12 ms·

Long live Xorg, I mean Xlibre

84 points by dxs 1y ago

trothamel 1y ago
I've tried to switch a few times, and keep going back to X. It seems like simple stuff - the big one is that I like to remote into my system and look at the screen, and with wayland, there's no way to look at the side monitor like I can with X11 and x11vnc.
shmerl 1y ago
> What I don't like is ANY, I repeat ANY software solution that champions mediocrity. Then it should be proven that proposed alternative to Wayland is not mediocre or worse in issues Wayland is solving. Overall the post looks very shortsighted in looking at these issues from very narrow perspective, seemingly not realizing problems that need solving are much wider and not limited to one use case. Wayland surely is not perfect and needs development (which lately seems to be moving at better pace), but I'm not convinced at all proposed alternative is better.
- devmor 1y ago
  > very narrow perspective, seemingly not realizing problems are much wider and not limited to one use case Ironically, this is the complaint many of us have about the development of Wayland.
  - shmerl 1y ago
    I'd say it's the result of the use cases being so broad, that some get more focus than others. There were obviously pain points that only gradually got better. But it doesn't mean Wayland isn't suitable for addressing those scopes. Someone has to do the work though rather than complain. In the past there were some problems with protocols not being accepted fast enough, those issues were more organizational than technical. But that seems to have been finally resolved not so long ago and a bunch of really useful protocols were accepted recently.
- moomin 1y ago
  I mean, I’m a Windows user so I have no dog in this fight, but it seems like the principal implants are that it’s slower, less responsive and less stable than the alternative. This seems like a primary use case. I’m not sure what the wider use cases you’re thinking of that justify the switch.
  - zdragnar 1y ago
    I used daily drive Wayland. It's fine; for most of what I do I'm happier with it than I am macos or windows. I frequently ran into screen tearing on X, something that I've not struggled with at all on Wayland. I feel for people who are bitten by Wayland, but there's a really vocal negative group on here that I suspect are very much in the minority. Much like the switch from init to system, most people are fine with it.
    - JoshTriplett 1y ago
      It's understandable that people who aren't having problems aren't vocal; people don't usually go out of their way to say "everything's working fine, no issues". Wayland works for the vast majority of people, and it's improving steadily. One of the main differences that leads people to complain is that in X, there wasn't any security between applications, and anyone could write a quick hack that makes things work for them (e.g. watch the keyboard for a key globally, or mirror the display remotely). In Wayland, there's no escape hatch: either the desktop environment needs to handle something, or you need to add a protocol for it. People experiment with new protocols all the time, but the Wayland project itself is (by design) slow and careful about adopting extensions. It is understandable to wish for simpler times. But retrocomputing isn't a path forward here.
  - topspin 1y ago
    > it’s slower, less responsive and less stable And the remote application/desktop story is terrible. I won't consider it until remote is at least as good or better than Xorg, and I don't foresee that happening in my lifetime (literally,) so Wayland will remain a bugbear I'll continue ignoring. I don't know and can't imagine how a recently promulgated desktop GUI platform that doesn't have remote as top priority came to be, but they weren't interested in anything I care about. I welcome Xlibre. It's not the first X fork, and the previous ones turned out great, as far as I'm concerned.
MrArthegor 1y ago
I agree completely with this post. It’s the eternal issue in the GNU\Linux side, reinvent the wheel instead of enhance the existing, and submit half backed solutions and claim it’s the full replacement to the previous solutions
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
devmor 1y ago
I agree with the sentiment of this post in general (annoyance with Wayland being shoved down my throat, despite missing core features of Xorg) but I am rather concerned about Xlibre's future as a project. The README being stuffed with reactionary political dogwhistles is downright weird and doesn't inspire confidence in longevity.
- erk__ 1y ago
  The main author is the person in Linus yells at here: https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/11/linus_torvalds_vaccine_smackdown/ https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/11/linus_torvalds_vaccin...
  - MrArthegor 1y ago
    Honestly the belief of the developers don’t matter at the end of the day. The quality of code is the only thing who matters. And I don’t imply the quality of code is good or not, I have no idea.
    - jubalfh 1y ago
      i don't know about you, but i generally do not want to work with people whose political beliefs include that my country is illegitimate or that hitler's rise to power was caused by the polish and the british doing bad things to the germans.
    - bryanlarsen 1y ago
      Projects of this size cannot be a one man show. So the ability of collaborators to cooperate matters greatly.
      - MrArthegor 1y ago
        Having a controversial reputation in leader is not always a bad thing, look at Theo De Raadt or Linus Totvald. It’s seem to have already attracted contributors, but let’s see how all of this goes in the next’s months.
lelanthran 1y ago
I use Linux Mint, Mate. I occasionally write native GUI apps (not electron-based), and for the current automation application I am working on Wayland is an absolute non-starter[1]. Like the other poster, every few years I would give Wayland a try, but as of today, 17-June-2025, Wayland is still lacking features that I want. I have no objection to using it, I just need it to be a replacement for X. [1] My application uses X11 FakeEvent. Did not find a similar thing for Wayland.
Thoreandan 1y ago
I'm waiting for BoringX or OpenX or, well, any other fork. Search for 'xorg drama'.
- JdeBP 1y ago
  The name that you might be reaching for unknowingly is Xenocara.
tchbnl 1y ago
[flagged]
MarkusWandel 1y ago
I get it about Wayland. Most of X is legacy cruft and even isolating that into XWayland or whatever it's called for backwards compatibility is better than having it front and center. But yes, there are use cases it doesn't cover. Example. My elderly mom uses Linux laptops that I've rigged to (1) always have an SSH connection open to my server machine, with reverse tunnels, and (2) run x0vncserver. Modern security people would cringe, but this is the real world. I can open her desktop any time, from 700km away, and fix serious disasters like: She accidentally double-clicked an email and it opened up in a tab that obscures her message list (Thunderbird). This has worked very well to keep her online and happily emailing. Where is the equivalent for Wayland? I get the impression that "it shouldn't exist because security" and therefore won't. Luckily, the show's not over yet. I run Fedora. The main spin won't do it any more, but the MATE spin is perfect. It comes up in MATE and it uses X! Still happy. Other laptop installations I have running probably use Wayland and as long as nothing breaks, I don't care.
- sudobash1 1y ago
  This is true with more "modern" setups. I tried rustdesk with Wayland. It somewhat works, but you have to be present at the "remote" PC to click a button allowing the sharing. I periodically retry Wayland, and it does seem to be improving, albeit slowly. There are a few significant things that just aren't there, but mostly it feels like death by a thousand paper-cuts. I can't dock toolbars; I can't use xdotools; screenshares are flaky; I can't click and drag to upload to browsers. I could live with Wayland, but the experience is still superior (for my use-cases) with X11.
