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Pretty interesting approach to make an X server that is essentially "Wayland-like" (merging display server/compositor by default, isolated apps by default, no r
by sho_hn 10mo ago
Pretty interesting approach to make an X server that is essentially "Wayland-like" (merging display server/compositor by default, isolated apps by default, no remoting of GLX, dropping legacy protocol features to the point of breaking compat with the core protocol, etc.). Not sure who this is for, but by itself it looks like a fairly reasonable set of choices.
- wmf 10mo agoFor people who absolutely have to have X11 this looks like a better plan than XLibre.
- sho_hn 10mo agoIt depends on whether their reasons for "absolutely having to have X11" hinge on actual compatibility with e.g. old binaries or wanting full remoting without streaming pixels. This project would satisfy people who really actually want Wayland, but were upset by transitional pains or interactions they had around it and want to stick with X11 just-cause while getting some similar benefits. This arguably does describe some people but not sure it's a whole lot in the long run. But who knows, maybe this could also make an easier to maintain XWayland some day, or a nice basis for implementing more esoteric X11 bits down the road vs. the older Xorg codebase.
- vidarh 10mo agoI don't "actually want Wayland" because I want the simplicity of X and the ability to run my own wm, but I have no need for legacy X11 requests, for some values of "legacy". Whether this will become viable for me remains to be seen, but I need very little from my X11 server.
- sho_hn 10mo agoFair! Though I'm actually not sure I understand what you mean with simplicity. X11 is so vastly more complicated than Wayland.
- vidarh 10mo agoFor the server/compositor. Not for the client, or if you want to write a wm and is forced to write a compositor. And actually I'm not even even convinced about the server if talking about a minimal server like this that insists on DRI/GBM, and ditches all the old rendering cruft.
- dismalaf 10mo agoSo build on top of wlroots or something. DWL for example is super small...
- ggdG 10mo agoCurrent status: > 2025-08-16: dwl IS CURRENTLY UN-MAINTAINED. AT THE PRESENT TIME, I (@fauxmight) DO NOT HAVE THE TIME OR CAPACITY TO KEEP UP WITH wlroots CHANGES. https://codeberg.org/dwl/dwl https://codeberg.org/dwl/dwl
- dismalaf 10mo agoI said build on top of wlroots, not DWL. And I only brought it up as an example of a small Wayland compositor/window manager because the poster I was replying to wants to build their own anyway. DWL is more interesting as a learning exercise than something to use.
- badsectoracula 10mo agoThe -IMO- important part of that quote is "NOT HAVE THE TIME OR CAPACITY TO KEEP UP WITH wlroots CHANGES". X11 is backwards compatible, you do not have to "keep up" with its changes. wlroots seemingly isn't. This is a significant issue when it comes to relying on most 3rd party libraries.
- mackeye 10mo ago(i worked a _little bit_ on dwl) each wlroots upgrade is a pretty small diff on the dwl source. the annoying part is, as dwl is configured with patches, every patch author has to update their patch to the new 0.x, as dwl is quite minimal, and thus has no stable api. that being said, obviously, dwm doesn't have this problem :) also, for dwl, the issue is that the initial author (not the guy that wrote that notice) is sorta mia, and he has control of the repo on codeberg, so we'd probably need to fork to be safe, and he may not want to take on project lead. (he checks every patch for merge conflicts with one another and upgrade breakages, god bless him lol)
- mathstuf 10mo agoLook into river. It has the window management and keybindings able to be offered by other tools (I have an idea to implement one using XMonad's layouts). It also vastly improved battery on my Dell Pro laptop. 58% battery used in 7h45m (light compilation day, but no suspend).
- mikkupikku 10mo agoThat sounds cool, but TBQH the last thing I want to do is make myself dependent on some obscure piece of tech I've only heard of once before (just now.) My plan is to keep running X as long as I can manage to make it run. If river finds traction and is well known to me in 10 years then I'll consider it then. This is one of my big problems with Wayland; the fragmentation of Wayland imposes an unacceptable cost to picking the wrong DE, whereas with X all my tools for X still work regardless of my DE.
