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GNOME 50 completes the migration to Wayland, dropping X11 backend code

107 points by upofadown 11mo ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20251114122702if_/https://linuxiac.com/gnome-50-ends-the-x11-era-after-decades/ https://web.archive.org/web/20251114122702if_/https://linuxi...

wongarsu 11mo ago
I was mostly surprised by the "Gnome 50" part. Last I remembered Gnome was still version 3. Turns out they jumped from 3.38 to version 40
- ernst_klim 11mo ago
  They are not planning to go Gnome 4, hence Gnome 3.40 became 40. Just like Emacs went from 1.12 to 13.
- hulitu 11mo ago
  > I was mostly surprised by the "Gnome 50" part. Last I remembered Gnome was still version 3. Turns out they jumped from 3.38 to version 40 I think GTK is version 5, so they have to converge somewhere. This is an old trick from SW developers to show a suppose maturity: bump the version number.
  - 1718627440 11mo ago
    To me a larger version number doesn't signify a more mature codebase, it signifies less mature developer and developer culture, that doesn't care about backward compatibility and semantic versions.
  - sph 11mo ago
    Then there’s the Linux approach: bump the major version when Linus feels the minor number is too large.
mx7zysuj4xew 11mo ago
X11 is not going anywhere. If anything it's Gnome adding another nail to its coffin
- gabrielgio 11mo ago
  x11 is in maintenance mode at this point and Gnome is not going anywhere. Gnome is used (and financed) by major distributions. Nothing new is being created with x11 and the people from freedesktop don't seen to be thrilled to maintain it. I don't think should change just for the sake of changing, but I'd start looking to migrate whatever you use that depends on x11.
  - user3939382 11mo ago
    Goodbye to any trace of freedom left on Linux when you combine this with proprietary graphics drivers.
    - happymellon 11mo ago
      Only Nvidia use proprietary graphics drivers?
      - blueflow 11mo ago
        vmxgfx has similar issues.
        happymellon 11mo ago
        If you are using VMWare then the proprietary video driver is probably the least of your issues.
    - dminik 11mo ago
      Freedom is dead when a single implementation is replaced with several competing implementations implementing an open standard.
w4rh4wk5 11mo ago
Does this mean we finally get proper drag-n-drop support back? [1] [1] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/file-roller/-/issues/4 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/file-roller/-/issues/4
- Doxin 11mo ago
  Is that why that broke? I've got more than a few expletives on the tip of my tongue right about now.
bytemode 11mo ago
Blocked in my location. Did a quick search only to find that it's blocked in many other locations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35314374 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35314374
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 11mo ago
  https://web.archive.org/web/20251114122702if_/https://linuxiac.com/gnome-50-ends-the-x11-era-after-decades/ https://web.archive.org/web/20251114122702if_/https://linuxi...
christophilus 11mo ago
I haven’t booted into an X11 environment in maybe 4 years. Wayland has been fine (Fedora + Gnome, Fedora / Arch + Niri). I think this is one of those issues where hardcore users overestimate how much anyone else cares or will notice.
- wltr 11mo ago
  I used X when I started with Linux in my high school. When I finally stopped tolerating macOS almost a decade ago, I started with Wayland only, and never looked back. I even ditched Krita in favour of Gimp, solely because Gimp supports Wayland (from version 3, and on 2.99 before that). To this day, I don’t understand X, like at all. It’s all some super complicated pile to me. While I don’t understand Wayland either, it’s super simple to interact with as a user. That’s all I care about, especially given that Wayland is better with security, multiple displays, has a smaller code base, and whatnot. Each time I see someone says Wayland is unusable to them, I wonder whether that’s some edge case they have, or is it just some habit. I’m happy I don’t need X for anything, so I just wait till most apps would support Wayland.
  - woleium 11mo ago
    Remember x11 was initially a client server model, where multiple clients could access a single x11 server. This brought a lot of complexity we don’t use these days
    - tcbawo 11mo ago
      For certain jobs, I've done development for Linux while also having a Windows box for other things. Opening Linux GUI apps remotely on my Windows desktop is nice and allows me to consolidate my displays. This is an edge case, for sure. How well does Wayland support this?
      - ahartmetz 11mo ago
        AFAIK it's more or less still being worked on. Since Wayland has no support in the core protocol, it's an add-on which needs the compositor to forward input and output streams and then something to compress the video and forward it (+input events) further over the network. I can't say that I got it to work so far, though screen sharing in MS Teams(!) running in MS Edge for Linux does work and uses much of the same functionality. That is with KDE and kwin-wayland.
anthk 11mo ago
Another nail in the coffin. Bye, Red Hat. Bye, NGOME. Non GNU OldIBM Mediocre Environment. I wish GTK4 dies in IBM hands too, for the good. XFCE can go back to a community supported GTK3 anytime.