  - markasoftware 1y ago
    rustdesk is a little sketchy https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/14kjvkg/community_consensus_on_rustdesk_with_all_the/ https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/14kjvkg/communi...
- treve 1y ago
  Does Waypipe solve this problem?
MarkusWandel 1y ago
I should add, we also have a use case for X at work. Run gigantic EDA tool by submitting it to a compute server via LSF. It all works, just like magic; the right cookie is passed, X is remoted, it opens up, no fuss. What's the Wayland way?
GuestFAUniverse 1y ago
If you don't bother about any app being able to spoof on your pressed keys: go, use Xorg. But why stop there, and cope with a multi-user environment? Just boot into single user mode and "chmod a+rwx / -R". A lot of other /problems/ solved too. /S
- panzi 1y ago
  How do accessibility tools work with that? They need to examine and control other running processes.
  - stop50 1y ago
    Fake inputs are done with uinput(kernel interface). Access to the screen is usually over pipewire.
    - panzi 1y ago
      Doesn't writing to /dev/uinput require you to be root? That's way worse security wise than faking X11 inputs. Also you can't direct the inputs to a specific window. That is bound to create problems where events go to the wrong process. Also PipeWire is an audio interface. A replacement to PulseAudio. That has nothing to do with accessing screens.
      - yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago
        > Also PipeWire is an audio interface. A replacement to PulseAudio. That has nothing to do with accessing screens. No, it's a general audio/video system, including video from cameras and virtual video streams from screen capture; see https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PipeWire#WebRTC_screen_sharing https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PipeWire#WebRTC_screen_shar... for some discussion.
        panzi 1y ago
        Didn't know it also does video. But accessibility tools don't just want video, they want APIs to read all text and other GUI structures directly. OCR is just too imprecise and a waste of resources.
anglesideangle 1y ago
As someone who actively uses a wayland compositor and has done so since switching to linux ~4 years ago, I often feel like I live in a different world from the authors of articles discussing its usability. Just to discuss a few points made about wayland's supposed inferiority: > Wayland cannot do (or do well) tons of things: > VNC server > remote desktop I don't regularly use either of these so I cannot attest to whether they work on wayland. > SSH X forwarding https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe > custom keyboard bindings I currently have caps lock bound to esc > numerous accessibility options This is likely true > legacy software xwayland > absolute desktop positioning Once again, I'm running absolute desktop positioning right now > screen sharing and recording I just installed and ran obs, told it to use screen capture as a source, it recorded fine > CAD/EDA tools CAD software only runs on windows anyway. For KiCad, it's seemingly blocked on a window positioning protocol, which wayland will hopefully adopt soon
- markasoftware 1y ago
  the remote desktop stuff is important for some. Waypipe was very slow last time I tried it. That all being said, I actually found the remote desktop situation to be /okay/ on wayland. `gnome-remote-desktop` is decent; though it uses quite a lot of bandwidth, it appeared to be smoother than xrdp when that bandwidth is available. And the sunshine/moonlight pair, while intended for game streaming, worked fine as a usual remote desktop server/client under wayland.
- Arch-TK 1y ago
  The only wayland compositor that I know of that handles XWayland correctly is hyprland. And when I say correctly, I mean that if I am on a non 96 DPI display, e.g. a 168 DPI display (1.75x) and want things scaling properly, Xwayland gets told to pretend that the display size is some resolution in the vicinity of ~1097 by ~686 (not sure how this part works, and honestly I don't think it's relevant) and a DPI of 96. Then xwayland does the most idiotic thing imaginable, it takes the output of applications running under it and stretches it. And now I have vaseline on my screen. No thanks. I may try hyprland at some point to see if there's actual value to using Wayland over X but so far every time I've tried to switch it has been random obstacle after random obstacle. One of the most baffling has been arbitrary restrictions on the scaling factor.
treve 1y ago
[project] is bad because it's missing [pet peeve feature] will never get old. Ultimately open source devs work on what they want to work on. Feature-wise Wayland may be worse in some ways than X11 and better in others, but it's winning because people work on it/with it. But choice and competition is one of the best things about Linux, so if a small group is upset about losing X11 and self-organize to carry the torch, more power to them. Build a great alternative, and maybe present yourself as a choice rather than being so reactionary. You're not a rebel, you're just in a niche and that's OK.
Lariscus 1y ago
[flagged]
- throwaway63097 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - JoshTriplett 1y ago
    If a new startup comes up, and someone points out "they've taken funding from Philip Morris / Altria", that is completely on topic, and will affect how some people evaluate the company. This is comparable.
    - throwaway63097 1y ago
      Calling someone a "reactionary nutjob" isn't really informative. You can put someome's biases on display without insults, just as other commenters have done.
      - jubalfh 1y ago
        indeed. the objective description is “a genuine german neonazi”.
  - em-bee 1y ago
    You'd expect that the changes would've been reverted sooner if that was all there was to it, no? How come they're suddenly a problem? that was my first thought too. if these commits were a problem they should not have been accepted in the first place. was there no review process in place? and if there was no review, isn't that a sign that the project is dead? and if the project is dead what's with the sudden activity? none of this makes sense.
    - Tadpole9181 1y ago
      AFAICT they were reviewed, but too leniently in light of his "improve the codebase" rhetoric. His recent drama and stirring has brought eyes from more senior members of the team, which realized his work was shotty and several changes being made were outright wrong or caused new bugs. More info here: https://www.phoronix.com/news/X.Org-Server-Lots-Of-Reverts https://www.phoronix.com/news/X.Org-Server-Lots-Of-Reverts
marcodiego 1y ago
Having this specific guy becoming the lead/creator/maintainer of Xlibre, strengthens my argument about the kind of people who are against the Xorg->Wayland replacement.
- Starlevel004 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - TkTech 1y ago
    I've been here for 13 years and I've never seen so many flagged throw-away accounts as I have in the series of threads discussing this fork. I was blissfully unaware of this niche corner of the conspiracy hive mind. The README, their anti-vax rants, the "Make X great again!", the way they write... I'm getting Terry A. Davis (RIP) déjà vu.
    - WesolyKubeczek 1y ago
      In the Laundry Files by Charles Stross, doing too much computations in your head may give you a form of brain damage by inviting extra-dimensional feeders to feast on your central nervous system. I feel like while the details may differ, as far as the big picture is concerned, he is not wrong.
      - JdeBP 1y ago
