I'm running sway) although it's certainly better than it used to be.
Or consider multi-window usecases seen in scientific computing (among other things) and the active hostility of the maintainers towards standardizing any protocol that would enable an application to actively control layout across multiple monitors (provided user consent, of course).
That begs the question of whether there should be or is a transition. From where I sit right now, there should not be and there isn’t. Wayland doesn’t meet my needs (not ‘needs’ in the sense of food and air, of course!) today, despite how interesting it is and despite the genuine improvements it offers in some ways. It may in the future, but until then any transition would be a net loss for me.
I don't follow? If folks are using RDP, they don't need Xorg's less-secure remote access options, they can just use RDP? And Wayland has VNC and RDP servers, including GNOME having built-in RDP, so if people are using that then it shouldn't matter whether GNOME happens to have replaced X with Wayland.
Looking more into plugin libraries, a lot of it is based specifically on X, I don't think that's going to be rewritten anytime soon.
I've felt for a while stuck between X and Wayland. Same with Pipewire and Jack/Pulse.
Why in bloody hell is it so hard to persist routing across reboots with pipewire? Why is Wayland turning 17 without a serious replacement for SSH forwarding?
Not that Pulse was ever excellent on that particular point, but it mostly worked without resorting to third party apps or hand writing scripts.
Retina MacBook Pro was released in 2012, about 13 years ago. Personally, I don't think Xorg is in a position to sneer at its competitor for being "beta in quality" after "15 years into making."
People have sworn up and down to me that the fractional scaling stuff is possible in X but I read probably 10 guides on how to do it and it never worked. Bummer.
It's like macOS is doing it, by the way.
If you like Xorg, use Xorg. If you like Wayland, use Wayland. If you're not happy about an issue, contribute to it.
1. freedesktop based on xorg is outdated and needs to be modernized to keep up with competing operating systems.
2. The Wayland movement is and has been run extremely poorly.
Both xorg and wayland are bad so it's easy for either side to point that out.
Sure, it is. But does it matter? I don't think so.
I was happy with Xorg, and there were things it couldn't do that I didn't plan on contributing, so I didn't complain to them.
I am now happy with Wayland, and there are things it cannot do that I am not contributing, so I don't complain.
What I see is that Wayland is quite active and they actually added things I needed that didn't exist a few years ago. That's great. Many people seem to be very vocal about how they prefer Xorg because it works for them: that's great, they can use Xorg.
Someone wants to write another one? That's great, let them do it.
Linux is about diversity. Don't come to Linux and ask it to become Windows or macOS.
FreeBSD and even some Linux distros use boring technology™ that just works, thank you. I don't need breakage due to diversity, I need a stable OS that is reliable, works and doesn't crash.
You want boring technology that works, there's certainly an open source distro for you. And there are open source distros for people who have different needs. "Diversity".
The problem is that RedHat nee IBM are attempting to force everybody onto Wayland by dropping X11 support. They already tried once and the outcry was so huge that they had to back off saying they would try again next version.
This is kind of a rock and a hard place. The Wayland developers don't want to support X11 but neither does anybody else. Wayland is fundamentally broken in many ways down at the architectural level, but the sunk cost fallacy keeps them working on it.
Everybody forgets that Wayland predates Vulkan. A "real" replacement for X11/Wayland probably needs to restart from "Vulkan support is the base layer" and build up from there.
and how is that waylands fault? what if vulkan gets replaced? should a new replacement be written from scratch every time that happens?
It is not. However, Wayland had to make certain decisions up front that later turned out to be significantly suboptimal in the context of a graphics world that converged to DX12/Vulkan/Metal and all look roughly the same from an abstraction level.
> Everybody forgets that Wayland predates Vulkan. A "real" replacement for X11/Wayland probably needs to restart from "Vulkan support is the base layer" and build up from there.
I wonder if you could point me in the right direction to learn more about this?
