Hacker News Reader

Comment by neilv | Hacker News Reader

I 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 unconventional design choices that everyone else was stuck with. (At the same time there was much positive benefits from the efforts.)

Even though I don't use the default Gnome desktop on most of my systems (I usually prefer XMonad or i3wm atop X11), I still end up using applications programs written to GTK and Gnome libraries.

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.

View on HN

fuel the healthy competition is a really positive spin on even more fragmentation. It's sad how Linux desktop eats itself.

GNOME is a perpetrator as well. I usually check the GNOME release notes (since I use GNOME on my NixOS laptop) and on a semi-regular basis there is a note that says: replaced app X by a completely new rewrite Y. And there is still no support for basic things like marking up/annotating a screenshot, even though the basic image viewer has been rewritten N times (anyone remember Electric Eyes?).

I think "healthy competition" is the most productive way to look at it, given the situation.

With the history of unclear alignment, it would be foolish for everyone to rely on Gnome.

But there's a ton of investment and value in that platform. (Much of it before Gnome even started, but now under the Gnome umbrella.)

So "competition" has been giving us alternatives.

Maybe ongoing competition will help keep pressure on Gnome, to be closer to aligned with the user bases.

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 significant development and the adoption that makes development sustainable.

The trick is: If you use any sort of a11y tools, it's really hard to move to wayland. Things are improving, but it's slow going.

Or most remote desktop tools.

SteamDeck's desktop mode was X11, last I checked.

Also their gamescope compositor makes the weird but reasonable-in-context choice of being a wayland (micro)compositor... that by default only uses Xwayland and doesn't expose a wayland socket to applications. AIUI this is because, at least to date, X was better for gaming in some way.

If you are on for example Mint, X11 is chosen for you and will probably be for a few years to come. There is an experimental Cinnamon Wayland session, though.

Which demographic do you evaluate? Because I am clearly among the xorg users. I don't even use systemd either.

I still find Wayland to be buggier than X11.

it seems to have better display scaling which is useful when I switch between large monitor and laptop screen.

I'm personally open to Wayland, and able to move to it (and sometimes have, though once I had to back it out because it was breaking too much in a critical factory embedded appliance) (and XMonad works noticeably better for me than i3wm/Sway). But not everyone can move to it.

Wayland is only one of the many Gnome desktop feature and technical decisions that not everyone agrees with. Some decisions are regressions, and outright defective, for years and counting.

There's an awkward situation, in which the companies paying for the programmers effectively get to decide, and the governance doesn't necessarily reflect the user base. But, like "they who has the gold, makes the rules", they who does the work...

So the healthy competition comes in when someone someone can afford to spend time to build alternatives. Sometimes expending effort just to undo changes of someone else, on a fork.

For example, when Gnome decided to take the desktop behavior in their own creative direction, the Cinnamon project gave everyone back a more familiar and intuitive desktop, which continued to work with all the application programs that people had been using.

(Strangely, Cinnamon seems more an enterprise-desktop look&feel drop-in replacement than the default Gnome desktop. When I would've guessed Gnome corporate funders would've been focused on getting Linux desktop on corporate desktop as their first priority, and then second priority would be mobile. But I don't see the default Gnome desktop getting them either. Cinnamon, on the other hand, is immediately usable by any corporate worker who's used any Microsoft desktop since Windows 95.)

> When I would've guessed Gnome corporate funders would've been focused on getting Linux desktop on corporate desktop

Already a decade ago, I commented on a news-for-nerds site like this one, “Well, GNOME makes choices we don’t like, but they are focused on the corporate-desktop market.” But then a GNOME developer replied to correct me: “That’s an old misconception, we are not mainly focused on the corporate desktop”. So who exactly they are designing for, remains a mystery to me.

The differences started with the first Gnome startup. Even the two co-founders of HelixCode had differing goals for the platform, and even different visions for the basic nature of it.

As a casual linux user with a 2in1 framework I feel very represented by Gnome's design choices, but I'll admit that I know I am nowhere close to representing most linux users. I do also really like it on the desktop too fwiw.

There are a few. There is still some software that has trouble with XWayland, which could hold back some users, and there are many who aren’t happy with the state of accessibility tools. But I don’t think this justifies the hatred towards it, as it’s not like these issues are unfixable. (Wayland now works better than X for me on all of my systems.)

It’s really disappointing how often disagreements in the open source world turn into religious wars. I think it’s because so many would rather yell and scream than contribute a single line of code. So much wasted energy.

> I'm a curmudgeonly old man fond of old tech, but I have still had a Wayland-only setup since early 2020

You must not be that curmudgeonly! I haven't tried Wayland yet, and so long as people are still arguing about it, I'm too afraid to even try it. :-)

The whole audio plugin field is on X11 for formats reason

I don't use a compositor in XOrg.

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.

[0]: https://github.com/emacs-exwm/exwm

> How many X11 holdouts are still around, really?

A lot. I have no idea how to start "Wayland" on Slackware. I use FVWM.

OTOH, i saw Wayland in Tails. It is slow and ugly as hell, window managent is nonexistent.

I think the GNOME/GTK devs alienated numerous devs. I tried to talk to ebassi but he censored me on reddit as a consequence. He does not like people speaking up against what the GTK devs do.

I have no hope for GTK. It is a GNOMEy toolkit now.

> I have no hope for GTK. It is a GNOMEy toolkit now.

G(nome)T(ool)K(it). It always was. It is a CADT program: every new version is a complete and incompatible implementation of the old version.

> G(nome)T(ool)K(it). It always was.

I believe it was the "Gimp Tool Kit" originally, and Wikipedia agrees:

> GTK (formerly GIMP ToolKit[3] and GTK+[4]) is a free open-source widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces (GUIs)[5]

Maybe the confusion is that it was sometimes called "GTK+" in the brand name originally (though most people just said "GTK" anyway, and that's what the code identifiers said).

Gimp (the photo/image editor) was already pretty sophisticated for years before Gnome was even started.

The first Gnome-branded library that I recall in the GTK space was Gnome Canvas.

The earlier commenter's point stands. Though my impression was that GTK was de facto taken over by Gnome around GTK 3 (though you could still write GUI apps without bringing in the fleet of Gnome desktop services).

> 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 freedesktop.org infrastructure: https://linuxiac.com/xlibre-xserver-project-plans-revival-of...

> In a dramatic turn of events, Red Hat employees banned developer Enrico Weigelt from the freedesktop.org infrastructure. Weigelt’s account, repositories, tickets, and merge requests (more than 140) associated with the Xorg project were also abruptly deleted. As a result of these actions, in a message titled “History repeats: Redhat censored me on freedesktop.org,”.

(more in the link).

As somebody that has a functioning desktop environment (XFCE) and that doesn't bother much with new stuff, this is incredibly annoying, as the Wayland people have been breaking the linux desktop for everybody while pushing for incomplete alternatives (case in point: another comment to this same thread: wayland breaks accessibility: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45824341 - they should have first developed it AND THEN push for it but no, they had to push incomplete and non functional garbage down everybody's throat).

I'm not really against Wayland per se, I'm against the fascistoid appoach that wayland people had all along the way.

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.

Except that he was kicked out for sending in patches that weren't working, failed the build tests and had obviously next actually been tested. Repeatedly. It reached AI slop level PRs and people got sick of it.

> Politics does not influence my choices in software (quality does).

Then why are you linking to a guy who has been making broken changes?

Xorg as a whole was much higher in quality when the push for broken wayland stuff started. You’re lagging.

> 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…

> Poettering

He is Microsoft's mole.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com