        Funnily enough, it was M. Stross who put me onto the fuss about the X11Libre's project's politics, and the GitHub issue over its README, just under a week ago. M. Stross had some rather strong words to say on the subject.
        SSLy 1y ago
        mind sparing a link to the words?
        WesolyKubeczek 1y ago
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
yongjik 1y ago
Well, it's my understanding that Xorg still cannot do per-monitor fractional scaling these days, have they fixed it? That was the major selling point of Wayland for me, as an occasional linux desktop user. Retina MacBook Pro was released in 2012, about 13 years ago. Personally, I don't think Xorg is in a position to sneer at its competitor for being "beta in quality" after "15 years into making."
- orthecreedence 1y ago
  This is why I jumped to Wayland: laptop monitor and desktop monitor with different resolutions/scaling. Xorg choked, Wayland worked. That said, moving to Wayland broke a ton of other stuff in my otherwise peaceful workflow. I really do not like Wayland, but I need to be productive on my machine. People have sworn up and down to me that the fractional scaling stuff is possible in X but I read probably 10 guides on how to do it and it never worked. Bummer.
- WesolyKubeczek 1y ago
  XFCE solves this by using XRandR multipliers which can be applied per monitor, where the canvas is really big and is scaled however the target display needs it. It's like macOS is doing it, by the way.
  - msgodel 1y ago
    I always thought I'd run into this issue when I got a machine with a hidpi monitor. Well I have one now and use it with a normal monitor and yeah I fixed it with a single xrandr command. It's not clear to me what exactly everyone's problem has been.
    - Izkata 1y ago
      xrandr exposes a lot of stuff that's not available in GUI configuration screens. At least for Gnome, this is one of them.
      - msgodel 1y ago
thesnide 1y ago
Wayland seems the canonical example of https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
- cardiffspaceman 1y ago
  They haven’t simply rewritten the existing implementations of X protocols. They threw away the X protocols and devised new ones that don’t cover all the cases.
palata 1y ago
I don't get the Xorg vs Wayland fight. Feels like it mostly coming from people who don't contribute to either of them. If you like Xorg, use Xorg. If you like Wayland, use Wayland. If you're not happy about an issue, contribute to it.
- charcircuit 1y ago
  The fight is because: 1. freedesktop based on xorg is outdated and needs to be modernized to keep up with competing operating systems. 2. The Wayland movement is and has been run extremely poorly. Both xorg and wayland are bad so it's easy for either side to point that out.
  - palata 1y ago
    > so it's easy for either side to point that out. Sure, it is. But does it matter? I don't think so. I was happy with Xorg, and there were things it couldn't do that I didn't plan on contributing, so I didn't complain to them. I am now happy with Wayland, and there are things it cannot do that I am not contributing, so I don't complain. What I see is that Wayland is quite active and they actually added things I needed that didn't exist a few years ago. That's great. Many people seem to be very vocal about how they prefer Xorg because it works for them: that's great, they can use Xorg. Someone wants to write another one? That's great, let them do it. Linux is about diversity. Don't come to Linux and ask it to become Windows or macOS.
    - petre 1y ago
      > Linux is about diversity FreeBSD and even some Linux distros use boring technology™ that just works, thank you. I don't need breakage due to diversity, I need a stable OS that is reliable, works and doesn't crash.
      - palata 1y ago
        How is that contradicting what I'm saying? You want boring technology that works, there's certainly an open source distro for you. And there are open source distros for people who have different needs. "Diversity".
63 1y ago
I'll throw my hat in the anti-Wayland ring. I have a 5-year-old graphics card from the most popular graphics card company in the world. And yet, in 2025, I cannot run Sway/Wayland on my Nvidia 3070 for more than 20 minutes without a crash. i3/Xorg works fine. Wayland just straight doesn't work and the push to move everyone to it looks ridiculous from my perspective.
- mqus 1y ago
  At least in the past, this was an nvidia issue (not respecting the kernel). But I do understand the user issue here: X works, Wayland does not.
- jauntywundrkind 1y ago
  AMD has great open source drivers that work wonderfully everywhere. Even their old hardware keeps getting amazing upgrades & enhancements, a decade+ latter! Word on the street is Nvidia is doing a much much better job, for a year or so now. But, like, you are using a GPU that sway used to make you type "--i-wont-buy-an-nvidia-gpu-again" and now makes you type --unsupported-gpu to use. It's not Wayland's fault if your video card can't do the pretty same sensible reasonable kernel calls asked of it without crashing. I realize that you might not really care about the distinction, I sympathize highly that it just sucks, and no one in open source likes this (Google image search "Linus Torvalds Nvidia"; 2025 only a bit better than 2012 if your bug report here really true I guess). But fault & culpability matters, and Wayland does way way way less special magic & is way more straightforward with how it handles the display subsystem than X, which half ignores the kernel & has its own absurd driver subsystems and mountains of jank overlapping extensions to do what kernels and GPUs just do these days. GPUs have it easy under Wayland!
  - throwaway63097 1y ago
    > Wayland does way way way less special magic & is way more straightforward with how it handles the display subsystem than X, which half ignores the kernel & has its own absurd driver subsystems and mountains of jank overlapping extensions to do what kernels and GPUs just do these days. Users don't care about your beautiful code and architecture if your product doesn't even work. Making excuses doesn't help anyone - if X can work fine with Nvidia drivers, Wayland's failure to do so is a problem with Wayland.
jmkr 1y ago
A few weeks ago I was looking into `XReparentWindow` because certain things use it (DAW Plugins). I don't think Wayland can do something similar (but I guess XWayland works), GTK and Qt both seem to have their own version. Looking more into plugin libraries, a lot of it is based specifically on X, I don't think that's going to be rewritten anytime soon. I've felt for a while stuck between X and Wayland. Same with Pipewire and Jack/Pulse.
- queenkjuul 1y ago
  Agreed. Wayland has things to offer me, just like pipewire; then I actually use it, and find things i rely on don't work properly. Why in bloody hell is it so hard to persist routing across reboots with pipewire? Why is Wayland turning 17 without a serious replacement for SSH forwarding? Not that Pulse was ever excellent on that particular point, but it mostly worked without resorting to third party apps or hand writing scripts.
StillBored 1y ago