Wayland chose "we will control the compositing to avoid all tearing". This is suboptimal nowadays with monitors with multiple refresh rates some of which are on completely different graphics cards. It's better to let an application have a Vulkan (or equivalent) surface, draw to it, query, and choose its own linkage to the refresh rate. Also, nobody other than Wayland devs give one iota of damn about performance or tearing during resizes (see: macOS and Windows). There's also the issue of how much resource Wayland compositors have to overallocate in order to be able to composite everything. I have applications that regularly crash because Wayland chewed up too much VRAM and the application couldn't get sufficient VRAM resources.
It's better to let something like Zink handle OpenGL rather than try to provide an OpenGL interface. It's better to give something a surface and let Vulkan handle video rendering onto the surface (the application understands whether it needs to do something like sync to audio or whether it is just an animation). etc. This is even more especially true in the world of massive multicore/multithread.
Then there are the architectural decision that range from the silly to the flat out wrong. Fractional scaling is handled by doubling and shrinking--that's a huge waste of processing. Gnome idiocy around client-side decorations which are just a disaster because it forces everybody to link to C/C++ libraries even if they aren't using C/C++.
Security stuff that has been a disaster: Stopping or arbitrarily jiggling the refresh rate to prevent "application fingerprinting" is dumb and just pisses everybody off. Pointer and focus issues because you might figure out some way to intercept people typing. Screenshot/screencast is an absolute PITA because "security". Input Method and accessibility that threw out a ton of working stuff from X11 that still hasn't been replaced.
I mean, the Wayland developers are not wrong that these things are security issues ... but you can't let them continue to persist for more than a decade and then wonder why people think your project sucks. If you don't give them something, then don't complain when they go back to the old, shitty, insecure thing that works.
As you can see, there are a LOT of corner cases to be covered. This is the primary problem. The video subsystem is a lot of fiddly work that very few people are qualified to do. Look at how much work Asahi Lina and Alyssa Rosenzweig had to do to make graphics work on Linux on Apple hardware. Now, multiply that out and you can see just what a mountain this stuff is.
Be aware that in the discussion above, Vulkan can be substituted with Direct12 or Metal which are effectively the exact same graphics API.
Which is actually probably the end result of all of this. We're probably going to wind up with some version of Win32/DX12 APIs on Linux thanks to Steam as that would give you portability betweeen Linux and the biggest OS platform. And, to be fair, most users would probably be happier...
Just for clarity, have they actually converged to the point where the APIs are that similar? Or do you just mean they fill the same role?
The concurrency primitives are very similar. The way they all manage memory is a little different, but not horribly so.
And now that DirectX and Vulkan are both supporting SPIR-V as the shader intermediate format, things really have converged.
You can't say that in a thread about the main maintainer forking it because he wants to maintain it against the wishes of the original maintainers.
This post is literally about someone wanting to maintain it.
The problem is that the Wayland folks are trying to replace X11 rather than provide an easy upgrade path. They simply don’t care about anyone who uses a computer in any way outside of the ways they can be bothered to support. ‘It’s better!’ they cry, despite users telling them for well over a decade now that it’s not actually, because we cannot do the things we want.
And Wayland is being used as a form of lock-in. ‘GNOME uses Wayland now. Just drop support for that crufty old X11,’ they whisper. Never mind that plenty of folks don’t use GNOME and don’t want to use GNOME. Never mind that Wayland is still not fit for purpose.
It may be someday, and that would be great. I’d genuinely look forward to being able to move on from X11. But Wayland does not work for me, and as projects start to remove support for X11 they are removing support for me.
If not then it’s not really an upgrade path.
I do get it — no-one owes me anything. They don’t even, really, owe me the kindness of not breaking the software I use. In principle I could fork and maintain everything I want myself, or working with others. But …
intercepting/sending keystrokes in particular had to be redesigned to make to make it more secure. without that there would not have been a point to wayland at all.
your actual apps that just display stuff on the screen and take your input all still work though.
Sure, and I really would like to enjoy that security improvement. But would an evolutionary approach have been possible?
For example, would it have been possible to start by running Wayland with all programs in a privileged status, then migrate to using something like OpenBSD’s pledge(2) to spawn programs preferentially in an unprivileged status, then migrate to spawning some programs (e.g. legacy X11 display managers) in a privileged status?