bjourne 11mo ago
Sadly, I recently had to switch back from Wayland to xorg because clients are getting so memory hungry. My eight year old gpu only has 2gb of vram, which I constantly run out of. Some part of the gfx stack should handle swapping out vram to main ram but it apparently isn't.
- kasabali 11mo ago
  Is it an Nvidia?
killerstorm 11mo ago
I've been using Gnome for years, but, honestly, it just isn't good: seems like it's optimized for very basic use. Something as simple as adding launcher to a panel now requires an extension. Also Wayland has some problem on my system (Thinkpad / Intel Xe) where it randomly just goes slow, this makes it an easy choice to try things other than Gnome.
- BoredPositron 11mo ago
  [flagged]
  - nkohari 11mo ago
    Comments like these are less than worthless. If you're going to contribute, say something meaningful.
    - BoredPositron 11mo ago
      [flagged]
  - ga_to 11mo ago
    Gonna tell him what?
- ginalloa 11mo ago
  As discussed earlier on HN, KDE these days has been the most usable desktop for many users. It is mostly stable, feature rich and can be customized easily.
  - nmstoker 11mo ago
    Yes, fuly agree. And enough time has passed with it being robust and performant that the old bores who used to go on about KDE performance have finally given up bleeting on about that. I wouldn't bash GNOME as clearly plenty of work goes into it and having two decent DE is good for the ecosystem, but for me GNOME never struck a chord compared to the elegance of KDE - it just feels like the Duplo version compared to KDE
aitchnyu 11mo ago
Site is blocked by origin server in India.
szszrk 11mo ago
Transition to Wayland opened so many user experience regressions. Many are solved today, or at least partially solved but... There is still no possibility to have proper remote sessions when using Wayland. On any Window Manager and any distro. It's such a shitshow when you go into details. Nothing works, including third party tools (like NoMachine) and I could find no real hope for actual solutions being designed. The best you can go with "remote session" on Wayland is viewing a desktop session that was already opened by someone directly on the computer. You can partially work around this by... setting your account to be automatically logged in with no password :D And even then it's a crippled experience. A basic feature I used for the past 25 years and helped me to learn linux and offer safe space for others to learn it as well. To work around work computer limitations. To use your best hardware wherever and whenever you want. I currently had to ditch both my favorite distro and WM because of that. But at least we can make screenshots nowadays, so I guess it could be worse.
- eliaspro 11mo ago
  "gnome-remote-desktop" does exactly that - providing (amongst other capabilities) a way to handle remote logins: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-remote-desktop https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-remote-desktop
  - magicalhippo 11mo ago
    It's not explicit from the link, but does it allow the headless login to be resumed from console and vice versa? I tried some solutions in the past but they did not support that, which is a deal breaker.
    - szszrk 11mo ago
      There are no headless sessions on Wayland. At all. You want proper headless session, set up X11 distro and use xrdp - it's really easy. But on wayland "remote support" to something that is already displayed on screen is all you can get now.
      - 11mo ago
Daunk 11mo ago
I don't understand how Wayland is becoming the norm when it can't even restore window positions yet.
- lobo_tuerto 11mo ago
  Tiling window managers are the future.
- saturn_vk 11mo ago
  Why does the display server have to restore window positions?
  - vidarh 11mo ago
    If you want that feature, then the display server doesn't need to be the one to support it when the display server lets applications obtain and control window positions. Wayland doesn't let you do that, and it's a deliberate choice. See e.g.: https://wayland-book.com/xdg-shell-in-depth/interactive.html https://wayland-book.com/xdg-shell-in-depth/interactive.html "However, a deliberate design trait of Wayland makes application windows ignorant of their exact placement on screen or relative to other windows." And: https://hackaday.com/2025/11/11/waylands-never-ending-opposition-to-multi-window-positioning/ https://hackaday.com/2025/11/11/waylands-never-ending-opposi...
    - wakawaka28 11mo ago
      We know it's a deliberate choice. It's just wrong. >This decision affords Wayland compositors a greater deal of flexibility — windows could be shown in several places at once, arranged in the 3D space of a VR scene, or presented in any other novel way. Wayland is designed to be generic and widely applicable to many devices and form factors. Do ANY of these other features work? Furthermore, all our applications are built basically as 2D grids of pixels. What click position do you get if you render the same window in some "novel" way like in two places at once? I don't especially care if any of their space-age bullshit works. It NEEDS to work for the apps we have, which are just pixel arrays. Many users have been ranting about this issue for years and all we get in response from Wayland wackos is basically "live with it!" Nobody has realized any actual benefits in functionality from switching to Wayland. Maybe some graphics nerds with weird monitor setups are geeking out about fractional pixel coordinates and multiple refresh rates. The rest of us are just dealing with issues for no benefit.