Wayland is architecturally garbage. Not for technical reasons, but social ones. Although social isn't the right word to describe a technology that encourages toolkit/DM/etc fragmentation which in turn breaks core functionality in the wider application ecosystem. Some of this isn't the fault of wayland directly, but it makes it worse. AKA by design there isn't a standard way to iterate windows and detect buttons/lists/various control types/etc which massively complicates if not outright breaks screen readers, while at the same time continues to fragment simple things like theming (and copy/paste is even worse than it was 10 years ago) if an application isn't using the blessed GUI toolkit. And in say fedora, the gnome folks seem to be designing to a device type that doesn't exist, its terrible out of the box with multiple monitors/etc while at the same time being terrible on touchscreen devices. I don't run it that much, but was showing my daughter who is perfectly competent in windows and macos (she carries both around all day!), how to navigate gnome, and jut shocked how absolutely none of it is intuitive to someone who has 'expert' level knowledge of all the common OS/phone UI's. Sure it looks slick, because its not cluttered with 'garbage' like you know, maximize buttons, scroll bars, and other things one might click on with a mouse. All the while doing cool things like reflowing the terminal text whenever the scrollbar appears/disappears. Its this complete lack of supervision/understanding. Sure on a phone touchscreen scroll bars might get in the way, but on a large screen laptop with two 30"+ 4K monitors? And frankly, as someone who works closely with some of these distro's, I think there is a silent majority who have the same opinion but aren't willing to pay the political tax in their ecosystem for standing up and pointing out the emperor is naked for fear of sounding like a Luddite and being sidelined.
- cardiffspaceman 1y ago
  Change-averse people have no valid opinions/s
daft_pink 1y ago
I’m really curious what distros will offer this?
- msgodel 1y ago
  Probably Artix. They tend to like these kinds of things.
msgodel 1y ago
I love the idea of coming up with something simpler than Xorg or even X11. Unfortunately Wayland devs seem to have become user hostile in a way similar to the systemd devs (your use case being incompatible or unsuported is your problem, shut up and let us rearrange the OS etc) on top of the software just not being very good. Basic things like running video terminal emulators just doesn't work as well as it does on X (comparing Xterm on X to whatever on Sway always seemed to have much higher latency on my hardware, even moving the window around seems to lag a frame or two behind where it should be.) At this point wayland itself has gotten pretty old, doesn't support what most desktop Linux users need day to day (at least enough to replace X) and is so unpleasant to deal with I don't think I'll be trying it again. It's a shame, the bar isn't that high. Then again maybe X11 is the oldest still in use graphics API for a reason.
exiguus 1y ago
I understand that change can be challenging, but actively seeking reasons to avoid change is another matter entirely. The criticism of Wayland in this article seems unfounded. Transitioning to new tools can resolve many issues. You have a choice: acknowledge that Wayland is faster, more user-friendly, and more secure, or remain tied to technologies from the 1990s. Since Ubuntu has adopted Wayland exclusively for its new LTS release, I've noticed over the past few days that much of the criticism comes from Windows users who rely on RDP to configure Red Hat or CentOS with a GUI, or something similar. These users have become accustomed to the lack of security in Xorg to perform their tasks. Now, they must reconsider how they maintain their Linux machines. In any case, I was unaware that Wayland was becoming the new systemd. Perhaps this is because I have been using it for more then four years, starting with bullseye (sid) / GNOME, and for about two years with FreeBSD / Sway. I use these systems daily at work without any major issues.
- eadmund 1y ago
  > I understand that change can be challenging It’s less about change and more about outright breakage. Wayland does not support me. > You have a choice: acknowledge that Wayland is faster, more user-friendly, and more secure, or remain tied to technologies from the 1990s. Wayland may be faster, it’s certainly more secure (in the same sense that a system embedded in a ton of concrete and dropped to the bottom of the ocean is more secure), but I’m not convinced that it’s more user friendly. It’s certainly not friendly to me, since it does not allow me to run my window manager of choice. I’m not convinced that the technologies of the 1990s were necessarily all that bad, either. Yeah, there were some assumptions which turned out not to be the case in reality. And yeah, there is a ton of cruft. And yeah, no-one would design X11 the way it is today. But, you know what? X11, unlike Wayland, works for me. I would love to use Wayland, honestly. That’s not a lie. But it doesn’t work. And from what I can see it doesn’t want to work.
  - exiguus 1y ago
    I understand your perspective and the challenges you're encountering with Wayland. It's evident that this transition can be difficult for many, particularly when it comes to maintaining compatibility with specific setups and personal preferences, such as your choice of window manager. When selecting technology, I always consider my specific use case. For instance, at work, I need to manage multiple open windows simultaneously, so I rely on tiled windows across four monitors. To ensure stability and avoid OS issues, I use GNOME with Pop Shell on Debian. On my smaller laptop, where mobility and keyboard-only navigation are priorities, I've found Sway to be an excellent replacement for dwm. The key point I want to emphasize is the importance of identifying your unique use case. Once you understand your needs, you can choose the tools that best meet those requirements. The tool itself isn't the ultimate goal; it's about finding what works best for your specific situation. Typically, there are plenty of tools available that can solve your problem or fit your use case.
ysofunny 1y ago
Wayland has always smelled to me like a corporate grab... but I'm known to be a bit paranoid (understatement)
- inftech 1y ago
  But Wayland is a corporate grab, no paranoid here
- em-bee 1y ago
  by the same corporations that managed Xorg, so i don't see the difference.
Yizahi 1y ago
Author seems to conflate features unique to X11 with "useful" features or "desirable by many" features. I would try to project minimally, but the long list he provides is not that, at least for some significant number of users, or maybe even for majority (I suspect it is). While on the other hand he conveniently ignores that a majority of users do need stuff like working HiDpi scaling, multimonitor use with different scalings, general monitor stability in all scenarios (plug and play from laptop, sleep/hibernate, go to 3D gaming and back to desktop etc.) and other stuff used daily by most users. And which is very brittle or even missing in X-11. For professional use, I can live with Linux without graphical server at all. But for entertainment or creative arts use, monitor "just working per spec" is way more important than those thin client X-11 features inherited from mainframes and mostly unused.
- Gud 1y ago
  Maybe unused by you, but I and many other hackers use those features. I use FreeBSD and use bhyve to run OpenBSD. I also use FreeBSDs Linuxulator to run Linux software(Spotify, haven’t gotten my games working yet). Without X forwarding this is no longer a possibility. It seems to me a large part of the Linux community don’t understand that many of us want to continue living in a world of options. The commercialisation of Linux has been detrimental to the free software community. It seems to me it’s no longer about hacking, enjoying life, but making money(“professional use”, hehe). End rant
  - Yizahi 1y ago
    I would suspect that hacker/geek user share of Linux users is smaller than all other user categories together. I don't want to belittle any group btw, just counting share. So I suspect that many more people need monitor related features than thin client features. Thus a project supporting (or at least aiming to) the former wins in popularity over the project focused on the latter. Same reason systemd won btw. More people (again, I suspect, I'm not collecting stats, only observing market situation) want features from systemd than people wanting complete transparency and plain text support of the init scripts. I wish good luck to people trying to support X11, but it will be hard for them I guess.