It sure seems like Wayland requires a lot more work from software using it than X11 did. Wayland has been out for 16 years and still isn’t almost universal; 16 years after X11’s 1984 release it was well-nigh universal.
Again, I get that no-one owes me anything. But it seems to me that the Wayland developers committed the fundamental error of trying to replace a working system with vapourware. It’s still vapourware, in that in 2025 Wayland is still not a drop-in replacement for X11.
> your actual apps that just display stuff on the screen and take your input all still work though.
My display manager is an actual app that is a fundamental part of my workflow.
If it was vapourware, nobody would find it useful. I have been using it for 4 years, it works. I wouldn't call that vapourware.
Question: how do you feel about systemd? Feels similar to me. Nobody forces me to use systemd (and I don't), but the evolution is such that more and more software assumes systemd and it hurts the minority who is not using it.
In order not to use systemd, I can choose a distro that supports something else. Aren't there distros out there that still support X11? Surely that must exist...
It has been almost 20 years and Wayland JUST merged pointer warp support (literally like last week)--which is absolutely fundamental to both CAD and menu systems.
So, no, Wayland does not support some very important use cases.
If you've had 20 years and can't be better than what you claim you are replacing, what does that say about you as a programmer or organization?
However ...
In this case, there are some genuine arguments that what the Wayland developers are doing is, at the least, kind of anti-social and quite possibly harmful to the Linux ecosystem.
Earlier: https://flak.tedunangst.com/post/killing-X11
Note the posting from KiCad: https://www.kicad.org/blog/2025/06/KiCad-and-Wayland-Support...
This was kicked off because KiCad (and other applications that use X11) wound up with a whole bunch of bug reports because Wayland developers broke mutter which broke XWayland which broke a whole bunch of apps. This wasn't a subtle bug; it made it very clear that RedHat doesn't even do basic application testing inside of XWayland.
So, a whole bunch of applications had to field a whole bunch of bug reports that weren't their fault simply because a "Linux" company with lots of money and resources can't be arsed to not cause collateral damage.
Consequently, people are starting to ask some really hard questions as to whether the overall Linux community would be better off without Wayland.
That is both the good thing and the bad thing. Application software can seamlessly work on Wayland via XWayland. Anything that needs to touch things outside its own window - notably, a11y and automation tools (which in fairness are functionally the same thing) don't have it so easy.
You can keep using the older software? No one is forcing you to upgrade? Should these people be forced to work on projects they don't like?
But folks should also have a sense of duty or responsibility not to needlessly interfere with others. I am free to release a reïmplementation of ls(1). I’m free to extend it. But I shouldn’t change the meaning of ‘ls -d’ to delete all matching files, because it conflicts with POSIX. I shouldn’t change the meaning of ‘ls -b’ to overwrite matching files with nulls (blanks), even though POSIX doesn’t define it at all and in theory I am free to do so, because GNU ls(1) already uses it for printing C-style escapes.
While on the other hand he conveniently ignores that a majority of users do need stuff like working HiDpi scaling, multimonitor use with different scalings, general monitor stability in all scenarios (plug and play from laptop, sleep/hibernate, go to 3D gaming and back to desktop etc.) and other stuff used daily by most users. And which is very brittle or even missing in X-11.
For professional use, I can live with Linux without graphical server at all. But for entertainment or creative arts use, monitor "just working per spec" is way more important than those thin client X-11 features inherited from mainframes and mostly unused.
I use FreeBSD and use bhyve to run OpenBSD. I also use FreeBSDs Linuxulator to run Linux software(Spotify, haven’t gotten my games working yet).
Without X forwarding this is no longer a possibility.
It seems to me a large part of the Linux community don’t understand that many of us want to continue living in a world of options.
The commercialisation of Linux has been detrimental to the free software community. It seems to me it’s no longer about hacking, enjoying life, but making money(“professional use”, hehe).