wartijn_ 11mo ago
https://archive.ph/2OaGe https://archive.ph/2OaGe
benterix 11mo ago
What a strange title. X11 is still more popular than Gnome, and formulating a wish like a fact doesn't make it so.
- saturn_vk 11mo ago
  Do you have a source for that statistic?
  - CodeArtisan 11mo ago
    Stats from Debian and Archlinux. i can't tell how reliable they are. https://qa.debian.org/popcon-graph.php?packages=x11-common+gnome-shell https://qa.debian.org/popcon-graph.php?packages=x11-common+g... https://pkgstats.archlinux.de/compare/packages#packages=gnome-shell,xorg-server,wayland https://pkgstats.archlinux.de/compare/packages#packages=gnom...
    - roryirvine 11mo ago
      Be aware that Debian's xwayland depends on x11-common, so your number here will be the combined total of Xorg and Wayland. You could try comparing xserver-xorg-core instead, but even then that'll only show you the number of submitters who have it installed, not the number that actually use it. The usual way to get a graphical desktop in Debian (task-desktop) pulls in both Wayland and Xorg, but uses the former by default. The best estimate would be something like the number of xserver-xorg-core installs less the number of xwayland installs. Using that method, it looks like there are roughly twice as many GNOME users as pure Xorg users.
- tokai 11mo ago
  Such a statement is pointless with any data to back it up.
- ColonelPhantom 11mo ago
  Anecdotally, I strongly doubt this is true, although my environment is probably quite biased. I know a ton of people who use Gnome, some who use KDE, and I think roughly all of these people use them with Wayland. The standalone-WM users I know are also mostly on Sway or other Wayland ones. The only real X11 holdouts seem to be people using X11-only DE's, such as Xfce or Cinnamon.
demetris 11mo ago
I was working on a carousel library a few months ago. I had made a few stress-test demos so that I could catch obvious issues while I was adding things and tweaking things. One carousel there had 16K slides. On Windows both Chrome and Firefox managed that fine. They scrolled from start to end and back without issue and you could see, I think, all the frames in my 60Hz screen. On GNOME and X11 (dual boot, so same hardware) Chrome was fine but there were issues with Firefox. I was curious so I logged out and logged in with Wayland. On Wayland Firefox was fine too, indistinguishable from Chrome. I don’t understand hardware, compositors, etc., so I have no idea why that was, but it was interesting to see.
- mid-kid 11mo ago
  Firefox remains very conservative on enabling modern features on X11. Some distributions force them on, but otherwise it's up to the user to figure out how to do that. It's likely that some hwaccel flag in about:config wasn't turned on by default. Similarly, if you want smooth touchpad scrolling, you need to set MOZ_USE_XINPUT2
  - hulitu 11mo ago
    > Firefox remains very conservative on enabling modern features on X11. So old school throthling if you don't use the "right" version (Apple batterygate, Microsoft wordperfectgate). They could blame it on testing though (we only use Wayland and we are too lazy to test the X11 version)
  - demetris 11mo ago
    Oh! That’s interesting. Thank you. My main Firefox in that setup is from the Mozilla repos, rather than the ESR version that is the default in Debian stable. So, it could very well be that. I will have to check to see what the ESR Firefox from the Debian repos does.
iamnothere 11mo ago
Makes sense to move to something actively maintained. I don’t use GNOME, but I have been on Wayland for years in both KDE and tiling WMs. It works great while on X11 I would often get weird flickering and stuttering issues (some NVIDIA bug I could never track down). Anyway, if the X11 die-hards want it to survive, they need to organize an effort to maintain it, not yell at everyone who wants to build something better. I am sympathetic to people who have a working setup and just don’t want to mess with their configuration anymore. Unless you’re on OpenBSD, though, that ship has long sailed in most *nix distros (even “stable” Debian). Long-term stability is underrated but hard to achieve.
Hizonner 11mo ago
Mighty presumptuous to think everybody uses Gnome. I've spent decades using neither Gnome nor KDE.
rich_sasha 11mo ago
I love Linux and vastly prefer it to Windows, but whenever people tell me Linux is vastly more stable than Windows, I think of the whol X11/Wayland saga. I still scarcely know what these are. In fact I actively don't want to know about compositors and whatnot. When I want GUIs, I just want to see them. I can list many crappinesses of Windows, but stuff like this kinda just works.
- wakawaka28 11mo ago
