3 ms·

As a fvwm user, if Linux forces Wayland on me, I guess my 30 year use of Linux may be coming to an end. Oh well.

by jmclnx 11mo ago

sapiogram 11mo ago
As long as you're willing to stay on some old LTS distro, you'll be fine for at least another 10 years. X isn't going anywhere.
cupofjoakim 11mo ago
I find your comment a bit funny on multiple levels. "Linux" does not force anything on you right? It's the community that has by and large decided to move to maintaining other solutions. If you still want to use fvwm you can still run it on arch with x11 until x11 is not maintained and the kernel breaks it somehow
- serf 11mo ago
  >"Linux" does not force anything on you right? >It's the community that has by and large decided to move to maintaining other solutions. If you still want to use fvwm you can still run it on arch with x11 until x11 is not maintained and the kernel breaks it somehow well you just framed it perfectly; it's still forced on the end-user regardless of whether or not you want to call it 'linux' or 'the community that controls and steers linux" .
  - MyOutfitIsVague 11mo ago
    It's not forced if you were getting it all for free anyway and can walk away at any time. "They've stopped giving away old thing for free and are now only doing new thing" doesn't put you in the position of a captive who has no freedom. You can complain, you can develop your own solutions, you can leave, but I find it over the line the number of people in the X11/Wayland conversation whose position amounts to looking at people who are working for free, and demanding that they do a specific kind of free work without compensation or help. It's all people working on their free time, or companies sponsoring the developments they need. It's hard to make demands as an end user who isn't paying or even helping.
- Gud 11mo ago
  "Linux" is mostly controlled by a few corporations and their interests. It's been a loooooooooong time since it was a grass roots movement. I don't know about you, but corporate dictates always leave a bad taste in my mouth.
  - jauntywundrkind 11mo ago
    Oh sure there's absolutely places where this is true. But there's so many many counter examples. Sway, Niri, Hyprland desktops... Top tier incredible experiences begat as small personal passions. So many incredible tools that have become must-have-daily-drivers for folks, alike this modern shell tools thread. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41292835 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41292835 The narrative that everything is corporate and greed is, imo, a deep deep dis-service. Incredible things are happening on the edge, and there's nothing else on the planet remotely resembling the conjunctive discollaboration here. Folks have incredible leverage from existing open source works, & add their own sparkle, time and time again. (Nearly never does this box us in.) For sure there are big projects too, with huge corporate influence and millions of users. But it is a deeply rotten proposition to me to try selling some corrupt world case, that this land here is just as rotten and poisoned as the application/apppliance-ized rest of world. That there's coersion. There's some being left behind the pack, some, but so little. "Linux" is still the best freest most augment-intelligemce computing out there by a light year, and it's trends are healthy. (Wayland in fact has improved & strengthened that stance, freed us from a nasty monolith that everyone had to use, and given us actual freedom of implementation. Wayland is part of the liberation, the addition of choice & liberty. It's wild to me that people seek those old chains.)
    - Gud 11mo ago
      I disagree. The freedom loving hippie hackers of the 90s you can mostly find in the BSD communities, in my not so humble opinion.
      - jauntywundrkind 11mo ago
        Do you have anything to argue that with? I'm all ears, would be neat to see. I already mentioned quite an array of projects that I find inspiring. I can't say I know of anything in particular coming from BSD land. ZFS has adherents for sure but there doesn't seem like there's any innovation or creation or downstream net new coming out of that.
- jmclnx 11mo ago
  Actually it did, well technically it was userland. Pulseaudio was forced on me because Firefox and a few others need it. PAM was forced on me because some applications needing it, I believe that was due to kde. Until v15, slackware had no need for pam or pulseaudio Now many of us are waiting until systemd is forced on us :(
aseipp 11mo ago
For users of older window managers on newer distros where X is likely to be removed "soon-ish" (vs LTS distros), the answer is to just use Wayback. It is a different X11 server implementation that uses Wayland under the hood, and is enough to run your WM. There are already people who use it to run AwesomeWM, IceWM, etc: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayback/wayback https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayback/wayback That said, you cannot run Wayland apps this way, it is purely for X11 only. If applications/rendering toolkits remove X11 support, you're out of luck. But Wayback may actually be a reason for some of them to keep maintaining X11 backends a bit longer, anyway.
ndiddy 11mo ago
There's a new fdo project called Wayback, which is a stub Wayland compositor that runs a rootful Xwayland that then acts as a full X server to host your X11 window manager/DE. Long-term, this will allow people who rely on X11 sessions to continue to run them indefinitely, while also providing better support for modern display hardware than Xorg's native KMS backend. https://wayback.freedesktop.org/ https://wayback.freedesktop.org/
BlitzGeology91 11mo ago
From your perspective, what would Linux forcing Wayland on you look like?
- yjftsjthsd-h 11mo ago
  There are 3 ways I see it happening: 1. Applications or toolkits only supporting Wayland. An example of this is Waydroid, though thankfully that's the only example I'm currently aware of. 2. Desktop Environments only supporting Wayland. Examples now include GNOME and KDE. 3. Drivers only supporting Wayland. I think this may be the case of some "exotic" systems; I believe there are some postmarketos systems that don't have graphics with anything else. Thankfully, the existence of Wayback means this is probably a non-concern.
  - pabs3 11mo ago
    1. GTK is going this way IIRC.
pabs3 11mo ago
IIRC GTK is dropping their X11 support too, so you will need some sort of X11 to Wayland proxy to run GTK apps, including Firefox.