End rant
Same reason systemd won btw. More people (again, I suspect, I'm not collecting stats, only observing market situation) want features from systemd than people wanting complete transparency and plain text support of the init scripts.
I wish good luck to people trying to support X11, but it will be hard for them I guess.
“Oh, they’re a minority, who gives a shit about their wishes anyway”.
systemd didn’t “win”. It might be the most popular init system for Linux. Feel free to use whatever init system you want. I’m not looking to deprecate it
And frankly, as someone who works closely with some of these distro's, I think there is a silent majority who have the same opinion but aren't willing to pay the political tax in their ecosystem for standing up and pointing out the emperor is naked for fear of sounding like a Luddite and being sidelined.
I couldn't be not against Wayland when in half of the applications I used clipboard wasn't working properly.
I couldn't be not against Wayland when screen sharing would either use X11 or not work at all.
I couldn't be not against Wayland when most of the complexity shifted from X server to compositors and toolkits, and it both diluted responsibility for the gnarliest bugs (go guess if it's the compositor or the toolkit! Added fun when it's the boundary of both!) and made it possible to write GNOME-only, or KDE-only, or wlroots-only software that won't work on another compositor because it needs a private implementation of an obscure protocol.
I couldn't be not against Wayland when your window manager breaking would bring your whole session down, complete with the breakage happening a lot.
I hear that there are problems with input protocols like "your toolkit has to implement several versions of the same thing and they all are half-arsed anyway", but living in the happy land of the Unicode's Basic Multilingual Plane, I know too little of this problem to have a say about it. But I'm somehow not surprised.
There is also this thing about Unix-like systems not being limited to Linux, and the story of Wayland elsewhere is way worse.
Most of the gnarliest points are now addressed, and Plasma got super stable around 5.26 onwards, however, I'm not really happy that we now have a triumvirate of Mutter, KWin, and wlroots, and that the bar for entry for new compositors is quite high. The fact that X11 allowed a proliferation of window managers is its advantage, not the other way around.
I'm wondering if someone gets to write a compositor that will be "engine, not policy" for Wayland, on top of which different desktop environments could be built. Like wlroots, but some steps further. It will probably have a year of glory, and then Wayland will be declared obsolete, crufty, insecure, legacy, and in dire need of being replaced with something lean and simple, and maybe written by an LLM. Good thing I'm going to be too old or too dead to give a shit by the time it happens.
I just got better things to do than rewrite code from one working display system to ... another working display system. That's all there is to it, and that's the case for many (probably most) people.
Then it should be proven that proposed alternative to Wayland is not mediocre or worse in issues Wayland is solving. Overall the post looks very shortsighted in looking at these issues from very narrow perspective, seemingly not realizing problems that need solving are much wider and not limited to one use case.
Wayland surely is not perfect and needs development (which lately seems to be moving at better pace), but I'm not convinced at all proposed alternative is better.
Ironically, this is the complaint many of us have about the development of Wayland.
In the past there were some problems with protocols not being accepted fast enough, those issues were more organizational than technical. But that seems to have been finally resolved not so long ago and a bunch of really useful protocols were accepted recently.
I feel for people who are bitten by Wayland, but there's a really vocal negative group on here that I suspect are very much in the minority. Much like the switch from init to system, most people are fine with it.
Wayland works for the vast majority of people, and it's improving steadily. One of the main differences that leads people to complain is that in X, there wasn't any security between applications, and anyone could write a quick hack that makes things work for them (e.g. watch the keyboard for a key globally, or mirror the display remotely). In Wayland, there's no escape hatch: either the desktop environment needs to handle something, or you need to add a protocol for it. People experiment with new protocols all the time, but the Wayland project itself is (by design) slow and careful about adopting extensions.
It is understandable to wish for simpler times. But retrocomputing isn't a path forward here.
And the remote application/desktop story is terrible.
I won't consider it until remote is at least as good or better than Xorg, and I don't foresee that happening in my lifetime (literally,) so Wayland will remain a bugbear I'll continue ignoring. I don't know and can't imagine how a recently promulgated desktop GUI platform that doesn't have remote as top priority came to be, but they weren't interested in anything I care about.