84 points by dxs 1y ago

I've tried to switch a few times, and keep going back to X. It seems like simple stuff - the big one is that I like to remote into my system and look at the screen, and with wayland, there's no way to look at the side monitor like I can with X11 and x11vnc.

shmerl 1y ago

> What I don't like is ANY, I repeat ANY software solution that champions mediocrity. Then it should be proven that proposed alternative to Wayland is not mediocre or worse in issues Wayland is solving. Overall the post looks very shortsighted in looking at these issues from very narrow perspective, seemingly not realizing problems that need solving are much wider and not limited to one use case. Wayland surely is not perfect and needs development (which lately seems to be moving at better pace), but I'm not convinced at all proposed alternative is better.

devmor 1y ago
> very narrow perspective, seemingly not realizing problems are much wider and not limited to one use case Ironically, this is the complaint many of us have about the development of Wayland.
- shmerl 1y ago
  I'd say it's the result of the use cases being so broad, that some get more focus than others. There were obviously pain points that only gradually got better. But it doesn't mean Wayland isn't suitable for addressing those scopes. Someone has to do the work though rather than complain. In the past there were some problems with protocols not being accepted fast enough, those issues were more organizational than technical. But that seems to have been finally resolved not so long ago and a bunch of really useful protocols were accepted recently.
moomin 1y ago
I mean, I’m a Windows user so I have no dog in this fight, but it seems like the principal implants are that it’s slower, less responsive and less stable than the alternative. This seems like a primary use case. I’m not sure what the wider use cases you’re thinking of that justify the switch.
- zdragnar 1y ago
  I used daily drive Wayland. It's fine; for most of what I do I'm happier with it than I am macos or windows. I frequently ran into screen tearing on X, something that I've not struggled with at all on Wayland. I feel for people who are bitten by Wayland, but there's a really vocal negative group on here that I suspect are very much in the minority. Much like the switch from init to system, most people are fine with it.
  - JoshTriplett 1y ago
    It's understandable that people who aren't having problems aren't vocal; people don't usually go out of their way to say "everything's working fine, no issues". Wayland works for the vast majority of people, and it's improving steadily. One of the main differences that leads people to complain is that in X, there wasn't any security between applications, and anyone could write a quick hack that makes things work for them (e.g. watch the keyboard for a key globally, or mirror the display remotely). In Wayland, there's no escape hatch: either the desktop environment needs to handle something, or you need to add a protocol for it. People experiment with new protocols all the time, but the Wayland project itself is (by design) slow and careful about adopting extensions. It is understandable to wish for simpler times. But retrocomputing isn't a path forward here.
- topspin 1y ago
  > it’s slower, less responsive and less stable And the remote application/desktop story is terrible. I won't consider it until remote is at least as good or better than Xorg, and I don't foresee that happening in my lifetime (literally,) so Wayland will remain a bugbear I'll continue ignoring. I don't know and can't imagine how a recently promulgated desktop GUI platform that doesn't have remote as top priority came to be, but they weren't interested in anything I care about. I welcome Xlibre. It's not the first X fork, and the previous ones turned out great, as far as I'm concerned.

MrArthegor 1y ago

I agree completely with this post. It’s the eternal issue in the GNU\Linux side, reinvent the wheel instead of enhance the existing, and submit half backed solutions and claim it’s the full replacement to the previous solutions

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

devmor 1y ago

I agree with the sentiment of this post in general (annoyance with Wayland being shoved down my throat, despite missing core features of Xorg) but I am rather concerned about Xlibre's future as a project. The README being stuffed with reactionary political dogwhistles is downright weird and doesn't inspire confidence in longevity.

erk__ 1y ago
The main author is the person in Linus yells at here: https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/11/linus_torvalds_vaccine_smackdown/ https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/11/linus_torvalds_vaccin...
- MrArthegor 1y ago
  Honestly the belief of the developers don’t matter at the end of the day. The quality of code is the only thing who matters. And I don’t imply the quality of code is good or not, I have no idea.
  - jubalfh 1y ago
    i don't know about you, but i generally do not want to work with people whose political beliefs include that my country is illegitimate or that hitler's rise to power was caused by the polish and the british doing bad things to the germans.
  - bryanlarsen 1y ago
    Projects of this size cannot be a one man show. So the ability of collaborators to cooperate matters greatly.
    - MrArthegor 1y ago
      Having a controversial reputation in leader is not always a bad thing, look at Theo De Raadt or Linus Totvald. It’s seem to have already attracted contributors, but let’s see how all of this goes in the next’s months.

lelanthran 1y ago

I use Linux Mint, Mate. I occasionally write native GUI apps (not electron-based), and for the current automation application I am working on Wayland is an absolute non-starter[1]. Like the other poster, every few years I would give Wayland a try, but as of today, 17-June-2025, Wayland is still lacking features that I want. I have no objection to using it, I just need it to be a replacement for X. [1] My application uses X11 FakeEvent. Did not find a similar thing for Wayland.

Thoreandan 1y ago

I'm waiting for BoringX or OpenX or, well, any other fork. Search for 'xorg drama'.

JdeBP 1y ago
The name that you might be reaching for unknowingly is Xenocara.

tchbnl 1y ago

[flagged]

MarkusWandel 1y ago

I get it about Wayland. Most of X is legacy cruft and even isolating that into XWayland or whatever it's called for backwards compatibility is better than having it front and center. But yes, there are use cases it doesn't cover. Example. My elderly mom uses Linux laptops that I've rigged to (1) always have an SSH connection open to my server machine, with reverse tunnels, and (2) run x0vncserver. Modern security people would cringe, but this is the real world. I can open her desktop any time, from 700km away, and fix serious disasters like: She accidentally double-clicked an email and it opened up in a tab that obscures her message list (Thunderbird). This has worked very well to keep her online and happily emailing. Where is the equivalent for Wayland? I get the impression that "it shouldn't exist because security" and therefore won't. Luckily, the show's not over yet. I run Fedora. The main spin won't do it any more, but the MATE spin is perfect. It comes up in MATE and it uses X! Still happy. Other laptop installations I have running probably use Wayland and as long as nothing breaks, I don't care.

sudobash1 1y ago
This is true with more "modern" setups. I tried rustdesk with Wayland. It somewhat works, but you have to be present at the "remote" PC to click a button allowing the sharing. I periodically retry Wayland, and it does seem to be improving, albeit slowly. There are a few significant things that just aren't there, but mostly it feels like death by a thousand paper-cuts. I can't dock toolbars; I can't use xdotools; screenshares are flaky; I can't click and drag to upload to browsers. I could live with Wayland, but the experience is still superior (for my use-cases) with X11.
- markasoftware 1y ago
  rustdesk is a little sketchy https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/14kjvkg/community_consensus_on_rustdesk_with_all_the/ https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/14kjvkg/communi...
treve 1y ago
Does Waypipe solve this problem?

