X11 is not going anywhere. If anything it's Gnome adding another nail to its coffin
Nothing new is being created with x11 and the people from freedesktop don't seen to be thrilled to maintain it. I don't think should change just for the sake of changing, but I'd start looking to migrate whatever you use that depends on x11.
I regularly write code which relies on a working X11. I have written a virtual machine which makes X11 calls to do 2D graphics and event handling, as well as applications which compile to the virtual machine code. If X11 and now XWayland cease to be available, not only would I have to rewrite large parts of my virtual machine, but also rewrite all the 2D graphics code in applications. All so that I can stand still when the rug is being pulled from under my feet. I'm sure there are others in a similar predicament.
I may be naive about this, but as X11 just works, and has done for decades, it should require little to no maintenance, so why the need to withdraw it? I don't expect, or require, any additional functionality.
I'm using my own terminal, wm, and file manager. They use X11, and I have no interest in changing that, because I have no need to as long as X11 works on my hardware and that won't change anytime soon. Everything I don't do in a terminal, I do in a browser.
EDIT: To add some more context for why I have no interest in changing that: 1) my wm is 1568 lines of code at the moment. If anything, that is more than I'm happy with. With Wayland I'd need to write my own compositor. Way too much work even with reusing e.g. wlroots.
2) My file manager is more of a basic desktop launcher. That is fine, and intentional. I may add some features to it. But the reason I'm using that rather than any of the over a dozen options I've tested is that most of them either never had or have ripped out spatial features, and the ones that had some spatial features didn't act the way I wanted them to. I want Amiga-like semi-spatial features of being able to selectively snapshot icon and window placement ("semi-"spatial because traditional spatial would imply a single instance of a window for a given path; I just want default placement to be the same as last time I snapshotted it). Wayland on purpose refuses to allow that, and so I'd need to hack on a compositor or write my own to be able to support the most important feature to me in the file manager.
I'm not going to tolerate my usability being reduced just to switch away from software that does what I want it to, to software that offers me nothing new that I want and takes away features I do want.
Reminds me of sites that required ActiveX to run arbitrary code on the user side when visiting a web site outside a sandbox. Turned out to not be ideal from a security point of view.
But I guess `ssh -X` users still miss those times...
For example, terminal transparency using Konsole on KDE flickers for me.
Its nearly there, but not quite. Maybe Gnome has no such issues?
Plasma v: 6.3.6, Ryzen 7 5800U with integrated graphics. Happens every time I use Konsole with transparency.
True.
But does not address the fact that Wayland is a bad solution to X11's problems, and that its architecturally broken from inception.
I have a more stable experience with wayland today than I had with x11. Which to be fair was not only because of wayland but because desktop linux as a whole has made a lot of progress in the last years
Most of the issues and slow adoption were because the core protocol was deliberately kept extremely minimal, and agreeing on all the needed extensions took a long time. Don't take it from me, but rather from KDE developer Nate Graham: https://pointieststick.com/2023/09/17/so-lets-talk-about-thi...
As such, anyone who tried it early probably had to deal with a pretty large amount of non-working stuff, but by now the platform is capable of most features people require and the biggest remaining bottleneck is that software needs to use these new APIs.
Most people won't care, but for a number of us Wayland is stubbornly refusing to support functionality we see as dealbreakers.
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 write your own or are you using an existing one that works that way?
The VR stuff is a poor excuse - just fail on that scenario. Nobody that cares about window positioning will have an issue with that.
My file manager defaults to re-opening a window for any directory to a previously snapshotted location, like the Amiga Workbench did. And, yes, I wrote my own. It's a few hundred lines of of a quick and dirty Ruby hack talking directly to a pure Ruby X11 binding, which is anothe reason I stick with X - I can throw things together quickly for X. The amount of ceremony, or big additional dependencies, needed for Wayland is ridiculous.
But if you use really old nvidia gpu you can have a mixed experience with wayland. Which is a fair problem to complain, but you can't blame that on wayland and call that lack of freedom. That problem was caused by the lack of freedom coming from nvidia gpus and how locked down they are and how nvidia for many year has been hostile towards linux desktop.
It’s achieved developer and very tech savvy IT pro freedom. If you can deal with command lines and debugging systems you are not a user. You’re a computer professional.
If OSS wanted to bring freedom to users its primary focus would be radical simplification and UI/UX.
That's open source being used by developers to provide a closed service to users. Users experience it as an opaque closed service.
SaaS backed by open source is actually the most closed model of software, more closed than closed-source software run locally.
Personally, I've never used a proprietary driver with either.
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; whereas in Wayland there’s only the compositor, so GNOME, KDE, Sway, whatever, all essentially include their own equivalent of Xorg (which could be fully integrated, or factored into a library, such as Mutter, KWin, wlroots).
Please cite a single independent implementation of an X11 protocol server.
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...
The commercial ones (Xsun, Xsgi, Hummingbird, DESQView/X etc.) were all based on MIT code.
The big reason why I want to keep X11 besides backwards compatibility is the ability to run GUI apps remotely, even from a server that has zero graphical capabilities. But these do not really apply to desktop environments. If you want to remote a full desktop rather than individual applications, there are better options (VNC, RDP, ...).
Feel free to find volunteers to fulfill their shoes.
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"
Wayland exists because, thanks to hardware innovations, there's a better way to do the job than what was possible in the 80s.
>> Wayland exists because, thanks to hardware innovations, there's a better way to do the job than what was possible in the 80s.
E.g. instead of the Xwayland approach, you could've already ditched "half" of Xorg if you stripped most of the server-side drawing primitives and server-side font support and moved them to Xlib, handling it client side, and then made it clear someone else would need to take over maintenance of Xlib, and "started over" with a stripped down Xcb.
You could've validated further restrictions by letting clients opt in to them with extensions before "flipping the switch" and restricting them by default when the damage was acceptable.
Even if we then eventually reached a point where there'd be a schism, odds are it'd be far smaller. And certainly far less time would've been wasted.
Really the only high-profile 'switch' in recent times I can think of is that Fedora promoted KDE to be first-class ('edition') alongside Gnome, instead of delegated to a more second-class spin. And while KDE is a bit more conservative in this regard, I believe that in the long term KDE also wants to go Wayland-only at some point.
Personally I did switch from Gnome to KDE some time after Gnome 40, since I quite liked 3.x but the UI overhaul 40 did wasn't really my thing. It also helps that KDE got a lot better in recent years.
xorg-server is gone from the linux desktop. Gnome and KDE use wayland shells by default, and that's what users get when they download a Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora/whatever ISO.
Well, no. Stand-alone Xorg is probably declining on the Linux desktop, but "gone" is inaccurate.
- Sent from i3
Yup, my feeling as well.
Wayland was sold as a sorely needed fix to X11 long-standing problems.
The fact that X11 had problems that sorely needed to be fixed is indeed true.
The fact that Wayland is the solution is unfortunately not.
Just because something is the next gen project does not mean it actually succeeded in fixing what it planned to.
They've been adding nails to the coffin for 25+ years now. How many more do you think it's going to take?