- vidarh 10mo agoI don't have any interest in river. I have my own wm that does exactly what I want, so why would I switch? Wayland doesn't solve any problems I have, and would create new ones, such as having to adapt to new tools or write my own compositor. Battery life just isn't a relevant consideration for me.
- wincy 10mo agoI remember Wayland scared me off of Linux when I tried to switch to Ubuntu a few years ago. I couldn’t watch a movie without jiggling my mouse every few minutes. At the time I feel like it was like “yeah that feature doesn’t exist yet” or something. So I switched back to Windows. It looks like there’s workarounds now but I’ve mostly switch to my fantastic M1 MacBook Air at this point.
- QuercusMax 10mo agoWayland still doesn't support screensavers last I checked, which is wild to me. Truly bizarre that such longstanding feature is just absent.
- jml7c5 10mo agoIt's a matter of designing and proprosing a protocol for it. X11's screensaver support was also a protocol extension. There probably hasn't been much interest in it because screens can easily be powered off remotely, which was not the case in 1992.
- igneo676 10mo agoYeah, most of those real gaps have been solved at this point. I'd encourage you to give it a shot now with Avahi
- Qwertious 10mo agoWayland made writing WMs needlessly hard, and the benefits of Wayland were frankly not real - most of the reasons given in 2011 were patched in to X11 later. All the Wayland rewrite got us was a situation where Wayland is both bleeding-edge and obsolete simultaneously. Say what you like about X11, but by the time people unironically pushed for mass Wayland adoption, X11 was stable and boringly so. The future of WMs is, IMO, Arcan - https://arcan-fe.com/ https://arcan-fe.com/ - but that's an ambitious project and I don't blame the main developer for deliberately going out of his way to avoid advertising it before it's ready. In the meanwhile, Wayland and X11 both more-or-less work with the occasional major pain in the ass.
- bigyabai 10mo agoIMO, if you have to rewrite a display server implementation then you're already proving all the protocol advocates right.
- shevy-java 10mo agoWhy? People complain that the YAML specification/protocol is too complex. This may be, but I found using YAML much, much easier and nicer than XML. So to me these two things are not necessarily interconnected. You can have a great implementation and a crappy protocol; but also a great protocol and a crappy implementation.
- YouAreWRONGtoo 10mo ago[dead]
- sho_hn 10mo ago> "most of the reasons given in 2011 were patched in to X11 later" This definitely doesn't match my memory, and I was there :) Most of the good reasons remain unavailable in X11 to this day. There definitely were some attempts to advance X11 that post-date Wayland, most notably the proposals by Keith Packard, but they never got much traction.
- PunchyHamster 10mo agoFrom my perspective X just got to the point where it just works for me few years ago and Wayland is just introducing more issues than it solves (to be clear it solves no current issue for me, only one that I think might be better for me is handling different refresh rate displays and maybe fractional scaling... and that could probably be done within X11) Like, why simple "copy the screen" got suddenly so complicated? Why every WM suddenly needs a bunch of features that before were just handled by display server, where they belong ? Why some(most) WMs handle title bars but GNOME doesn't ? Why someone decided title bar management is optional to window manager ? X11 might need to go but Wayland have learned no lessons from it. It's just knee-jerk "if X11 done it this way, let's do it differently"
- extropy 10mo agoWayland design choices are heavily influenced by automotive and TV where it has been industry standard way before it became mostly usable as a desktop. And that has lead to design compromises that look odd on desktop. But hey, you can probably run automotive UIs with your desktop compositor. And Gnome devs are just being silly at this point.
- sho_hn 10mo agoThis car runs KDE Plasma's KWin, along with many other Mercedes-Benz models currently launching: https://youtu.be/wo5As8et1G8 https://youtu.be/wo5As8et1G8 https://youtu.be/pqJ-9SUPFwY https://youtu.be/pqJ-9SUPFwY Notably this deployment doesn't use any of the old-gen automotive Wayland cruft like ivi-shell though. It's pretty much the desktop stack now.
- Telemakhos 10mo agoI miss the 1990s Benz 190E I used to drive: the only electronics in sight were the tape deck/radio. Even the door locks ran off a vacuum system. I will never buy a car that runs an X-windows server.