MarkusWandel 1y ago

I should add, we also have a use case for X at work. Run gigantic EDA tool by submitting it to a compute server via LSF. It all works, just like magic; the right cookie is passed, X is remoted, it opens up, no fuss. What's the Wayland way?

GuestFAUniverse 1y ago

If you don't bother about any app being able to spoof on your pressed keys: go, use Xorg. But why stop there, and cope with a multi-user environment? Just boot into single user mode and "chmod a+rwx / -R". A lot of other /problems/ solved too. /S

panzi 1y ago
How do accessibility tools work with that? They need to examine and control other running processes.
- stop50 1y ago
  Fake inputs are done with uinput(kernel interface). Access to the screen is usually over pipewire.
  - panzi 1y ago
    Doesn't writing to /dev/uinput require you to be root? That's way worse security wise than faking X11 inputs. Also you can't direct the inputs to a specific window. That is bound to create problems where events go to the wrong process. Also PipeWire is an audio interface. A replacement to PulseAudio. That has nothing to do with accessing screens.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago
      > Also PipeWire is an audio interface. A replacement to PulseAudio. That has nothing to do with accessing screens. No, it's a general audio/video system, including video from cameras and virtual video streams from screen capture; see https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PipeWire#WebRTC_screen_sharing https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PipeWire#WebRTC_screen_shar... for some discussion.
      - panzi 1y ago
        Didn't know it also does video. But accessibility tools don't just want video, they want APIs to read all text and other GUI structures directly. OCR is just too imprecise and a waste of resources.

anglesideangle 1y ago

As someone who actively uses a wayland compositor and has done so since switching to linux ~4 years ago, I often feel like I live in a different world from the authors of articles discussing its usability. Just to discuss a few points made about wayland's supposed inferiority: > Wayland cannot do (or do well) tons of things: > VNC server > remote desktop I don't regularly use either of these so I cannot attest to whether they work on wayland. > SSH X forwarding https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe > custom keyboard bindings I currently have caps lock bound to esc > numerous accessibility options This is likely true > legacy software xwayland > absolute desktop positioning Once again, I'm running absolute desktop positioning right now > screen sharing and recording I just installed and ran obs, told it to use screen capture as a source, it recorded fine > CAD/EDA tools CAD software only runs on windows anyway. For KiCad, it's seemingly blocked on a window positioning protocol, which wayland will hopefully adopt soon

markasoftware 1y ago
the remote desktop stuff is important for some. Waypipe was very slow last time I tried it. That all being said, I actually found the remote desktop situation to be /okay/ on wayland. `gnome-remote-desktop` is decent; though it uses quite a lot of bandwidth, it appeared to be smoother than xrdp when that bandwidth is available. And the sunshine/moonlight pair, while intended for game streaming, worked fine as a usual remote desktop server/client under wayland.
Arch-TK 1y ago
The only wayland compositor that I know of that handles XWayland correctly is hyprland. And when I say correctly, I mean that if I am on a non 96 DPI display, e.g. a 168 DPI display (1.75x) and want things scaling properly, Xwayland gets told to pretend that the display size is some resolution in the vicinity of ~1097 by ~686 (not sure how this part works, and honestly I don't think it's relevant) and a DPI of 96. Then xwayland does the most idiotic thing imaginable, it takes the output of applications running under it and stretches it. And now I have vaseline on my screen. No thanks. I may try hyprland at some point to see if there's actual value to using Wayland over X but so far every time I've tried to switch it has been random obstacle after random obstacle. One of the most baffling has been arbitrary restrictions on the scaling factor.

treve 1y ago

[project] is bad because it's missing [pet peeve feature] will never get old. Ultimately open source devs work on what they want to work on. Feature-wise Wayland may be worse in some ways than X11 and better in others, but it's winning because people work on it/with it. But choice and competition is one of the best things about Linux, so if a small group is upset about losing X11 and self-organize to carry the torch, more power to them. Build a great alternative, and maybe present yourself as a choice rather than being so reactionary. You're not a rebel, you're just in a niche and that's OK.

Lariscus 1y ago

[flagged]

throwaway63097 1y ago
[flagged]
- JoshTriplett 1y ago
  If a new startup comes up, and someone points out "they've taken funding from Philip Morris / Altria", that is completely on topic, and will affect how some people evaluate the company. This is comparable.
  - throwaway63097 1y ago
    Calling someone a "reactionary nutjob" isn't really informative. You can put someome's biases on display without insults, just as other commenters have done.
    - jubalfh 1y ago
      indeed. the objective description is “a genuine german neonazi”.
- em-bee 1y ago
  You'd expect that the changes would've been reverted sooner if that was all there was to it, no? How come they're suddenly a problem? that was my first thought too. if these commits were a problem they should not have been accepted in the first place. was there no review process in place? and if there was no review, isn't that a sign that the project is dead? and if the project is dead what's with the sudden activity? none of this makes sense.
  - Tadpole9181 1y ago
    AFAICT they were reviewed, but too leniently in light of his "improve the codebase" rhetoric. His recent drama and stirring has brought eyes from more senior members of the team, which realized his work was shotty and several changes being made were outright wrong or caused new bugs. More info here: https://www.phoronix.com/news/X.Org-Server-Lots-Of-Reverts https://www.phoronix.com/news/X.Org-Server-Lots-Of-Reverts

marcodiego 1y ago

Having this specific guy becoming the lead/creator/maintainer of Xlibre, strengthens my argument about the kind of people who are against the Xorg->Wayland replacement.