  Linux is extremely stable. There are some exploits for it, but generally you are very unlikely to accidentally get a virus on it. If you don't update your software, it could potentially run for YEARS without a reboot on Linux. Maybe that is possible on Windows but I have yet to see it really. If you mean API/ABI stability, the question is far more nuanced. I think most Linux software you are likely to use will run on any Linux distro equally well, although you may require it to be rebuilt for your particular distro. In the worst case there is always Docker. Statically linked programs can work for a VERY long time across distros. Microsoft probably has a bigger commitment to backward compatibility right now, but Linux binary software can be carried forward for many years as well with few/no changes. The Wayland thing is going to upset this stability, but in theory XWayland should make the old stuff keep working. Most popular distros on common hardware "just work" these days and can be used easily by normal people. You might be confused if you tried to migrate a binary executable forward or between distros and it didn't work, but it is mostly developers and admins who think about such things.
- Ferret7446 11mo ago
  This stuff just kinda works on Linux too. This discussion is for distro maintainers (think of them like OS packagers) and power users. If you just install Ubuntu or Bazzite or whatever, it should just work
- serf 11mo ago
  what's the drive to use a nix but 'actively dont want to know' about things? just need to fulfill some software necessity? The two most major OSs out there specialize in catering to users that don't want to know how the thing works -- it seems like you're swimming against the current a little bit, no? also I don't think that anyone has ever called any nix stable and had software politics and human-stuff in mind ; what's meant is that it doesn't crash and burn when you're trying to use it.
sunshine-o 11mo ago
One of the big problem I am/was facing with Wayland is the performance when accessing a VM with SPICE and virt-viewer. You basically had to use X11 on the host and the guest for everything to work in an optimal way. Do anybody knows if any progress have been made on this front?
- mhitza 11mo ago
  SPICE is slowly being phased out by Redhat, so I'm doubtful we'll see improvements on that front any time soon.
  - sunshine-o 11mo ago
    That would be a bummer ! And with X11 support gone we would have to downgrade to VNC to access our VMs?
    - rand846633 11mo ago
      AFAIK spice just has been succeeded, i forget for what exactly but after the switch everything was better one worked out it the box. I think for virtIO…
erelong 11mo ago
I'm curious to what extent things in this article have been fixed: "Think twice before abandoning X11. Wayland breaks everything!" https://gist.github.com/probonopd/9feb7c20257af5dd915e3a9f2d1f2277 https://gist.github.com/probonopd/9feb7c20257af5dd915e3a9f2d... In my experience Wayland always had problems, so depending on how XWayland works, I'd probably have to drop Gnome if there's no X11 support that's functional and I imagine a lot of others would need to do so (until X11 support is reinstated) What are some better Gnome alternatives that support X11?
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
- immibis 11mo ago
  KDE, MATE, Cinnamon. Gnome has been going in this direction for many years now, where it seems to ship based on the principle of "works on my machine." Gnome is also the driving force behind Wayland. Go figure.
- coldtea 11mo ago
  Most of the arguments sound irrelevant: >Wayland breaks everything! It is binary incompatible, provides no clear transition path with 1:1 replacements for everything in X11, and is even philosophically incompatible with X11 Being binary compatible is a moot point, 1:1 replacement for "everything in X11" are not an issue if the subset you need works or has good replacements, and being "philosophically incompatible" is part of the point of using it. >Even the most basic, most simple things (like xkill) - in this case with no obvious replacement Yes, you can't use Xkill to kill a Wayland-based application- wasn't that a given. You can use regular kill or whatever means your DE provides (several do). If your workflows depend on regular use of xkill, you have bigger problems than it not being available for Wayland.
  - vrighter 11mo ago
    yes but it's no good to me if wayland supports the subset of functionality that you use but not the subset that I need.
lloydatkinson 11mo ago
I can’t believe apps still can’t position their own windows
- immibis 11mo ago
  It's a deliberate decision so it will never change. I'm not surprised that Wayland doesn't allow this (and a great many other things, e.g. window icons) but I am surprised that anyone uses Wayland despite that.
compsciphd 11mo ago
one thing I've asked in the past, is there a headless vnc for use in a wayland only environment, ala xvncserver (and related forks)
- hollow-moe 11mo ago
  Yes, there's a wayvnc project (you need a wlroots compositor tho, so no GNOME). You can start a compositor in headless mode and then connect to it with a fully wayland client like wlvncc
jaitaiwan 11mo ago
My poor xrdp setup
deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
aki237 11mo ago
I have no idea what issues folks are talking about. I use vanilla gnome for my work and personal use case (given with well supported GPUs, read: no Nvidia). All the features work. Zoom/screen share/obs etc., Multi touch gestures work on laptops as smoothly as they were on a mac. HDR has started working recently even in my browser. VRR has been working for almost a couple of years. It doesn't break, most mem leaks that gnome was known for all gone. Almost all the cli X specific tools I use (mostly clipboard stuff) are all available. Initially when I switched I did see like a 10~15% increase in battery usage albeit being smooth.