- 10mo ago
- superkuh 10mo agoThe people who absolutely have to have X11 like myself usually have reasons. It sounds like currently a lot of those reasons for using X11 would prevent using this X server. Like reliable non-fragmented and widely supported screenreader protocol. Or the ability to do keyboard and mouse sharing. >Applications will be isolated from each other by default and can only interact with other applications either through a GUI prompt asking for permission, such as with screen recorders, where it will only be allowed to record the window specified or by explicitly giving the application permission before launched (such as a window manager or external compositor).
- nixosbestos 10mo agoAccessibility? Sure. Everything else? Nah, I'm sorry. There are countless ways to do remoting with Wayland. There are countless ways to do kb+mouse sharing.
- superkuh 10mo ago>There are countless ways to do kb+mouse sharing. You realize that's worse, right? And to be clearer: core Wayland protocol does not have countless ways. It has zero. Instead of a single protocol with the strong X11 reference X server the wayland compositors pick and choose between libinput, or libei, or libportal with the InputCapture PR, xdg-desktop-portal with the InputCapture interface, some I've probably missed, or maybe you have nothing at all (weston). It's a gamble if your choice of desktop environment and it's wayland compositor's non-core wayland protocols will match up with those the developer for $software chose. On X11 linux everything that works somewhere works everywhere. With the various waylands if you stay within your desktop's ecosystem you'll probably not notice, but go beyond it and you will. Each wayland desktop pretty much runs it's own compositor with it's own set of third party libs because the wayland core protocol spec is very minimal. I would say incomplete. ref: https://wayland.app/protocols/ https://wayland.app/protocols/
- imtringued 10mo agoThe point of the protocol spec being minimal is that it enables a wide variety of implementations, something it definitely succeeded at. I still don't know how people twist this obvious success into a failure.
- reactordev 10mo agoMy rpi dashboards are gonna love it
- c-hendricks 10mo agoAnything special about Raspberry Pi's that require X11? Raspberry Pi OS defaults to Wayland nowadays, and there's specific kiosk Wayland compositors like Cage (https://github.com/cage-kiosk/cage https://github.com/cage-kiosk/cage). Tho admittedly kiosk-wm (https://github.com/JOT85/kiosk-wm https://github.com/JOT85/kiosk-wm) is much more succinct.
- PunchyHamster 10mo agoless RAM and power usage
- reactordev 10mo agoI write dashboards using X11/OpenGL for displaying otel metrics. GLFW for my window library. Wayland is overkill. I would go straight /dev/fb if it meant I could also antialias and make it pretty and didn’t need a cursor.
- GaryBluto 10mo agoPeople who want to use X11 are likely to be the same people using older software and hardware, which this doesn't support.
- vidarh 10mo agoI don't use any old hardware, and I have argued for a new X server following almost exactly the steps this project outlines.
- nixosbestos 10mo agoGood news. The devs of x11 agree and made a replacement called... Way... Oops
- vidarh 10mo agoYeah, no, the X11 devs made pretty much all the wrong tradeoffs for me.
- nixosbestos 10mo ago[flagged]
- bigyabai 10mo agoI wonder why Valve disagrees.
- yjftsjthsd-h 10mo agoValve ships a Wayland compositor that just runs XWayland for apps and doesn't even expose the Wayland socket by default. I'm really not sure how we're supposed to count that.
- mikkupikku 10mo agoValve being eminently pragmatic, as usual.
- singpolyma3 10mo agoLong term if x11 starts having issues then probably https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayback/wayback https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayback/wayback will be it
- Izkata 10mo ago> which allows for running full X11 desktop environments using Wayland components Wait so is this turning Wayland into a client/server model like X11, where eventually it could support existing window managers and other stuff separate from the compositor? I remember a year or two ago wondering if that would ever happen and I think I only got one reply saying it wouldn't happen because it was unnecessary.
- singpolyma3 10mo agoYes basically. It's one full screen xwayland context you run a normal x11 wm in
- sorpigal 10mo agoIMO this is the real future of Wayland. It should always have been "mere plumbing" for X; the few processes that really need the isolation and security (e.g. screen lock) can be native, everything else should just keep using X, and the "in between" programs can mostly be X programs and implement some wayland protocols for the extra bits they need. Best of both worlds, no compat break.