I welcome Xlibre. It's not the first X fork, and the previous ones turned out great, as far as I'm concerned.
You may wish to check the current status. (If you are not a GNOME fan, try KDE; if you are not a GNOME and KDE fan, I'd still suggest checking the quality of their features for the things you care about, to confirm what a Wayland-based environment is capable of; don't judge the quality of X11 by trying an equivalent of twm.)
I think that's simply false. Wayland is a protocol. What's slow or fast is compositors implementation. And there are good ones that aren't slow / less responsive etc.
And I don’t imply the quality of code is good or not, I have no idea.
I've never seen either Torvalds or de Raadt go off on these mega-weird political rants completely unprompted, or inject that sort of thing in the project's README. Never mind going off on rants that smell an awful lot like Nazi apologetics. This is not just a matter of "how they're saying it", there are some real issues with what they're saying as well.
But you know, it's open source. He doesn't need mine or anyone else's permission. More power to him.
But it's really not the same as Torvalds or de Raadt. And it's also not so strange people want to steer clear of it.
source comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44200000
Well it's the code that matters. Not what their beliefs are.
code is also garbage
Well it's the thought that's important.
Guess "you can't have one without the other".
But it’s just a supposition at this stage, let’s see on the next’s month if it a complete mess or if it’s the XFree86 to Xorg transition
The code of conduct: https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver/blob/master/CODE_OF_COND...
Update - We are investigating reports of issues with many services impacting segments of customers. We will continue to keep users updated on progress towards mitigation. Jun 17, 2025 - 19:53 UTC
I have been around long enough (enduring the big swinging dicks) to understand why they are required.
The statements of inclusion in the README when the principal author campaigns against it indicates a dire lack of social skills. What hope is there for this?
I mostly agree with the critisisms of Wayland, I too have had to uninstall it to get what I need, but this all seems worse
Good luck to them, but I have no confidence
For reasons I've never understood politics started invading open source about 10 years ago. What's weird is that these political ideas all seem to be highly aligned and this is the first major project that breaks that alignment.
Personally I'd prefer to see the politics, on both sides, disappear forever. It only pollutes the engineering and it fails to be convincing or meaningful in any other context.
> doesn't inspire confidence in longevity.
There are forces trying to kill X11 for their own internal reasons. I think as long as there is a project that is trying to maintain it, it will be successful, political warts and all.
It's particularly the reactionary stuff that concerns me when it comes to projects like this. When someone's motivation is tied to short-lived movements of social energy like that, I don't trust them to have a long term vision or investment in a project.
It's hard to imagine an energy that's apparently existed for 12 years and still going being described as "short-lived." Perhaps it's really just unfamiliar and that's why it seems so concerning?
Do you typically read the types of publications where that was likely to occur?
> I do recall the same rants about 3 or 4 other terms that ultimately resolve to “people that aren’t me are allowed to do things”, though.
Or perhaps you've just read second hand accounts of the phenomenon without actually confronting it directly? Which is what I presume given that you've come to such a self serving conclusion about it.
No, you're thinking of “Free Software” — “Open Source” was explicitly pro-corporate from the moment the term was coined. OSI themselves will tell you that “open source” as we know it was a product of AOL's desire to get people to work for them for free: https://opensource.org/history
“The [February 3rd, 1998] conferees believed the pragmatic, business-case grounds that had motivated Netscape to release their code illustrated a valuable way to engage with potential software users and developers, and convince them to create and improve source code by participating in an engaged community. The conferees also believed that it would be useful to have a single label that identified this approach and distinguished it from the philosophically- and politically-focused label ‘free software.’”
Some people choose to make open source political and that's their right, but it isn't inherently political. That is a choice one makes.
You may not have political opinions but you took political action....
Politics is "dirty", understandably. But people are mostly decent.