Starlevel004 1y ago
[flagged]
- TkTech 1y ago
  I've been here for 13 years and I've never seen so many flagged throw-away accounts as I have in the series of threads discussing this fork. I was blissfully unaware of this niche corner of the conspiracy hive mind. The README, their anti-vax rants, the "Make X great again!", the way they write... I'm getting Terry A. Davis (RIP) déjà vu.
  - WesolyKubeczek 1y ago
    In the Laundry Files by Charles Stross, doing too much computations in your head may give you a form of brain damage by inviting extra-dimensional feeders to feast on your central nervous system. I feel like while the details may differ, as far as the big picture is concerned, he is not wrong.
    - JdeBP 1y ago
      Funnily enough, it was M. Stross who put me onto the fuss about the X11Libre's project's politics, and the GitHub issue over its README, just under a week ago. M. Stross had some rather strong words to say on the subject.
      - SSLy 1y ago
        mind sparing a link to the words?
      - WesolyKubeczek 1y ago

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

yongjik 1y ago

Well, it's my understanding that Xorg still cannot do per-monitor fractional scaling these days, have they fixed it? That was the major selling point of Wayland for me, as an occasional linux desktop user. Retina MacBook Pro was released in 2012, about 13 years ago. Personally, I don't think Xorg is in a position to sneer at its competitor for being "beta in quality" after "15 years into making."

orthecreedence 1y ago
This is why I jumped to Wayland: laptop monitor and desktop monitor with different resolutions/scaling. Xorg choked, Wayland worked. That said, moving to Wayland broke a ton of other stuff in my otherwise peaceful workflow. I really do not like Wayland, but I need to be productive on my machine. People have sworn up and down to me that the fractional scaling stuff is possible in X but I read probably 10 guides on how to do it and it never worked. Bummer.
WesolyKubeczek 1y ago
XFCE solves this by using XRandR multipliers which can be applied per monitor, where the canvas is really big and is scaled however the target display needs it. It's like macOS is doing it, by the way.
- msgodel 1y ago
  I always thought I'd run into this issue when I got a machine with a hidpi monitor. Well I have one now and use it with a normal monitor and yeah I fixed it with a single xrandr command. It's not clear to me what exactly everyone's problem has been.
  - Izkata 1y ago
    xrandr exposes a lot of stuff that's not available in GUI configuration screens. At least for Gnome, this is one of them.
    - msgodel 1y ago

thesnide 1y ago

Wayland seems the canonical example of https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

cardiffspaceman 1y ago
They haven’t simply rewritten the existing implementations of X protocols. They threw away the X protocols and devised new ones that don’t cover all the cases.

palata 1y ago

I don't get the Xorg vs Wayland fight. Feels like it mostly coming from people who don't contribute to either of them. If you like Xorg, use Xorg. If you like Wayland, use Wayland. If you're not happy about an issue, contribute to it.

charcircuit 1y ago
The fight is because: 1. freedesktop based on xorg is outdated and needs to be modernized to keep up with competing operating systems. 2. The Wayland movement is and has been run extremely poorly. Both xorg and wayland are bad so it's easy for either side to point that out.
- palata 1y ago
  > so it's easy for either side to point that out. Sure, it is. But does it matter? I don't think so. I was happy with Xorg, and there were things it couldn't do that I didn't plan on contributing, so I didn't complain to them. I am now happy with Wayland, and there are things it cannot do that I am not contributing, so I don't complain. What I see is that Wayland is quite active and they actually added things I needed that didn't exist a few years ago. That's great. Many people seem to be very vocal about how they prefer Xorg because it works for them: that's great, they can use Xorg. Someone wants to write another one? That's great, let them do it. Linux is about diversity. Don't come to Linux and ask it to become Windows or macOS.
  - petre 1y ago
    > Linux is about diversity FreeBSD and even some Linux distros use boring technology™ that just works, thank you. I don't need breakage due to diversity, I need a stable OS that is reliable, works and doesn't crash.
    - palata 1y ago
      How is that contradicting what I'm saying? You want boring technology that works, there's certainly an open source distro for you. And there are open source distros for people who have different needs. "Diversity".

63 1y ago

I'll throw my hat in the anti-Wayland ring. I have a 5-year-old graphics card from the most popular graphics card company in the world. And yet, in 2025, I cannot run Sway/Wayland on my Nvidia 3070 for more than 20 minutes without a crash. i3/Xorg works fine. Wayland just straight doesn't work and the push to move everyone to it looks ridiculous from my perspective.

mqus 1y ago
At least in the past, this was an nvidia issue (not respecting the kernel). But I do understand the user issue here: X works, Wayland does not.
jauntywundrkind 1y ago
AMD has great open source drivers that work wonderfully everywhere. Even their old hardware keeps getting amazing upgrades & enhancements, a decade+ latter! Word on the street is Nvidia is doing a much much better job, for a year or so now. But, like, you are using a GPU that sway used to make you type "--i-wont-buy-an-nvidia-gpu-again" and now makes you type --unsupported-gpu to use. It's not Wayland's fault if your video card can't do the pretty same sensible reasonable kernel calls asked of it without crashing. I realize that you might not really care about the distinction, I sympathize highly that it just sucks, and no one in open source likes this (Google image search "Linus Torvalds Nvidia"; 2025 only a bit better than 2012 if your bug report here really true I guess). But fault & culpability matters, and Wayland does way way way less special magic & is way more straightforward with how it handles the display subsystem than X, which half ignores the kernel & has its own absurd driver subsystems and mountains of jank overlapping extensions to do what kernels and GPUs just do these days. GPUs have it easy under Wayland!
- throwaway63097 1y ago
  > Wayland does way way way less special magic & is way more straightforward with how it handles the display subsystem than X, which half ignores the kernel & has its own absurd driver subsystems and mountains of jank overlapping extensions to do what kernels and GPUs just do these days. Users don't care about your beautiful code and architecture if your product doesn't even work. Making excuses doesn't help anyone - if X can work fine with Nvidia drivers, Wayland's failure to do so is a problem with Wayland.

jmkr 1y ago

A few weeks ago I was looking into `XReparentWindow` because certain things use it (DAW Plugins). I don't think Wayland can do something similar (but I guess XWayland works), GTK and Qt both seem to have their own version. Looking more into plugin libraries, a lot of it is based specifically on X, I don't think that's going to be rewritten anytime soon. I've felt for a while stuck between X and Wayland. Same with Pipewire and Jack/Pulse.

queenkjuul 1y ago
Agreed. Wayland has things to offer me, just like pipewire; then I actually use it, and find things i rely on don't work properly. Why in bloody hell is it so hard to persist routing across reboots with pipewire? Why is Wayland turning 17 without a serious replacement for SSH forwarding? Not that Pulse was ever excellent on that particular point, but it mostly worked without resorting to third party apps or hand writing scripts.