- adastra22 10mo agoI’m not sure this satisfies X11 needs without remote display capability.
- shakna 10mo agoUntil Wayland actually has an accesibility story, X is really the only choice. Don't think most grassroots projects will have that.
- torginus 10mo agoIsn't accessibility outside of the scope of Wayland, whose purpose is to composite application buffers, and deliver input events? Something like a screen reader needs to talk to an app and query the toolkit for the contents of a window in a semantic way - that's a toolkit feature not a compositor one.
- KetoManx64 10mo agoWhat does this matter for blind people who want to use Linux? All that matters to them is that it's super complicated and nobody wants to work with the tech to make screen readers work on Wayland.
- torginus 10mo agoTo my knowledge, X11 didn't offer a comprehensive accessibility API either - there's no Linux equivalent of stuff like MS Active Accessibility or MSUIA on Linux. Even back then Qt, GTK and everyone else offered their own API and screen readers needed to integrate with every single one - this didn't really change under Wayland, only the sandboxing makes certain operations harder, but the accessibility story on Linux is not great, and never was.
- shakna 10mo agoThe standard was Extended Window Manager Hints [0]. Above X11, implemented by GTK and everyone else. Right. However... Wayland makes it impossible to implement EWMH. Which means the enrire EMWH standard needs to be tossed, and everyone needs to make something new. You can't even get the title of a window, under Wayland. That's private to that process tree. Wayland requires accessibility be implemented at the application level, not the window manager. And thats guaranteed to make it always broken for a majority of use cases. [0] https://specifications.freedesktop.org/wm/latest/ https://specifications.freedesktop.org/wm/latest/
- themafia 10mo agoRewriting it from scratch is so very rarely a better plan than improving what you already have.
- snvzz 10mo agoLong term? Perhaps, if successful. I am hopeful. But, right now, XLibre[0] is available, ready for use and very active. 0. https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver
- KetoManx64 10mo agoJust got a major release as well with tons of new contributors and fixes/additions: https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver/releases/tag/xlibre-xserver-25.1.0 https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver/releases/tag/xlibre-xser...
- kiney 10mo agoI WANT to use X11, its simply better than wayland
- gf000 10mo agoWell there is XWayland then.
- yjftsjthsd-h 10mo agoDepends why you need it. XWayland is worthless for a11y.
- gf000 10mo agoArguably, there is no sane a11y on GNU/Linux anywhere. iOS/Mac/Android is on completely other level.
- yjftsjthsd-h 10mo agoIt's not a single thing. Trying to get a screen reader on GNU/Linux is awful. Getting dwell click is easy on X11 and... some Wayland implementations. Or if you like: It was bad on X, and is worse on Wayland.
- self_awareness 10mo agoWhy a new incomplete implementation would be better to use than a project that is stable, full-featured, and with a proven track record?
- shevy-java 10mo ago> by itself it looks like a fairly reasonable set of choices. I have not tried this myself, so I can not speak from experience, but if they have removed features that people used, then they are in a similar situation as wayland. So I don't see what the difference then would be. Perhaps your analysis was also incomplete?
- sho_hn 10mo agoI consider Wayland's choices reasonable as well. I.e. I it's not surprising that a reasonable attempt to clean up X ends up looking similar to Wayland, just in a slightly different place on the xy graph that has backwards compat and cleanup as its axis.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- imtringued 10mo agoThe thing is, X11/Xorg is a huge monolith. There is simply no way to implement every single feature in one go and then release the competing implementation. The very thing that makes people biased towards X11/Xorg both negatively and positively is that it is a huge monolith and the only X implementation on Linux. The moment you have two implementations, you're gonna get the same complaints against the second X server as Wayland is receiving. You think this is an indictment to the second implementation and that they shouldn't bother by saying an "analysis was incomplete" but in my opinion it's exactly backwards. This is an argument that eternally perpetuates X11 not because of technical capability but rather because it was there first. After all, the moment there is any implementation that is second it might miss a single feature that nobody actually uses, but theoretically could be used when combining an old binary with a new X implementation. But this argument misses the obvious fact that X11/Xorg is already dead since any code change will break existing applications. Meaning X11 has become an unsalvageable fossil.
