5 ms·

Makes perfect sense - stop using X11 because XWayland needs to be fixed.

bitwize 5y ago
Actually it does make perfect sense because X is deprecated by the community and largely abandoned except for XWayland, which is kept around for legacy apps only. Update your workflow to the modern stuff, don't expect the maintainers to keep supporting your use case from decades ago.
- superkuh 5y ago
  > X is deprecated by the community and largely abandoned Old and functional does not mean deprecated. In most distros and for most users X is not deprecated. It sounds like you've been living on the bleeding edge for a long time and have lost touch with the reality of linux for most users. The GUI toolkits like Gtk and Qt fully support X. They do not fully support Wayland. When this changes you can call X deprecated.
  - McWobbleston 5y ago
    Yes, it's weird seeing the X is dead sentiment considering some of the most popular distros are still using X, and Wayland has only recently caught up with comparability for workflows like screen capture. I'm unfortunately stuck on X because of my NVIDIA system, but I hadn't been all that interested in Wayland until recently. AFAIK there is also some work to be done on the gaming side no?
    - bitwize 5y ago
      The most popular distros are Ubuntu and Red Hat/Fedora. Both use Wayland by default. Everybody else is part of the long tail.
      - zbuf 5y ago
        That is to confuse "long tail" with "doesn't matter", though. If a supermarket doesn't stock goods in the long tail, its customers shop elsewhere. Dismiss the "long tail" and we wouldn't have champagne in the supermarket, or classical music on the radio. The idea that somehow the ever-changing nature of Linux is going to stablise into something that satisfies _everyone_ seems misguided. Open source code means diverse groups can, and will decide themselves what's deprecated, and take on maintenance of the things they want to exist.
        bitwize 5y ago
        If it costs just as much money to support the long tail as it does to support 95% of your user base, guess what? That long tail will go unsupported. This is why the only relevant web standard is "does it work on WebKit (formerly IE)?" And why the only relevant firmware standard is "does it boot Windows?" The major distros ship with Wayland. The major toolkits support Wayland. That's where all the development and maintenance energy is right now. X is still around, but eventually support for it will go away. Once it becomes niche enough that the costs of maintaining an X code path outweigh the benefits of supporting the few users still on X, they will take the X code path out. That's how things go in software.
      - marginalia_nu 5y ago
        Well Linux itself is part of the long tail, so by this logic, why bother maintaining such an old fashioned and irrelevant operating system based on POSIX standards from the past?
    - oynqr 5y ago
      Good news, Nvidia has granted upon thee a driver that might actually work with Wayland
  - LeonidasXIV 5y ago
    Fact is that Xorg is more or less effectively abandoned, so yes, while distributions don't deprecate them yet because there's still a lot of places where X11 is required this is where it is going. Hmm, I guess you should let Fedora know that GTK+ and Qt don't support Wayland given they ship with Wayland by default and these... just work.
    - superkuh 5y ago
      >GTK+ and Qt don't support Wayland given they ship with Wayland by default and these... just work. That's not the impression I get watching #gtk on GIMPNet and the bug trackers. There's a lot left to do even if Wayland is enabled now.
  - mftb 5y ago
    I agree with you that, "Old and functional does not mean deprecated." but what you asserted is not what deprecation is either. It generally means the developers are giving notice that new development on a feature/feature-set/api is discouraged. That notice was given for X a while ago. I understand the idea that it would be better if the replacement were 100% ready when that notice was given, but I'm not surprised that wasn't the case with X, it's big shoes to fill. I can't speak for normal users, but I have seen some reporting, that they have been on a Wayland for a while now without knowing it.
- Asooka 5y ago
  Ah yes, surely if we break the entire world again, this year will be the year of the Linux desktop. The Linux desktop experience is a bit like watching an alcoholic. You try to explain that drinking is making them sick and they should stop, but they just get violent and drink even more. I think the success of Windows should be proof enough that you can keep compatibility for very old APIs and that it's required for an OS that is to be a platform for other people to build software on, as opposed to a walled garden (Apple) where you sometimes let people build part of it.
  - Ginden 5y ago
    It's estimated that more than 6000 people are working on Windows full time. I don't think that Linux (kernel + DE) has half of that manpower.
  - therealjumbo 5y ago
    The maintainers of X decided they didn't want to keep maintaining X since it has too much baggage. So they designed/implemented a replacement, Wayland, and have given notice that development on X is going to come to a halt. Unless a different group of maintainers steps forward, but that seems unlikely. So like always, open source is a do-acracy. The people doing the doing, get to make the decisions. Regardless of "Year of the Linux Desktop" what these maintainers are trying to do in general is minimize their time involvement while making the desktop have the features and support (like for 4K monitors) that people want. Secondly, "the Linux Desktop" isn't a single organization like a commercial entity is. Its a bunch of different groups that all have their own priorities and schedules and use cases and so on. Expecting that process to produce output that is functionally identical to a single commercial entity, is unrealistic.
    - tablespoon 5y ago
      > The maintainers of X decided they didn't want to keep maintaining X since it has too much baggage. So they designed/implemented a replacement, Wayland... > ...what these maintainers are trying to do in general is ... making the desktop have the features and support (like for 4K monitors) that people want. Was there something about X that was incompatible with 4k monitors?