StillBored 1y ago

Wayland is architecturally garbage. Not for technical reasons, but social ones. Although social isn't the right word to describe a technology that encourages toolkit/DM/etc fragmentation which in turn breaks core functionality in the wider application ecosystem. Some of this isn't the fault of wayland directly, but it makes it worse. AKA by design there isn't a standard way to iterate windows and detect buttons/lists/various control types/etc which massively complicates if not outright breaks screen readers, while at the same time continues to fragment simple things like theming (and copy/paste is even worse than it was 10 years ago) if an application isn't using the blessed GUI toolkit. And in say fedora, the gnome folks seem to be designing to a device type that doesn't exist, its terrible out of the box with multiple monitors/etc while at the same time being terrible on touchscreen devices. I don't run it that much, but was showing my daughter who is perfectly competent in windows and macos (she carries both around all day!), how to navigate gnome, and jut shocked how absolutely none of it is intuitive to someone who has 'expert' level knowledge of all the common OS/phone UI's. Sure it looks slick, because its not cluttered with 'garbage' like you know, maximize buttons, scroll bars, and other things one might click on with a mouse. All the while doing cool things like reflowing the terminal text whenever the scrollbar appears/disappears. Its this complete lack of supervision/understanding. Sure on a phone touchscreen scroll bars might get in the way, but on a large screen laptop with two 30"+ 4K monitors? And frankly, as someone who works closely with some of these distro's, I think there is a silent majority who have the same opinion but aren't willing to pay the political tax in their ecosystem for standing up and pointing out the emperor is naked for fear of sounding like a Luddite and being sidelined.

cardiffspaceman 1y ago
Change-averse people have no valid opinions/s

daft_pink 1y ago

I’m really curious what distros will offer this?

msgodel 1y ago
Probably Artix. They tend to like these kinds of things.

msgodel 1y ago

I love the idea of coming up with something simpler than Xorg or even X11. Unfortunately Wayland devs seem to have become user hostile in a way similar to the systemd devs (your use case being incompatible or unsuported is your problem, shut up and let us rearrange the OS etc) on top of the software just not being very good. Basic things like running video terminal emulators just doesn't work as well as it does on X (comparing Xterm on X to whatever on Sway always seemed to have much higher latency on my hardware, even moving the window around seems to lag a frame or two behind where it should be.) At this point wayland itself has gotten pretty old, doesn't support what most desktop Linux users need day to day (at least enough to replace X) and is so unpleasant to deal with I don't think I'll be trying it again. It's a shame, the bar isn't that high. Then again maybe X11 is the oldest still in use graphics API for a reason.

exiguus 1y ago

I understand that change can be challenging, but actively seeking reasons to avoid change is another matter entirely. The criticism of Wayland in this article seems unfounded. Transitioning to new tools can resolve many issues. You have a choice: acknowledge that Wayland is faster, more user-friendly, and more secure, or remain tied to technologies from the 1990s. Since Ubuntu has adopted Wayland exclusively for its new LTS release, I've noticed over the past few days that much of the criticism comes from Windows users who rely on RDP to configure Red Hat or CentOS with a GUI, or something similar. These users have become accustomed to the lack of security in Xorg to perform their tasks. Now, they must reconsider how they maintain their Linux machines. In any case, I was unaware that Wayland was becoming the new systemd. Perhaps this is because I have been using it for more then four years, starting with bullseye (sid) / GNOME, and for about two years with FreeBSD / Sway. I use these systems daily at work without any major issues.

eadmund 1y ago
> I understand that change can be challenging It’s less about change and more about outright breakage. Wayland does not support me. > You have a choice: acknowledge that Wayland is faster, more user-friendly, and more secure, or remain tied to technologies from the 1990s. Wayland may be faster, it’s certainly more secure (in the same sense that a system embedded in a ton of concrete and dropped to the bottom of the ocean is more secure), but I’m not convinced that it’s more user friendly. It’s certainly not friendly to me, since it does not allow me to run my window manager of choice. I’m not convinced that the technologies of the 1990s were necessarily all that bad, either. Yeah, there were some assumptions which turned out not to be the case in reality. And yeah, there is a ton of cruft. And yeah, no-one would design X11 the way it is today. But, you know what? X11, unlike Wayland, works for me. I would love to use Wayland, honestly. That’s not a lie. But it doesn’t work. And from what I can see it doesn’t want to work.
- exiguus 1y ago
  I understand your perspective and the challenges you're encountering with Wayland. It's evident that this transition can be difficult for many, particularly when it comes to maintaining compatibility with specific setups and personal preferences, such as your choice of window manager. When selecting technology, I always consider my specific use case. For instance, at work, I need to manage multiple open windows simultaneously, so I rely on tiled windows across four monitors. To ensure stability and avoid OS issues, I use GNOME with Pop Shell on Debian. On my smaller laptop, where mobility and keyboard-only navigation are priorities, I've found Sway to be an excellent replacement for dwm. The key point I want to emphasize is the importance of identifying your unique use case. Once you understand your needs, you can choose the tools that best meet those requirements. The tool itself isn't the ultimate goal; it's about finding what works best for your specific situation. Typically, there are plenty of tools available that can solve your problem or fit your use case.

ysofunny 1y ago

Wayland has always smelled to me like a corporate grab... but I'm known to be a bit paranoid (understatement)

inftech 1y ago
But Wayland is a corporate grab, no paranoid here
em-bee 1y ago
by the same corporations that managed Xorg, so i don't see the difference.

Yizahi 1y ago

Author seems to conflate features unique to X11 with "useful" features or "desirable by many" features. I would try to project minimally, but the long list he provides is not that, at least for some significant number of users, or maybe even for majority (I suspect it is). While on the other hand he conveniently ignores that a majority of users do need stuff like working HiDpi scaling, multimonitor use with different scalings, general monitor stability in all scenarios (plug and play from laptop, sleep/hibernate, go to 3D gaming and back to desktop etc.) and other stuff used daily by most users. And which is very brittle or even missing in X-11. For professional use, I can live with Linux without graphical server at all. But for entertainment or creative arts use, monitor "just working per spec" is way more important than those thin client X-11 features inherited from mainframes and mostly unused.

Gud 1y ago
Maybe unused by you, but I and many other hackers use those features. I use FreeBSD and use bhyve to run OpenBSD. I also use FreeBSDs Linuxulator to run Linux software(Spotify, haven’t gotten my games working yet). Without X forwarding this is no longer a possibility. It seems to me a large part of the Linux community don’t understand that many of us want to continue living in a world of options. The commercialisation of Linux has been detrimental to the free software community. It seems to me it’s no longer about hacking, enjoying life, but making money(“professional use”, hehe). End rant
- Yizahi 1y ago
  I would suspect that hacker/geek user share of Linux users is smaller than all other user categories together. I don't want to belittle any group btw, just counting share. So I suspect that many more people need monitor related features than thin client features. Thus a project supporting (or at least aiming to) the former wins in popularity over the project focused on the latter. Same reason systemd won btw. More people (again, I suspect, I'm not collecting stats, only observing market situation) want features from systemd than people wanting complete transparency and plain text support of the init scripts. I wish good luck to people trying to support X11, but it will be hard for them I guess.