107 points by upofadown 11mo ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20251114122702if_/https://linuxiac.com/gnome-50-ends-the-x11-era-after-decades/ https://web.archive.org/web/20251114122702if_/https://linuxi...

wongarsu 11mo ago

I was mostly surprised by the "Gnome 50" part. Last I remembered Gnome was still version 3. Turns out they jumped from 3.38 to version 40

ernst_klim 11mo ago
They are not planning to go Gnome 4, hence Gnome 3.40 became 40. Just like Emacs went from 1.12 to 13.
hulitu 11mo ago
> I was mostly surprised by the "Gnome 50" part. Last I remembered Gnome was still version 3. Turns out they jumped from 3.38 to version 40 I think GTK is version 5, so they have to converge somewhere. This is an old trick from SW developers to show a suppose maturity: bump the version number.
- 1718627440 11mo ago
  To me a larger version number doesn't signify a more mature codebase, it signifies less mature developer and developer culture, that doesn't care about backward compatibility and semantic versions.
- sph 11mo ago
  Then there’s the Linux approach: bump the major version when Linus feels the minor number is too large.

mx7zysuj4xew 11mo ago

X11 is not going anywhere. If anything it's Gnome adding another nail to its coffin

gabrielgio 11mo ago
x11 is in maintenance mode at this point and Gnome is not going anywhere. Gnome is used (and financed) by major distributions. Nothing new is being created with x11 and the people from freedesktop don't seen to be thrilled to maintain it. I don't think should change just for the sake of changing, but I'd start looking to migrate whatever you use that depends on x11.
- user3939382 11mo ago
  Goodbye to any trace of freedom left on Linux when you combine this with proprietary graphics drivers.
  - happymellon 11mo ago
    Only Nvidia use proprietary graphics drivers?
    - blueflow 11mo ago
      vmxgfx has similar issues.
      - happymellon 11mo ago
        If you are using VMWare then the proprietary video driver is probably the least of your issues.
  - dminik 11mo ago
    Freedom is dead when a single implementation is replaced with several competing implementations implementing an open standard.

w4rh4wk5 11mo ago

Does this mean we finally get proper drag-n-drop support back? [1] [1] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/file-roller/-/issues/4 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/file-roller/-/issues/4

Doxin 11mo ago
Is that why that broke? I've got more than a few expletives on the tip of my tongue right about now.

bytemode 11mo ago

Blocked in my location. Did a quick search only to find that it's blocked in many other locations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35314374 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35314374

1vuio0pswjnm7 11mo ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20251114122702if_/https://linuxiac.com/gnome-50-ends-the-x11-era-after-decades/ https://web.archive.org/web/20251114122702if_/https://linuxi...

christophilus 11mo ago

I haven’t booted into an X11 environment in maybe 4 years. Wayland has been fine (Fedora + Gnome, Fedora / Arch + Niri). I think this is one of those issues where hardcore users overestimate how much anyone else cares or will notice.

wltr 11mo ago
I used X when I started with Linux in my high school. When I finally stopped tolerating macOS almost a decade ago, I started with Wayland only, and never looked back. I even ditched Krita in favour of Gimp, solely because Gimp supports Wayland (from version 3, and on 2.99 before that). To this day, I don’t understand X, like at all. It’s all some super complicated pile to me. While I don’t understand Wayland either, it’s super simple to interact with as a user. That’s all I care about, especially given that Wayland is better with security, multiple displays, has a smaller code base, and whatnot. Each time I see someone says Wayland is unusable to them, I wonder whether that’s some edge case they have, or is it just some habit. I’m happy I don’t need X for anything, so I just wait till most apps would support Wayland.
- woleium 11mo ago
  Remember x11 was initially a client server model, where multiple clients could access a single x11 server. This brought a lot of complexity we don’t use these days
  - tcbawo 11mo ago
    For certain jobs, I've done development for Linux while also having a Windows box for other things. Opening Linux GUI apps remotely on my Windows desktop is nice and allows me to consolidate my displays. This is an edge case, for sure. How well does Wayland support this?
    - ahartmetz 11mo ago
      AFAIK it's more or less still being worked on. Since Wayland has no support in the core protocol, it's an add-on which needs the compositor to forward input and output streams and then something to compress the video and forward it (+input events) further over the network. I can't say that I got it to work so far, though screen sharing in MS Teams(!) running in MS Edge for Linux does work and uses much of the same functionality. That is with KDE and kwin-wayland.

anthk 11mo ago

Another nail in the coffin. Bye, Red Hat. Bye, NGOME. Non GNU OldIBM Mediocre Environment. I wish GTK4 dies in IBM hands too, for the good. XFCE can go back to a community supported GTK3 anytime.

