3 ms·

I'm on X11 still and completely ignored the train wreck, hoping it'll go away eventually.

by exe34 2y ago

EasyMark 2y ago
It's not going to go away. Wayland is here to stay.
- mkgreen 2y ago
  And so is X11. We are heading for a dual stack desktops. There are tons of expensive applications that target Linux _because_ of X11 and they will rather force users to switch OSes than get rewritten.
  - ac29 2y ago
    If the apps target Linux/X11, wouldnt they also have to be rewritten to switch OS?
    - mkgreen 2y ago
      There are other Unix systems but by far the easiest solution is simply making sure all installed apps can still behave as X11 clients. Wayland or Xwayland is not really any issue. Few people use Xorg directly, as the new deployments usually require some form of a remote access.
  - cesarb 2y ago
    > And so is X11. We are heading for a dual stack desktops. IMO, we're heading for "X11 over Wayland" desktops, in which the only X11 implementation is Xwayland. These expensive applications which target X11 will keep working, through that compatibility layer.
  - kelnos 2y ago
    Pretty much any app that uses a toolkit won't need to be rewritten. Most of them just need small changes, or even no changes. Those that are written to use Xlib directly, sure, they'll take some work (though rewritten? doubtful). If their maintainers don't want to do that, they'll still run under Xwayland.
    - mkgreen 2y ago
      These apps were written for X11 and NFS, so they can run on any node in a cluster. The were typically deployed on commercial UNIX systems and ported to Linux when Sun went belly up. In practice, I don't think porting them again will be needed. It is enough to qualify a different distribution if Redhat chose to exit the workstation market. There are already companies like NoMachine that keep X11 running. It is not even about the access (people usually use nx or even vnc for that). It is about having a system that can work as a part of a cluster (network filesystem, X11), with all base GUI utilities (terminals, file managers, browsers, pdf viewers) supporting that.
  - consteval 2y ago
    I think it's trivial to run X11 applications under wayland, in a sandbox.
panick21_ 2y ago
X11 is basically already unsupported, pretty much all the developers moved to Wayland. Even the BSD and everybody else relaying on X11 has noticed that and they know they can't maintain X11 by themselves. It will 100x not go away, there is no way. Literally all big stakeholder both open source (Gnome, KDE, Fedora and so on) and companies like Valve are all in on Wayland. The reality is, X11 is a complete train wreck and always was. Its just that for a long time people invest in it and made it usable. The same is true for Wayland, things have been improving rapidly in Wayland and it many ways its already better. The train wreck is being cleared and the trains are running again, literally nobody will go back to horses.
- ahartmetz 2y ago
  I mean yeah. Wayland started with a feature aversion from its initial developer, then continued with feature avoidance by committee, the committee in turn required by the "everyone gets to implement the X server equivalent" design and some of the trouble coming particularly from "everyone" including Gnome. Some of these missing features are really not considered optional at this point by many desktop Linux users. But there aren't many left now. I'll probably make the switch in 0.5-3 years ;) What is there in Wayland is really quite clean though, so it will... EVENTUALLY... be pretty good.
- AlienRobot 2y ago
  >X11 is basically already unsupported, pretty much all the developers moved to Wayland In my view, Wayland is basically unsupported. GNOME and KDE support it. XFCE, Lxqt, Mate, and Cinnamon don't. It's been over 10 years. You could make a whole DE from scratch in this time.
  - ac29 2y ago
    > XFCE, Lxqt, Mate, and Cinnamon don't. XFCE, Lxqt, Mate all have at least partial wayland support. Cinnamon has experimental support.
    - AlienRobot 2y ago

I'm on X11 still and completely ignored the train wreck, hoping it'll go away eventually.

by exe34 2y ago

I'm on X11 still and completely ignored the train wreck, hoping it'll go away eventually.

EasyMark 2y ago

It's not going to go away. Wayland is here to stay.

mkgreen 2y ago
And so is X11. We are heading for a dual stack desktops. There are tons of expensive applications that target Linux _because_ of X11 and they will rather force users to switch OSes than get rewritten.
- ac29 2y ago
  If the apps target Linux/X11, wouldnt they also have to be rewritten to switch OS?
  - mkgreen 2y ago
    There are other Unix systems but by far the easiest solution is simply making sure all installed apps can still behave as X11 clients. Wayland or Xwayland is not really any issue. Few people use Xorg directly, as the new deployments usually require some form of a remote access.
- cesarb 2y ago
  > And so is X11. We are heading for a dual stack desktops. IMO, we're heading for "X11 over Wayland" desktops, in which the only X11 implementation is Xwayland. These expensive applications which target X11 will keep working, through that compatibility layer.
- kelnos 2y ago
  Pretty much any app that uses a toolkit won't need to be rewritten. Most of them just need small changes, or even no changes. Those that are written to use Xlib directly, sure, they'll take some work (though rewritten? doubtful). If their maintainers don't want to do that, they'll still run under Xwayland.
  - mkgreen 2y ago
    These apps were written for X11 and NFS, so they can run on any node in a cluster. The were typically deployed on commercial UNIX systems and ported to Linux when Sun went belly up. In practice, I don't think porting them again will be needed. It is enough to qualify a different distribution if Redhat chose to exit the workstation market. There are already companies like NoMachine that keep X11 running. It is not even about the access (people usually use nx or even vnc for that). It is about having a system that can work as a part of a cluster (network filesystem, X11), with all base GUI utilities (terminals, file managers, browsers, pdf viewers) supporting that.
- consteval 2y ago
  I think it's trivial to run X11 applications under wayland, in a sandbox.

panick21_ 2y ago

X11 is basically already unsupported, pretty much all the developers moved to Wayland. Even the BSD and everybody else relaying on X11 has noticed that and they know they can't maintain X11 by themselves. It will 100x not go away, there is no way. Literally all big stakeholder both open source (Gnome, KDE, Fedora and so on) and companies like Valve are all in on Wayland. The reality is, X11 is a complete train wreck and always was. Its just that for a long time people invest in it and made it usable. The same is true for Wayland, things have been improving rapidly in Wayland and it many ways its already better. The train wreck is being cleared and the trains are running again, literally nobody will go back to horses.

ahartmetz 2y ago
I mean yeah. Wayland started with a feature aversion from its initial developer, then continued with feature avoidance by committee, the committee in turn required by the "everyone gets to implement the X server equivalent" design and some of the trouble coming particularly from "everyone" including Gnome. Some of these missing features are really not considered optional at this point by many desktop Linux users. But there aren't many left now. I'll probably make the switch in 0.5-3 years ;) What is there in Wayland is really quite clean though, so it will... EVENTUALLY... be pretty good.
AlienRobot 2y ago
>X11 is basically already unsupported, pretty much all the developers moved to Wayland In my view, Wayland is basically unsupported. GNOME and KDE support it. XFCE, Lxqt, Mate, and Cinnamon don't. It's been over 10 years. You could make a whole DE from scratch in this time.
- ac29 2y ago
  > XFCE, Lxqt, Mate, and Cinnamon don't. XFCE, Lxqt, Mate all have at least partial wayland support. Cinnamon has experimental support.
  - AlienRobot 2y ago