It is the evil powerful hideous people that make politics dirty and life bad
So acting as a decent considerate, loving even, person becomes a political act
Not good, things could be better, but it is what it is
For example, the removal of Jerry Pournelle's free account at MIT because he kept mentioning ARPANET in his column in Byte magazine. Then he accused MIT's sysadmins of being communists who wanted to destroy America's military...
That was 1985. The X project started the year before that.
Definitely don't see this project having legs or at the very least not advancing very far.
They're returning to a previous state which they believe possessed positive characteristics absent from contemporary? Somebody should come up with a word for that.
[0] https://www.phoronix.com/news/X.Org-Server-Lots-Of-Reverts
I mean them deleting their own code only proves their own incompetence not Enrico's.
More on those previous changes here: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/issues/1797#no...
Definitely some blame also belongs to the Xorg committer who reviewed and merged those changes (and it looks like that person understands that in retrospect). But the primary responsibility for getting a change right is the author's.
This is honestly an understatement. Posting antivax conspiracy theories on LKML? Reactionary. Writing anti-DEI rants in his REAMDE and COC files? Reactionary. But this long-winded rant [1] defending WW2 Germany? "Reactionary" doesn't even begin to describe it.
Whatever one's opinion on Wayland, his conduct [2] should be a huge red flag to anyone using his software.
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20190404153507/https://lists.dyn...
- WW2 Germany was "peaceful" and that the war was "forced" upon them
- Churchill and Roosevelt "should have been the first to be prosecuted in the Nuremberg trials"
- The German AfD party is "(mis)labeled" by the mainstream media as Nazis
Fortunately, it's also pretty clear from other contextual clues that he sees no reason to disavow those beliefs.
For all his whinging and whining about "muh dresden bombings", he conveniently seems to "forget" that all that stopped one of the worst genocides in history, including planned genocides (such as those of the Slavic people). And then when he does bring up the Holocaust later it's in a way that seems an awful lot like Holocaust denial.
I'm a simple guy. Goose-steps like a Nazi and salutes like a Nazi? Probably a Nazi.
Holy. Fucking. Crap.
I never thought that I would find someone in the modern day attempt to defend that Germany didn't start WW2, but here we are.
I had a low opinion of him before, but he found a new low to plumb.
We DON'T all live in the same reality, the echo chambers and false narratives being fed to us and corralling us is completely messing with our heads.
back in the 60's and 70's we were worried that the CIA was micro dosing the population... what we've learned is that isn't even needed. just feed us attractive lies and we'll line up for brainworms via the internet and TV day and night.
Concerning the WW2 lies about the start of the war, my principal issue with them are that they are quite easy to disprove, you just need to read _english_ cables sent to Poland which are publicly available, where they asked Poland to accept Germany ultimatum on Danzig and polish borders. I fact, Chamberlain Guarantee of polish independence explicitly didn't guarantee its borders. It was clearly an attempt to prevent another Czekoslovakia. Thus people believing them have to be idiots, I don't see another solution.
Also if you want to check Poland response, it's translated already. They said in late May 39 they tried to get a hold on German chief diplomat (not Ribbentrof, the second one) to accept most of Germany's terms, but couldn't. They surrendered by press, pushed articles in the free city to explain they removed border checks with Germany by July 39.
Character assassination campaigns like this are so pathetic on so many levels. What you are doing is already worse behavior than what you're trying to accuse him of.
And that you quoted him complaining about the russian developer bans is confusing. Why do you think "not wanting people banned by their country of origin" is a bad thing? What, are you racist?
Also, trolling LKML doesn't solve racism. Nor does having the Linux project violate sanctions.
Should the Germans have started invading countries and slaughtering millions of innocent people? Obviously not. But the way the German people were treated was going to lead to war, eventually, and it almost seems like the treaty of Versailles was engineered that way. Unfortunately, the guy that managed to unite enough German people to start the war was a nazi instead of a Napoleon.
When it came to the war itself, the allies and the Germans were no worse than each other. Obviously the mass murder the Germans were doing makes their side the "bad" side of the war, but if it hadn't been for the Holocaust I doubt the lines would be all that clear. At the end of the war, cities were bombed and razed to the ground out of revenge and bloodlust, not out of military strategy. It's amazing what you can get away with if you're on the "right" side at the end of a war.
