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Comment by prima-facie | Hacker News Reader

Am I the only one who's not buying into the Wayland hype? I just want X11 support not to fall into disrepair, as I see nothing wrong with it.

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I don’t see much Wayland hype. It’s boring plumbing for most people, isn’t it? Most of us are just going along with whatever the volunteer plumbing community decided to put together.

(xfwl4 author here.)

I'm also not a big fan of Wayland, to be honest. But that's the way the winds are blowing. X11 has its problems, but even if they are fixable, no one seems to want to work on Xorg anymore. I'm certainly not prepared to maintain it and push it forward. Are you?

Depending on Xorg today is more or less ok, but I do expect distros will stop shipping it eventually.

> I just want X11 support not to fall into disrepair

Are you also willing to maintain it?

Are you willing to write accessibility support for the new xfce only wayland compositor? How will you get every other wayland compositor to support your non-'wayland core' accessibility extension?

People like to frame things like the waylands are some sort of default and nothing is being lost and no one is being excluded.

Everyone has settled on an accessibility standard (Matt Campbell's). So it's not "your" accessibility protocol, it's already "the" accessibility protocol. This is working as intended IMO: allow things to compete and future in the wild and then pick the fittest.

Right. The push based accessibility that is only supported by GNOME's compositor, mutter, and GNOME's DE's userland as of this last 6 months. I would very happy to hear about even this extension supported under other wayland compositors and software. Do you know of any?

Since you seem informed perhaps you can clear something up for me, when Cambpell says "push full accessibility tree to trusted clients" does that mean you get the entire desktop tree, or only for that application?

Because if you don't get the entire window tree, because you only get the single windows information when that application provides it, it is highly incompatible with existing solutions. They say it is compatible because application developers can create a new virtualized thing themselves. But that's not compatible. And beyond that, it is a "solution" that prevents me from controlling my own computer. I understand GNOME is targeting everyone not just power users. But as a power user I am someone. I am a human being.

And Campbell's assertions that push is more performant than pull and full tree are being backed by arguments informed from problems that don't even apply generally. GTK 4 broke this, not GTK 3. It's not a push versus pull thing. It's wayland architecture focused Gtk4 causing the problem when things are fine in X11 focused GTK 3. ref: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/6269 a11y: No API for supporting a11y Selection interface , https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/6204 a11y AT-SPI: get_child_count implementation iterating over all children causes freeze for objects with many a11y children

Honestly at this point, I would be willing to pay $10-20 a month just for someone to maintain Xorg and xfree86. I really doubt I am the only one.

If the XLibre project appears to be making enough fairly-consistent progress for you to be comfortable tossing around some cash, then do gather up some likeminded folks to hire a dev to follow the guidance here [0] and help out!

Do note that I've never tried to croudfund a programmer, but that's something that I have to believe is possible to do.

[0] <https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver?tab=readme-ov-file#i-wan...>

Given that all their patches were reverted in upstream X11 due to quality issues [0], I wouldn't put too much trust into that project.

[0] https://www.phoronix.com/news/X.Org-Server-Lots-Of-Reverts

Given that FDO [0] has been screaming about how Xorg is dead and Wayland is (despite plenty of evidence to the contrary) ready for everyone and every use case for the past like ten+ years, I remain somewhat wary about their opinions regarding Xorg development.

Maybe XLibre will be a damn trainwreck, or maybe it'll be to xorg what xorg was to XFree86. I intend to find out through the testimony of users of XLibre.

[0] ...or maybe just a very vocal subset of the folks at FDO...

Some cognitive dissonance going on here. The vast majority of current Linux Desktop users are on Wayland, and X11 is phased out across the board. Calling it hype is absurd.

Sure, but do you have any facts to backup that assertion?

Ubuntu and Fedora dropping X11:

https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/12/ubuntu_2510_to_drop_x...

https://itsfoss.com/news/fedora-43-wayland-only/

Kde Plasma 6.8 dropping X11:

https://itsfoss.com/news/kde-plasma-to-drop-x11-support/

Suse dropping X11:

https://documentation.suse.com/releasenotes/sles/html/releas...

> Some cognitive dissonance going on here.

The cognitive dissonance I perceive goes like "No one is being paid to work on X11, therefore I should volunteer to work on Wayland."

So I guess Windows is actually the future then by your argument because that's used by even more users.

It's wild this is what you took from that, but no. My issue was with the word 'Hype'. Would you call windows Hype because it's bigger?

Yes, you are the only one in the entire world who hasn't fallen for it. Well done.

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