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How many X11 holdouts are still around, really? I'm a curmudgeonly old man fond of old tech, but I have still had a Wayland-only setup since early 2020; once Sw

How many X11 holdouts are still around, really? I'm a curmudgeonly old man fond of old tech, but I have still had a Wayland-only setup since early 2020; once Sway was there as a good tiling window manager, and Emacs got its Wayland-ready pure-gtk branch, there was no need to look back. I of course see people here and there on forums express discontent, but I don't think that demographic is big enough to drive both significant development and the adoption that makes development sustainable.

yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago
The trick is: If you use any sort of a11y tools, it's really hard to move to wayland. Things are improving, but it's slow going.
- pseudalopex 1y ago
  Or most remote desktop tools.
phantasmish 1y ago
SteamDeck's desktop mode was X11, last I checked.
- yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago
  Also their gamescope compositor makes the weird but reasonable-in-context choice of being a wayland (micro)compositor... that by default only uses Xwayland and doesn't expose a wayland socket to applications. AIUI this is because, at least to date, X was better for gaming in some way.
zahlman 1y ago
If you are on for example Mint, X11 is chosen for you and will probably be for a few years to come. There is an experimental Cinnamon Wayland session, though.
shevy-java 1y ago
Which demographic do you evaluate? Because I am clearly among the xorg users. I don't even use systemd either.
graemep 1y ago
I still find Wayland to be buggier than X11. it seems to have better display scaling which is useful when I switch between large monitor and laptop screen.
neilv 1y ago
I'm personally open to Wayland, and able to move to it (and sometimes have, though once I had to back it out because it was breaking too much in a critical factory embedded appliance) (and XMonad works noticeably better for me than i3wm/Sway). But not everyone can move to it. Wayland is only one of the many Gnome desktop feature and technical decisions that not everyone agrees with. Some decisions are regressions, and outright defective, for years and counting. There's an awkward situation, in which the companies paying for the programmers effectively get to decide, and the governance doesn't necessarily reflect the user base. But, like "they who has the gold, makes the rules", they who does the work... So the healthy competition comes in when someone someone can afford to spend time to build alternatives. Sometimes expending effort just to undo changes of someone else, on a fork. For example, when Gnome decided to take the desktop behavior in their own creative direction, the Cinnamon project gave everyone back a more familiar and intuitive desktop, which continued to work with all the application programs that people had been using. (Strangely, Cinnamon seems more an enterprise-desktop look&feel drop-in replacement than the default Gnome desktop. When I would've guessed Gnome corporate funders would've been focused on getting Linux desktop on corporate desktop as their first priority, and then second priority would be mobile. But I don't see the default Gnome desktop getting them either. Cinnamon, on the other hand, is immediately usable by any corporate worker who's used any Microsoft desktop since Windows 95.)
- HeinzStuckeIt 1y ago
  > When I would've guessed Gnome corporate funders would've been focused on getting Linux desktop on corporate desktop Already a decade ago, I commented on a news-for-nerds site like this one, “Well, GNOME makes choices we don’t like, but they are focused on the corporate-desktop market.” But then a GNOME developer replied to correct me: “That’s an old misconception, we are not mainly focused on the corporate desktop”. So who exactly they are designing for, remains a mystery to me.
  - neilv 1y ago
    The differences started with the first Gnome startup. Even the two co-founders of HelixCode had differing goals for the platform, and even different visions for the basic nature of it.
iamnothere 1y ago
There are a few. There is still some software that has trouble with XWayland, which could hold back some users, and there are many who aren’t happy with the state of accessibility tools. But I don’t think this justifies the hatred towards it, as it’s not like these issues are unfixable. (Wayland now works better than X for me on all of my systems.) It’s really disappointing how often disagreements in the open source world turn into religious wars. I think it’s because so many would rather yell and scream than contribute a single line of code. So much wasted energy.
invsblduck 1y ago
> I'm a curmudgeonly old man fond of old tech, but I have still had a Wayland-only setup since early 2020 You must not be that curmudgeonly! I haven't tried Wayland yet, and so long as people are still arguing about it, I'm too afraid to even try it. :-)
p0nce 1y ago
The whole audio plugin field is on X11 for formats reason
pmarin 1y ago
I don't use a compositor in XOrg.
MarsIronPI 1y ago
For me at least, Emacs' pure GTK port isn't enough! You'll have to pry EXWM[0] from my cold, dead hands, so until Emacs can act as a Wayland compositor I'm staying on X. That and also Wayland still doesn't seem to support Hyper as an independent modifier. [0]: https://github.com/emacs-exwm/exwm https://github.com/emacs-exwm/exwm
hulitu 1y ago
> How many X11 holdouts are still around, really? A lot. I have no idea how to start "Wayland" on Slackware. I use FVWM. OTOH, i saw Wayland in Tails. It is slow and ugly as hell, window managent is nonexistent.

yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago

The trick is: If you use any sort of a11y tools, it's really hard to move to wayland. Things are improving, but it's slow going.

pseudalopex 1y ago
Or most remote desktop tools.

phantasmish 1y ago

SteamDeck's desktop mode was X11, last I checked.

yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago
Also their gamescope compositor makes the weird but reasonable-in-context choice of being a wayland (micro)compositor... that by default only uses Xwayland and doesn't expose a wayland socket to applications. AIUI this is because, at least to date, X was better for gaming in some way.

zahlman 1y ago

If you are on for example Mint, X11 is chosen for you and will probably be for a few years to come. There is an experimental Cinnamon Wayland session, though.

shevy-java 1y ago

Which demographic do you evaluate? Because I am clearly among the xorg users. I don't even use systemd either.

graemep 1y ago

I still find Wayland to be buggier than X11. it seems to have better display scaling which is useful when I switch between large monitor and laptop screen.

neilv 1y ago

I'm personally open to Wayland, and able to move to it (and sometimes have, though once I had to back it out because it was breaking too much in a critical factory embedded appliance) (and XMonad works noticeably better for me than i3wm/Sway). But not everyone can move to it. Wayland is only one of the many Gnome desktop feature and technical decisions that not everyone agrees with. Some decisions are regressions, and outright defective, for years and counting. There's an awkward situation, in which the companies paying for the programmers effectively get to decide, and the governance doesn't necessarily reflect the user base. But, like "they who has the gold, makes the rules", they who does the work... So the healthy competition comes in when someone someone can afford to spend time to build alternatives. Sometimes expending effort just to undo changes of someone else, on a fork. For example, when Gnome decided to take the desktop behavior in their own creative direction, the Cinnamon project gave everyone back a more familiar and intuitive desktop, which continued to work with all the application programs that people had been using. (Strangely, Cinnamon seems more an enterprise-desktop look&feel drop-in replacement than the default Gnome desktop. When I would've guessed Gnome corporate funders would've been focused on getting Linux desktop on corporate desktop as their first priority, and then second priority would be mobile. But I don't see the default Gnome desktop getting them either. Cinnamon, on the other hand, is immediately usable by any corporate worker who's used any Microsoft desktop since Windows 95.)

HeinzStuckeIt 1y ago
> When I would've guessed Gnome corporate funders would've been focused on getting Linux desktop on corporate desktop Already a decade ago, I commented on a news-for-nerds site like this one, “Well, GNOME makes choices we don’t like, but they are focused on the corporate-desktop market.” But then a GNOME developer replied to correct me: “That’s an old misconception, we are not mainly focused on the corporate desktop”. So who exactly they are designing for, remains a mystery to me.
- neilv 1y ago
  The differences started with the first Gnome startup. Even the two co-founders of HelixCode had differing goals for the platform, and even different visions for the basic nature of it.

iamnothere 1y ago

There are a few. There is still some software that has trouble with XWayland, which could hold back some users, and there are many who aren’t happy with the state of accessibility tools. But I don’t think this justifies the hatred towards it, as it’s not like these issues are unfixable. (Wayland now works better than X for me on all of my systems.) It’s really disappointing how often disagreements in the open source world turn into religious wars. I think it’s because so many would rather yell and scream than contribute a single line of code. So much wasted energy.

invsblduck 1y ago

> I'm a curmudgeonly old man fond of old tech, but I have still had a Wayland-only setup since early 2020 You must not be that curmudgeonly! I haven't tried Wayland yet, and so long as people are still arguing about it, I'm too afraid to even try it. :-)

p0nce 1y ago

The whole audio plugin field is on X11 for formats reason

pmarin 1y ago

I don't use a compositor in XOrg.

MarsIronPI 1y ago

For me at least, Emacs' pure GTK port isn't enough! You'll have to pry EXWM[0] from my cold, dead hands, so until Emacs can act as a Wayland compositor I'm staying on X. That and also Wayland still doesn't seem to support Hyper as an independent modifier. [0]: https://github.com/emacs-exwm/exwm https://github.com/emacs-exwm/exwm

hulitu 1y ago

> How many X11 holdouts are still around, really? A lot. I have no idea how to start "Wayland" on Slackware. I use FVWM. OTOH, i saw Wayland in Tails. It is slow and ugly as hell, window managent is nonexistent.