I think this guy's speech is full of right wing rethoric that's often a dog whistle for the far right, but he's not "defending WW2 Germany" as a reactionary. If I were German, I'd be happy that Hitler's legacy is in crumbles and that many of the horrible people doing his bidding got what they deserved, but I'd be pretty pissed off that Churchill and his people never had to face any tribunals.
That was before i even knew they were a Nazi-defending nutcase insistent on dragging politics into LKML.
Frankly hope the project dies. Wayland can't replace X for me yet but I've no confidence XLibre is an improvement on X11 in any capacity.
> Wayland cannot do (or do well) tons of things:
> VNC server
> remote desktop
I don't regularly use either of these so I cannot attest to whether they work on wayland.
> SSH X forwarding
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe
> custom keyboard bindings
I currently have caps lock bound to esc
> numerous accessibility options
This is likely true
> legacy software
xwayland
> absolute desktop positioning
Once again, I'm running absolute desktop positioning right now
> screen sharing and recording
I just installed and ran obs, told it to use screen capture as a source, it recorded fine
> CAD/EDA tools
CAD software only runs on windows anyway. For KiCad, it's seemingly blocked on a window positioning protocol, which wayland will hopefully adopt soon
That all being said, I actually found the remote desktop situation to be /okay/ on wayland. `gnome-remote-desktop` is decent; though it uses quite a lot of bandwidth, it appeared to be smoother than xrdp when that bandwidth is available. And the sunshine/moonlight pair, while intended for game streaming, worked fine as a usual remote desktop server/client under wayland.
And when I say correctly, I mean that if I am on a non 96 DPI display, e.g. a 168 DPI display (1.75x) and want things scaling properly, Xwayland gets told to pretend that the display size is some resolution in the vicinity of ~1097 by ~686 (not sure how this part works, and honestly I don't think it's relevant) and a DPI of 96. Then xwayland does the most idiotic thing imaginable, it takes the output of applications running under it and stretches it.
And now I have vaseline on my screen.
No thanks.
I may try hyprland at some point to see if there's actual value to using Wayland over X but so far every time I've tried to switch it has been random obstacle after random obstacle.
One of the most baffling has been arbitrary restrictions on the scaling factor.
The only thing that for some stupid reason can't be solved is that I can't turn off blurry interpolation on the low DPI applications. Come on! The low DPI layer is in integer multiples, make it nearest-neighbor pixelated but crisp! How hard is that!?
(same goes for QEMU. Argggh!)
How?
But why stop there, and cope with a multi-user environment? Just boot into single user mode and "chmod a+rwx / -R". A lot of other /problems/ solved too.
/S
Also PipeWire is an audio interface. A replacement to PulseAudio. That has nothing to do with accessing screens.
No, it's a general audio/video system, including video from cameras and virtual video streams from screen capture; see https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PipeWire#WebRTC_screen_shar... for some discussion.
The correct response to "All applications can spoof keypresses or act as a keylogger" is "Okay, force user to grant permission before an application does this".
The Wayland response is "No application should be allowed to do this".
Whether you like it or not, sometimes users actually want functionality that you deem is insecure, and you gotta find a way to deliver what Windows, MacOS and X11 all deliver.
Also it's not like global hotkeys don't exist in Wayland.
That's the point - applications that need to perform malicious looking (but not actually) activity like intercepting or injecting keyboard inputs already work on X! What we are talking about is them not working on Wayland!
> Also it's not like global hotkeys don't exist in Wayland.
There are more features than simply mapping hotkeys, remapping keyboards, etc which already work on consumer computers, such as Windows, MacOS and X. What we are asking for when we complain about Wayland is the same functionality that already exists on Windows, MacOS and X.
Whether the Waylan devs think that the requests are unreasonable or not is, frankly, irrelevant. When everyone but Wayland supports something, the Wayland developers have to justify their decision to go against the norm.
The people asking for the norm typically don't need to justify why they want the norm.