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It's not really a "fiat". There just aren't any GNOME developers left that are interested in maintaining the X11 parts of the stack. The Mutter developers are a

It's not really a "fiat". There just aren't any GNOME developers left that are interested in maintaining the X11 parts of the stack. The Mutter developers are actively working on making the remaining X11 parts optional. Xorg itself is not getting any new extensions, all feature work on display protocols relevant to Mutter is currently happening in Wayland extensions and in Mesa. The major problems left there that involve X are related to XWayland. The GTK developers already redesigned the whole client back end to match Wayland. The other pieces of GNOME have long since moved into protocol-agnostic dbus interfaces. What incentive do they have left to maintain X11 support? There just isn't much there besides legacy compatibility.

aidenn0 4y ago
Perhaps "fiat" was too loaded of a term. What I mean to say is that, since GNOME is an integrated system, there is no particular need for it to depend on Wayland implementing some random feature that X11 has. On top of that, since so much of Wayland is implemented in the compositor, it's likely that Mutter can make up for any missing features in Wayland. Therefore, as you say, there's no incentive for the GNOME developers to support X11, and the devs are free to say "Use GNOME on wayland, implement an X11 backend for GNOME/GTK yourself, or don't use GNOME" which, in practice, boils down to "Use GNOME on Wayland, or don't use GNOME" and is, effectively, a fiat to use Wayland if you want to continue using newer versions of GNOME. I also didn't intend this to be judgemental; GNOME is almost certainly the most complete desktop environment for linux. I personally use KDE as my desktop, but most applications I use are not part of KDE (or even built using Qt). Conversely, a typical desktop user could probably get by using just GNOME applications (plus maybe libre-office for opening MS documents that can't be handled within GNOME). IMO a large part of what makes this possible is by being judicious in what is supported.
- superkuh 4y ago
  Both of you are concentrating on GNOME DE. GNOME DE doesn't matter. Gtk3/4/5 matters and it, and Gtk using devs writting applications, don't have all the vertical integration and control that the GNOME desktop environment has.
  - aidenn0 4y ago
    Maybe I'm wrong, but I get the sense that GNOME is the tail that wags the Gtk dog at this point.
    - superkuh 4y ago
      You're not wrong about control of Gtk. But my point was that if GNOME does drop such X11 functionality while the GNOME DE may not suffer, the far more important and larger set of applications that use Gtk will. GNOME DE won't have problems but the Linux ecosystem will.
      - Crysstalis 4y ago
        >You're not wrong about control of Gtk No, the parent comment is wrong. There is no "vertical integration" or control. It's just an open source project. If anyone was interested in maintaining the X11 support, it would happen, or at minimum it would happen in a fork, but there is currently nobody. If someone is worrying about other parts suffering, they should start contributing now. I doubt this will happen though, nobody has turned up over the past several years, which is exactly why they consider dropping it. Honestly I think most developers who even bother with GTK4 are probably fully on board with wayland, the ones who aren't are still trying to use GTK2 and GTK3.
- Crysstalis 4y ago
  >and is, effectively, a fiat to use Wayland if you want to continue using newer versions of GNOME. Ok, I get what you're saying, but this is not different from looking at GNOME 2 (which only ran on X11) and saying they declared a fiat that you have to use X11. Any project gets to pick its dependencies.

aidenn0 4y ago

Perhaps "fiat" was too loaded of a term. What I mean to say is that, since GNOME is an integrated system, there is no particular need for it to depend on Wayland implementing some random feature that X11 has. On top of that, since so much of Wayland is implemented in the compositor, it's likely that Mutter can make up for any missing features in Wayland. Therefore, as you say, there's no incentive for the GNOME developers to support X11, and the devs are free to say "Use GNOME on wayland, implement an X11 backend for GNOME/GTK yourself, or don't use GNOME" which, in practice, boils down to "Use GNOME on Wayland, or don't use GNOME" and is, effectively, a fiat to use Wayland if you want to continue using newer versions of GNOME. I also didn't intend this to be judgemental; GNOME is almost certainly the most complete desktop environment for linux. I personally use KDE as my desktop, but most applications I use are not part of KDE (or even built using Qt). Conversely, a typical desktop user could probably get by using just GNOME applications (plus maybe libre-office for opening MS documents that can't be handled within GNOME). IMO a large part of what makes this possible is by being judicious in what is supported.

superkuh 4y ago
Both of you are concentrating on GNOME DE. GNOME DE doesn't matter. Gtk3/4/5 matters and it, and Gtk using devs writting applications, don't have all the vertical integration and control that the GNOME desktop environment has.
- aidenn0 4y ago
  Maybe I'm wrong, but I get the sense that GNOME is the tail that wags the Gtk dog at this point.
  - superkuh 4y ago
    You're not wrong about control of Gtk. But my point was that if GNOME does drop such X11 functionality while the GNOME DE may not suffer, the far more important and larger set of applications that use Gtk will. GNOME DE won't have problems but the Linux ecosystem will.
    - Crysstalis 4y ago
      >You're not wrong about control of Gtk No, the parent comment is wrong. There is no "vertical integration" or control. It's just an open source project. If anyone was interested in maintaining the X11 support, it would happen, or at minimum it would happen in a fork, but there is currently nobody. If someone is worrying about other parts suffering, they should start contributing now. I doubt this will happen though, nobody has turned up over the past several years, which is exactly why they consider dropping it. Honestly I think most developers who even bother with GTK4 are probably fully on board with wayland, the ones who aren't are still trying to use GTK2 and GTK3.
Crysstalis 4y ago
>and is, effectively, a fiat to use Wayland if you want to continue using newer versions of GNOME. Ok, I get what you're saying, but this is not different from looking at GNOME 2 (which only ran on X11) and saying they declared a fiat that you have to use X11. Any project gets to pick its dependencies.