- torginus 10mo agoThe Linux kernel is also a monolith yet has worked forever without a rewrite. I think there is a reasonably agreed on set of things that can be removed from X, like server-side drawing primitives, and GLX
- LeFantome 10mo agoA lot of people would have preferred this to Wayland if it had come much earlier. If it also runs Wayland apps, many may prefer it actually.
- criticalfault 10mo agowondering who those people are given that Wayland was done by xorg devs
- IshKebab 10mo agoUsers? Obviously xorg devs want to work on something that isn't ancient and crufty. But users want something that actually works and it has taken almost 2 decades to get to that point. Actually I still have more issues on Wayland than X. Although it is at least starting to swing in the other direction - e.g. KDE's screen recording feature doesn't work on X. The button's still there but if you click it nothing happens.
- criticalfault 10mo agoMost users have no idea what is behind. They don't want X or anything X related, they want things to work. Most of the things worked before 2020, including legacy things through xwayland. Now all things work, except maybe remote apps through ssh ootb, but for this you can either use RDP or Waypipe. The only thing maybe worth discussing is video acceleration. this aside, I have been using gnome on Wayland for years and no problems what-so-ever. I really don't know what the fuss is about. I would prefer that people start moving this legacy nonsense behind and finally start accepting new and better things and focusing on things that have future. Same thing happened with systemd, it improves massively everything Linux, yet some people just want their services started with scripts. What problems do you have when things don't work for you on Wayland?
- yjftsjthsd-h 10mo agoWayland: * straight up doesn't work on at least one of my laptops (driver problems AFAICT) * does run on the other one, but crashes at an alarming rate compared to Xorg * breaks all of my accessibility tools (some have (worse) replacements, some don't)
- YouAreWRONGtoo 10mo ago[dead]
- linuxhansl 10mo agoTangentially related... Is it just me, but is Wayland still lagging behind X11? From things like window placement, night light, etc. Things seem to work just out of the box in X11, and there are always issues in Wayland. (For me this is specifically on Fedora, and I always switch back to X11 from Wayland.)
- vladvasiliu 10mo agoWell, isn't this compositor related? I've never had any window placement issues running Sway (i3 for Wayland). I never used night light on that machine, so I can't comment on that particular point, but the thing seems to work just as well as i3. The only problem I have is with JetBrains IDEs, which seem to have shaky support. They're usable (meaning you can code), but the experience is so wonky that I basically consider they don't support Wayland. The reason I switched from i3/x11 is that we've got some 27" 5k screens at work that are basically useless at 100%, and Sway handles different scaling settings flawlessly (except for IntelliJ, which seems lost).
- mihular 10mo agoWayland intellij ide support is in the works, IDEs support X11 out of the box, but you can enable Wayland support explicitly (just search for it). As per Windows placement, Firefox won't restore windows on original positions supposedly because of Wayland, somebody please correct me if I'm wrong.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- bitwize 10mo agoFunny, the other day I started writing an X server of my own. While I appreciate and welcome this work, I still use and write software that makes use of old X draw calls, which I intended to incorporate into my server, unlike the author of this work. So I'm glad to see my efforts have not been made largely redundant!
- vidarh 10mo agoI'd at least consider moving older draw calls into an xlib replacement. Not all of them are suitable for that, but e.g. sufficient font handling to beat Xorgs server side handling requires the Render extension plus ca. 1500 lines of C for a basic TrueType renderer, or half that in a higher level language, or just use FreeType which is a dependency for most X clients anyway.
- bitwize 10mo agoIt's just a hobby, won't be big and professional like Xorg. Aiming for as much protocol completeness as I can manage within those constraints.
- smorrow 10mo agoIs it written in C? If it is and you open-sourced it, someone might port it to Plan 9.
- smorrow 10mo agoWhat I meant by this is, if we had a decent X on Plan 9, we would actually use it, because right now remoting into other systems is just VNC...