Actually it does make perfect sense because X is deprecated by the community and largely abandoned except for XWayland, which is kept around for legacy apps only. Update your workflow to the modern stuff, don't expect the maintainers to keep supporting your use case from decades ago.

superkuh 5y ago
> X is deprecated by the community and largely abandoned Old and functional does not mean deprecated. In most distros and for most users X is not deprecated. It sounds like you've been living on the bleeding edge for a long time and have lost touch with the reality of linux for most users. The GUI toolkits like Gtk and Qt fully support X. They do not fully support Wayland. When this changes you can call X deprecated.
- McWobbleston 5y ago
  Yes, it's weird seeing the X is dead sentiment considering some of the most popular distros are still using X, and Wayland has only recently caught up with comparability for workflows like screen capture. I'm unfortunately stuck on X because of my NVIDIA system, but I hadn't been all that interested in Wayland until recently. AFAIK there is also some work to be done on the gaming side no?
  - bitwize 5y ago
    The most popular distros are Ubuntu and Red Hat/Fedora. Both use Wayland by default. Everybody else is part of the long tail.
    - zbuf 5y ago
      That is to confuse "long tail" with "doesn't matter", though. If a supermarket doesn't stock goods in the long tail, its customers shop elsewhere. Dismiss the "long tail" and we wouldn't have champagne in the supermarket, or classical music on the radio. The idea that somehow the ever-changing nature of Linux is going to stablise into something that satisfies _everyone_ seems misguided. Open source code means diverse groups can, and will decide themselves what's deprecated, and take on maintenance of the things they want to exist.
      - bitwize 5y ago
        If it costs just as much money to support the long tail as it does to support 95% of your user base, guess what? That long tail will go unsupported. This is why the only relevant web standard is "does it work on WebKit (formerly IE)?" And why the only relevant firmware standard is "does it boot Windows?" The major distros ship with Wayland. The major toolkits support Wayland. That's where all the development and maintenance energy is right now. X is still around, but eventually support for it will go away. Once it becomes niche enough that the costs of maintaining an X code path outweigh the benefits of supporting the few users still on X, they will take the X code path out. That's how things go in software.
    - marginalia_nu 5y ago
      Well Linux itself is part of the long tail, so by this logic, why bother maintaining such an old fashioned and irrelevant operating system based on POSIX standards from the past?
  - oynqr 5y ago
    Good news, Nvidia has granted upon thee a driver that might actually work with Wayland
- LeonidasXIV 5y ago
  Fact is that Xorg is more or less effectively abandoned, so yes, while distributions don't deprecate them yet because there's still a lot of places where X11 is required this is where it is going. Hmm, I guess you should let Fedora know that GTK+ and Qt don't support Wayland given they ship with Wayland by default and these... just work.
  - superkuh 5y ago
    >GTK+ and Qt don't support Wayland given they ship with Wayland by default and these... just work. That's not the impression I get watching #gtk on GIMPNet and the bug trackers. There's a lot left to do even if Wayland is enabled now.
- mftb 5y ago
  I agree with you that, "Old and functional does not mean deprecated." but what you asserted is not what deprecation is either. It generally means the developers are giving notice that new development on a feature/feature-set/api is discouraged. That notice was given for X a while ago. I understand the idea that it would be better if the replacement were 100% ready when that notice was given, but I'm not surprised that wasn't the case with X, it's big shoes to fill. I can't speak for normal users, but I have seen some reporting, that they have been on a Wayland for a while now without knowing it.
Asooka 5y ago
Ah yes, surely if we break the entire world again, this year will be the year of the Linux desktop. The Linux desktop experience is a bit like watching an alcoholic. You try to explain that drinking is making them sick and they should stop, but they just get violent and drink even more. I think the success of Windows should be proof enough that you can keep compatibility for very old APIs and that it's required for an OS that is to be a platform for other people to build software on, as opposed to a walled garden (Apple) where you sometimes let people build part of it.
- Ginden 5y ago
  It's estimated that more than 6000 people are working on Windows full time. I don't think that Linux (kernel + DE) has half of that manpower.
- therealjumbo 5y ago
  The maintainers of X decided they didn't want to keep maintaining X since it has too much baggage. So they designed/implemented a replacement, Wayland, and have given notice that development on X is going to come to a halt. Unless a different group of maintainers steps forward, but that seems unlikely. So like always, open source is a do-acracy. The people doing the doing, get to make the decisions. Regardless of "Year of the Linux Desktop" what these maintainers are trying to do in general is minimize their time involvement while making the desktop have the features and support (like for 4K monitors) that people want. Secondly, "the Linux Desktop" isn't a single organization like a commercial entity is. Its a bunch of different groups that all have their own priorities and schedules and use cases and so on. Expecting that process to produce output that is functionally identical to a single commercial entity, is unrealistic.
  - tablespoon 5y ago
    > The maintainers of X decided they didn't want to keep maintaining X since it has too much baggage. So they designed/implemented a replacement, Wayland... > ...what these maintainers are trying to do in general is ... making the desktop have the features and support (like for 4K monitors) that people want. Was there something about X that was incompatible with 4k monitors?