As a fvwm user, if Linux forces Wayland on me, I guess my 30 year use of Linux may be coming to an end. Oh well.

by jmclnx 11mo ago

As a fvwm user, if Linux forces Wayland on me, I guess my 30 year use of Linux may be coming to an end. Oh well.

As long as you're willing to stay on some old LTS distro, you'll be fine for at least another 10 years. X isn't going anywhere.

cupofjoakim 11mo ago

I find your comment a bit funny on multiple levels. "Linux" does not force anything on you right? It's the community that has by and large decided to move to maintaining other solutions. If you still want to use fvwm you can still run it on arch with x11 until x11 is not maintained and the kernel breaks it somehow

serf 11mo ago
>"Linux" does not force anything on you right? >It's the community that has by and large decided to move to maintaining other solutions. If you still want to use fvwm you can still run it on arch with x11 until x11 is not maintained and the kernel breaks it somehow well you just framed it perfectly; it's still forced on the end-user regardless of whether or not you want to call it 'linux' or 'the community that controls and steers linux" .
- MyOutfitIsVague 11mo ago
  It's not forced if you were getting it all for free anyway and can walk away at any time. "They've stopped giving away old thing for free and are now only doing new thing" doesn't put you in the position of a captive who has no freedom. You can complain, you can develop your own solutions, you can leave, but I find it over the line the number of people in the X11/Wayland conversation whose position amounts to looking at people who are working for free, and demanding that they do a specific kind of free work without compensation or help. It's all people working on their free time, or companies sponsoring the developments they need. It's hard to make demands as an end user who isn't paying or even helping.
Gud 11mo ago
"Linux" is mostly controlled by a few corporations and their interests. It's been a loooooooooong time since it was a grass roots movement. I don't know about you, but corporate dictates always leave a bad taste in my mouth.
- jauntywundrkind 11mo ago
  Oh sure there's absolutely places where this is true. But there's so many many counter examples. Sway, Niri, Hyprland desktops... Top tier incredible experiences begat as small personal passions. So many incredible tools that have become must-have-daily-drivers for folks, alike this modern shell tools thread. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41292835 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41292835 The narrative that everything is corporate and greed is, imo, a deep deep dis-service. Incredible things are happening on the edge, and there's nothing else on the planet remotely resembling the conjunctive discollaboration here. Folks have incredible leverage from existing open source works, & add their own sparkle, time and time again. (Nearly never does this box us in.) For sure there are big projects too, with huge corporate influence and millions of users. But it is a deeply rotten proposition to me to try selling some corrupt world case, that this land here is just as rotten and poisoned as the application/apppliance-ized rest of world. That there's coersion. There's some being left behind the pack, some, but so little. "Linux" is still the best freest most augment-intelligemce computing out there by a light year, and it's trends are healthy. (Wayland in fact has improved & strengthened that stance, freed us from a nasty monolith that everyone had to use, and given us actual freedom of implementation. Wayland is part of the liberation, the addition of choice & liberty. It's wild to me that people seek those old chains.)
  - Gud 11mo ago
    I disagree. The freedom loving hippie hackers of the 90s you can mostly find in the BSD communities, in my not so humble opinion.
    - jauntywundrkind 11mo ago
      Do you have anything to argue that with? I'm all ears, would be neat to see. I already mentioned quite an array of projects that I find inspiring. I can't say I know of anything in particular coming from BSD land. ZFS has adherents for sure but there doesn't seem like there's any innovation or creation or downstream net new coming out of that.
jmclnx 11mo ago
Actually it did, well technically it was userland. Pulseaudio was forced on me because Firefox and a few others need it. PAM was forced on me because some applications needing it, I believe that was due to kde. Until v15, slackware had no need for pam or pulseaudio Now many of us are waiting until systemd is forced on us :(

aseipp 11mo ago

For users of older window managers on newer distros where X is likely to be removed "soon-ish" (vs LTS distros), the answer is to just use Wayback. It is a different X11 server implementation that uses Wayland under the hood, and is enough to run your WM. There are already people who use it to run AwesomeWM, IceWM, etc: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayback/wayback https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayback/wayback That said, you cannot run Wayland apps this way, it is purely for X11 only. If applications/rendering toolkits remove X11 support, you're out of luck. But Wayback may actually be a reason for some of them to keep maintaining X11 backends a bit longer, anyway.

ndiddy 11mo ago

There's a new fdo project called Wayback, which is a stub Wayland compositor that runs a rootful Xwayland that then acts as a full X server to host your X11 window manager/DE. Long-term, this will allow people who rely on X11 sessions to continue to run them indefinitely, while also providing better support for modern display hardware than Xorg's native KMS backend. https://wayback.freedesktop.org/ https://wayback.freedesktop.org/

BlitzGeology91 11mo ago

From your perspective, what would Linux forcing Wayland on you look like?

yjftsjthsd-h 11mo ago
There are 3 ways I see it happening: 1. Applications or toolkits only supporting Wayland. An example of this is Waydroid, though thankfully that's the only example I'm currently aware of. 2. Desktop Environments only supporting Wayland. Examples now include GNOME and KDE. 3. Drivers only supporting Wayland. I think this may be the case of some "exotic" systems; I believe there are some postmarketos systems that don't have graphics with anything else. Thankfully, the existence of Wayback means this is probably a non-concern.
- pabs3 11mo ago
  1. GTK is going this way IIRC.

pabs3 11mo ago

IIRC GTK is dropping their X11 support too, so you will need some sort of X11 to Wayland proxy to run GTK apps, including Firefox.