bjourne 11mo ago

Sadly, I recently had to switch back from Wayland to xorg because clients are getting so memory hungry. My eight year old gpu only has 2gb of vram, which I constantly run out of. Some part of the gfx stack should handle swapping out vram to main ram but it apparently isn't.

kasabali 11mo ago
Is it an Nvidia?

killerstorm 11mo ago

I've been using Gnome for years, but, honestly, it just isn't good: seems like it's optimized for very basic use. Something as simple as adding launcher to a panel now requires an extension. Also Wayland has some problem on my system (Thinkpad / Intel Xe) where it randomly just goes slow, this makes it an easy choice to try things other than Gnome.

BoredPositron 11mo ago
[flagged]
- nkohari 11mo ago
  Comments like these are less than worthless. If you're going to contribute, say something meaningful.
  - BoredPositron 11mo ago
    [flagged]
- ga_to 11mo ago
  Gonna tell him what?
ginalloa 11mo ago
As discussed earlier on HN, KDE these days has been the most usable desktop for many users. It is mostly stable, feature rich and can be customized easily.
- nmstoker 11mo ago
  Yes, fuly agree. And enough time has passed with it being robust and performant that the old bores who used to go on about KDE performance have finally given up bleeting on about that. I wouldn't bash GNOME as clearly plenty of work goes into it and having two decent DE is good for the ecosystem, but for me GNOME never struck a chord compared to the elegance of KDE - it just feels like the Duplo version compared to KDE

aitchnyu 11mo ago

Site is blocked by origin server in India.

szszrk 11mo ago

Transition to Wayland opened so many user experience regressions. Many are solved today, or at least partially solved but... There is still no possibility to have proper remote sessions when using Wayland. On any Window Manager and any distro. It's such a shitshow when you go into details. Nothing works, including third party tools (like NoMachine) and I could find no real hope for actual solutions being designed. The best you can go with "remote session" on Wayland is viewing a desktop session that was already opened by someone directly on the computer. You can partially work around this by... setting your account to be automatically logged in with no password :D And even then it's a crippled experience. A basic feature I used for the past 25 years and helped me to learn linux and offer safe space for others to learn it as well. To work around work computer limitations. To use your best hardware wherever and whenever you want. I currently had to ditch both my favorite distro and WM because of that. But at least we can make screenshots nowadays, so I guess it could be worse.

eliaspro 11mo ago
"gnome-remote-desktop" does exactly that - providing (amongst other capabilities) a way to handle remote logins: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-remote-desktop https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-remote-desktop
- magicalhippo 11mo ago
  It's not explicit from the link, but does it allow the headless login to be resumed from console and vice versa? I tried some solutions in the past but they did not support that, which is a deal breaker.
  - szszrk 11mo ago
    There are no headless sessions on Wayland. At all. You want proper headless session, set up X11 distro and use xrdp - it's really easy. But on wayland "remote support" to something that is already displayed on screen is all you can get now.
    - 11mo ago

Daunk 11mo ago

I don't understand how Wayland is becoming the norm when it can't even restore window positions yet.

lobo_tuerto 11mo ago
Tiling window managers are the future.
saturn_vk 11mo ago
Why does the display server have to restore window positions?
- vidarh 11mo ago
  If you want that feature, then the display server doesn't need to be the one to support it when the display server lets applications obtain and control window positions. Wayland doesn't let you do that, and it's a deliberate choice. See e.g.: https://wayland-book.com/xdg-shell-in-depth/interactive.html https://wayland-book.com/xdg-shell-in-depth/interactive.html "However, a deliberate design trait of Wayland makes application windows ignorant of their exact placement on screen or relative to other windows." And: https://hackaday.com/2025/11/11/waylands-never-ending-opposition-to-multi-window-positioning/ https://hackaday.com/2025/11/11/waylands-never-ending-opposi...
  - wakawaka28 11mo ago
    We know it's a deliberate choice. It's just wrong. >This decision affords Wayland compositors a greater deal of flexibility — windows could be shown in several places at once, arranged in the 3D space of a VR scene, or presented in any other novel way. Wayland is designed to be generic and widely applicable to many devices and form factors. Do ANY of these other features work? Furthermore, all our applications are built basically as 2D grids of pixels. What click position do you get if you render the same window in some "novel" way like in two places at once? I don't especially care if any of their space-age bullshit works. It NEEDS to work for the apps we have, which are just pixel arrays. Many users have been ranting about this issue for years and all we get in response from Wayland wackos is basically "live with it!" Nobody has realized any actual benefits in functionality from switching to Wayland. Maybe some graphics nerds with weird monitor setups are geeking out about fractional pixel coordinates and multiple refresh rates. The rest of us are just dealing with issues for no benefit.

wartijn_ 11mo ago

https://archive.ph/2OaGe https://archive.ph/2OaGe

benterix 11mo ago

What a strange title. X11 is still more popular than Gnome, and formulating a wish like a fact doesn't make it so.

saturn_vk 11mo ago
Do you have a source for that statistic?
- CodeArtisan 11mo ago
  Stats from Debian and Archlinux. i can't tell how reliable they are. https://qa.debian.org/popcon-graph.php?packages=x11-common+gnome-shell https://qa.debian.org/popcon-graph.php?packages=x11-common+g... https://pkgstats.archlinux.de/compare/packages#packages=gnome-shell,xorg-server,wayland https://pkgstats.archlinux.de/compare/packages#packages=gnom...
  - roryirvine 11mo ago
    Be aware that Debian's xwayland depends on x11-common, so your number here will be the combined total of Xorg and Wayland. You could try comparing xserver-xorg-core instead, but even then that'll only show you the number of submitters who have it installed, not the number that actually use it. The usual way to get a graphical desktop in Debian (task-desktop) pulls in both Wayland and Xorg, but uses the former by default. The best estimate would be something like the number of xserver-xorg-core installs less the number of xwayland installs. Using that method, it looks like there are roughly twice as many GNOME users as pure Xorg users.
tokai 11mo ago
Such a statement is pointless with any data to back it up.
ColonelPhantom 11mo ago
Anecdotally, I strongly doubt this is true, although my environment is probably quite biased. I know a ton of people who use Gnome, some who use KDE, and I think roughly all of these people use them with Wayland. The standalone-WM users I know are also mostly on Sway or other Wayland ones. The only real X11 holdouts seem to be people using X11-only DE's, such as Xfce or Cinnamon.

demetris 11mo ago

I was working on a carousel library a few months ago. I had made a few stress-test demos so that I could catch obvious issues while I was adding things and tweaking things. One carousel there had 16K slides. On Windows both Chrome and Firefox managed that fine. They scrolled from start to end and back without issue and you could see, I think, all the frames in my 60Hz screen. On GNOME and X11 (dual boot, so same hardware) Chrome was fine but there were issues with Firefox. I was curious so I logged out and logged in with Wayland. On Wayland Firefox was fine too, indistinguishable from Chrome. I don’t understand hardware, compositors, etc., so I have no idea why that was, but it was interesting to see.

mid-kid 11mo ago
Firefox remains very conservative on enabling modern features on X11. Some distributions force them on, but otherwise it's up to the user to figure out how to do that. It's likely that some hwaccel flag in about:config wasn't turned on by default. Similarly, if you want smooth touchpad scrolling, you need to set MOZ_USE_XINPUT2
- hulitu 11mo ago
  > Firefox remains very conservative on enabling modern features on X11. So old school throthling if you don't use the "right" version (Apple batterygate, Microsoft wordperfectgate). They could blame it on testing though (we only use Wayland and we are too lazy to test the X11 version)
- demetris 11mo ago
  Oh! That’s interesting. Thank you. My main Firefox in that setup is from the Mozilla repos, rather than the ESR version that is the default in Debian stable. So, it could very well be that. I will have to check to see what the ESR Firefox from the Debian repos does.

iamnothere 11mo ago

Makes sense to move to something actively maintained. I don’t use GNOME, but I have been on Wayland for years in both KDE and tiling WMs. It works great while on X11 I would often get weird flickering and stuttering issues (some NVIDIA bug I could never track down). Anyway, if the X11 die-hards want it to survive, they need to organize an effort to maintain it, not yell at everyone who wants to build something better. I am sympathetic to people who have a working setup and just don’t want to mess with their configuration anymore. Unless you’re on OpenBSD, though, that ship has long sailed in most *nix distros (even “stable” Debian). Long-term stability is underrated but hard to achieve.

Hizonner 11mo ago

Mighty presumptuous to think everybody uses Gnome. I've spent decades using neither Gnome nor KDE.

rich_sasha 11mo ago

I love Linux and vastly prefer it to Windows, but whenever people tell me Linux is vastly more stable than Windows, I think of the whol X11/Wayland saga. I still scarcely know what these are. In fact I actively don't want to know about compositors and whatnot. When I want GUIs, I just want to see them. I can list many crappinesses of Windows, but stuff like this kinda just works.

wakawaka28 11mo ago
Linux is extremely stable. There are some exploits for it, but generally you are very unlikely to accidentally get a virus on it. If you don't update your software, it could potentially run for YEARS without a reboot on Linux. Maybe that is possible on Windows but I have yet to see it really. If you mean API/ABI stability, the question is far more nuanced. I think most Linux software you are likely to use will run on any Linux distro equally well, although you may require it to be rebuilt for your particular distro. In the worst case there is always Docker. Statically linked programs can work for a VERY long time across distros. Microsoft probably has a bigger commitment to backward compatibility right now, but Linux binary software can be carried forward for many years as well with few/no changes. The Wayland thing is going to upset this stability, but in theory XWayland should make the old stuff keep working. Most popular distros on common hardware "just work" these days and can be used easily by normal people. You might be confused if you tried to migrate a binary executable forward or between distros and it didn't work, but it is mostly developers and admins who think about such things.
Ferret7446 11mo ago
This stuff just kinda works on Linux too. This discussion is for distro maintainers (think of them like OS packagers) and power users. If you just install Ubuntu or Bazzite or whatever, it should just work
serf 11mo ago
what's the drive to use a nix but 'actively dont want to know' about things? just need to fulfill some software necessity? The two most major OSs out there specialize in catering to users that don't want to know how the thing works -- it seems like you're swimming against the current a little bit, no? also I don't think that anyone has ever called any nix stable and had software politics and human-stuff in mind ; what's meant is that it doesn't crash and burn when you're trying to use it.

sunshine-o 11mo ago

One of the big problem I am/was facing with Wayland is the performance when accessing a VM with SPICE and virt-viewer. You basically had to use X11 on the host and the guest for everything to work in an optimal way. Do anybody knows if any progress have been made on this front?

mhitza 11mo ago
SPICE is slowly being phased out by Redhat, so I'm doubtful we'll see improvements on that front any time soon.
- sunshine-o 11mo ago
  That would be a bummer ! And with X11 support gone we would have to downgrade to VNC to access our VMs?
  - rand846633 11mo ago
    AFAIK spice just has been succeeded, i forget for what exactly but after the switch everything was better one worked out it the box. I think for virtIO…

erelong 11mo ago

I'm curious to what extent things in this article have been fixed: "Think twice before abandoning X11. Wayland breaks everything!" https://gist.github.com/probonopd/9feb7c20257af5dd915e3a9f2d1f2277 https://gist.github.com/probonopd/9feb7c20257af5dd915e3a9f2d... In my experience Wayland always had problems, so depending on how XWayland works, I'd probably have to drop Gnome if there's no X11 support that's functional and I imagine a lot of others would need to do so (until X11 support is reinstated) What are some better Gnome alternatives that support X11?

deleted 11mo ago
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immibis 11mo ago
KDE, MATE, Cinnamon. Gnome has been going in this direction for many years now, where it seems to ship based on the principle of "works on my machine." Gnome is also the driving force behind Wayland. Go figure.
coldtea 11mo ago
Most of the arguments sound irrelevant: >Wayland breaks everything! It is binary incompatible, provides no clear transition path with 1:1 replacements for everything in X11, and is even philosophically incompatible with X11 Being binary compatible is a moot point, 1:1 replacement for "everything in X11" are not an issue if the subset you need works or has good replacements, and being "philosophically incompatible" is part of the point of using it. >Even the most basic, most simple things (like xkill) - in this case with no obvious replacement Yes, you can't use Xkill to kill a Wayland-based application- wasn't that a given. You can use regular kill or whatever means your DE provides (several do). If your workflows depend on regular use of xkill, you have bigger problems than it not being available for Wayland.
- vrighter 11mo ago
  yes but it's no good to me if wayland supports the subset of functionality that you use but not the subset that I need.

lloydatkinson 11mo ago

I can’t believe apps still can’t position their own windows

immibis 11mo ago
It's a deliberate decision so it will never change. I'm not surprised that Wayland doesn't allow this (and a great many other things, e.g. window icons) but I am surprised that anyone uses Wayland despite that.

compsciphd 11mo ago

one thing I've asked in the past, is there a headless vnc for use in a wayland only environment, ala xvncserver (and related forks)

hollow-moe 11mo ago
Yes, there's a wayvnc project (you need a wlroots compositor tho, so no GNOME). You can start a compositor in headless mode and then connect to it with a fully wayland client like wlvncc

jaitaiwan 11mo ago

My poor xrdp setup

deleted 11mo ago

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aki237 11mo ago

I have no idea what issues folks are talking about. I use vanilla gnome for my work and personal use case (given with well supported GPUs, read: no Nvidia). All the features work. Zoom/screen share/obs etc., Multi touch gestures work on laptops as smoothly as they were on a mac. HDR has started working recently even in my browser. VRR has been working for almost a couple of years. It doesn't break, most mem leaks that gnome was known for all gone. Almost all the cli X specific tools I use (mostly clipboard stuff) are all available. Initially when I switched I did see like a 10~15% increase in battery usage albeit being smooth.