7 ms·

It 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 st

by sho_hn 10mo ago

It 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 ago
I 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 ago
  Fair! Though I'm actually not sure I understand what you mean with simplicity. X11 is so vastly more complicated than Wayland.
  - vidarh 10mo ago
    For 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 ago
      So build on top of wlroots or something. DWL for example is super small...
      - ggdG 10mo ago
        Current 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 ago
        I 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 ago
        The -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)
        gf000 10mo ago
        > X11 is backwards compatible, you do not have to "keep up" with its changes. That's certainly one way to say "no longer developed".
    - LeFantome 10mo ago
      Well, you are not really forced to write a compositor these days as there are libraries that do all the heavy lifting for you. Check out Louvre for example. Or Smithay if you like Rust. And if you want a bit more depth, there is wlroots of course (or the hyprland version). It is not really any harder than writing an X11 WM.
      - kelnos 10mo ago
        wlroots and smithay (I'm not familiar with louvre) do a lot of the difficult work for you, that most compositors will do without much variation but there's still a lot that compositor writers still have to do. It's still a significantly larger task than, for example, writing an X11 WM. (Well, writing an X11 WM that also includes a built-in compositor is a bit more than just the WM, but I'd say still less than writing a Wayland compositor using wlroots or smithay. For example, xfwm4's compositor is around 5300 lines of C, which is... not nothing, but not crazy either.)
        LeFantome 10mo ago
        https://github.com/CuarzoSoftware/Louvre https://github.com/CuarzoSoftware/Louvre
      - vidarh 10mo ago
        Yeah, no I have my own wm in Ruby that is fewer lines of code than a typical Wayland Hello World, and that does what I want. I have no reason to want to throw that away for something that doesn't offer me any features I care about, and removes features I do. Such as the ability to just restart my wm if I make a change to it without affecting my current session at all. Unless you can show me a solution that lets me replace my tiling and floating wm in ca 1500 lines of Ruby, what you're offering me is inferior to what I have with X
        gf000 10mo ago
        It's called an extension. What's the point of mandating a (bad) IPC API?
  - mikkupikku 10mo ago
    What's the simple way for a bash script to get the title of the currently focused window? In X this is easy and the bash script will work with every DE. In Wayland you have to write a different solution for each compositor/DE.. Prove me wrong, please. It shouldn't be hard, all I want to do is fuzzy match window titles to named audio streams in pipewire, but "Oohh noo that's a security flaw!" say the patronizing Wayland developers who care more about making their own lives as developers simple than supporting basic desktop functionality.
    - imtringued 10mo ago
      > In X this is easy and the bash script will work with every DE. In Wayland you have to write a different solution for each compositor/DE.. Prove me wrong, please. I don't know what you expect people to prove other than that X and Wayland both have the same problem but since X is so complicated there is only one implementation to begin with, which makes it look like X has solved the problem even though it suffers from exactly the same problem.
      - mikkupikku 10mo ago
        There are in fact multiple implementations of X and xdotool works with all of them. Typical Wayland advocate, doesn't know what the fuck he's talking about while telling people to just ignore the problems they have with Wayland, probaby because you don't even understand the problem in the first place. Why did you even respond to me? To insult me? To waste my time?
        yjftsjthsd-h 10mo ago
        > There are in fact multiple implementations of X and xdotool works with all of them Are there non-Xorg X servers for Linux that are usable? Asking because I'd like to try them if they exist
    - saint_yossarian 10mo ago
      > all I want to do is fuzzy match window titles to named audio streams in pipewire, > basic desktop functionality I feel your pain, but find your idea of "basic" functionality amusing. That said, `pw-dump` / `pactl` will give you client names, which often match the window titles.
  - torginus 10mo ago
    Afaik Xorg is 'only' like ~500k lines of code, which is not huge by the standards of large porjects. In fact, one of the major counter arguments against Wayland, is that the compositor + a few core libs, like wlroots necessary to provide a similar set of functionalities, is already larger that the equivalent X11 code (which has a ton of unused cruft).
    - gf000 10mo ago
      > like wlroots necessary to provide a similar set of functionalities, is already larger that the equivalent X11 code I absolutely don't buy this.
      - TUSF 10mo ago
        You shouldn't, cause it's wrong. libwayland is 40k lines of code. wlroots is 60k loc. And just to check, sway is about 49k loc.
- mathstuf 10mo ago
  Look 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 ago
    That 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 ago
    I 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 ago
  I 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 ago
    Wayland still doesn't support screensavers last I checked, which is wild to me. Truly bizarre that such longstanding feature is just absent.
    - jml7c5 10mo ago
      It'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 ago
    Yeah, 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 ago
Wayland 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 ago
  IMO, if you have to rewrite a display server implementation then you're already proving all the protocol advocates right.
  - shevy-java 10mo ago
    Why? 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 ago
From 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 ago
  Wayland 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 ago
    This 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 ago
      I 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

by sho_hn 10mo ago

vidarh 10mo ago

I 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 ago
Fair! Though I'm actually not sure I understand what you mean with simplicity. X11 is so vastly more complicated than Wayland.
- vidarh 10mo ago
  For 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 ago
    So build on top of wlroots or something. DWL for example is super small...
    - ggdG 10mo ago
      Current 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 ago
        I 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 ago
        The -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)
        gf000 10mo ago
        > X11 is backwards compatible, you do not have to "keep up" with its changes. That's certainly one way to say "no longer developed".
  - LeFantome 10mo ago
    Well, you are not really forced to write a compositor these days as there are libraries that do all the heavy lifting for you. Check out Louvre for example. Or Smithay if you like Rust. And if you want a bit more depth, there is wlroots of course (or the hyprland version). It is not really any harder than writing an X11 WM.
    - kelnos 10mo ago
      wlroots and smithay (I'm not familiar with louvre) do a lot of the difficult work for you, that most compositors will do without much variation but there's still a lot that compositor writers still have to do. It's still a significantly larger task than, for example, writing an X11 WM. (Well, writing an X11 WM that also includes a built-in compositor is a bit more than just the WM, but I'd say still less than writing a Wayland compositor using wlroots or smithay. For example, xfwm4's compositor is around 5300 lines of C, which is... not nothing, but not crazy either.)
      - LeFantome 10mo ago
        https://github.com/CuarzoSoftware/Louvre https://github.com/CuarzoSoftware/Louvre
    - vidarh 10mo ago
      Yeah, no I have my own wm in Ruby that is fewer lines of code than a typical Wayland Hello World, and that does what I want. I have no reason to want to throw that away for something that doesn't offer me any features I care about, and removes features I do. Such as the ability to just restart my wm if I make a change to it without affecting my current session at all. Unless you can show me a solution that lets me replace my tiling and floating wm in ca 1500 lines of Ruby, what you're offering me is inferior to what I have with X
      - gf000 10mo ago
        It's called an extension. What's the point of mandating a (bad) IPC API?
- mikkupikku 10mo ago
  What's the simple way for a bash script to get the title of the currently focused window? In X this is easy and the bash script will work with every DE. In Wayland you have to write a different solution for each compositor/DE.. Prove me wrong, please. It shouldn't be hard, all I want to do is fuzzy match window titles to named audio streams in pipewire, but "Oohh noo that's a security flaw!" say the patronizing Wayland developers who care more about making their own lives as developers simple than supporting basic desktop functionality.
  - imtringued 10mo ago
    > In X this is easy and the bash script will work with every DE. In Wayland you have to write a different solution for each compositor/DE.. Prove me wrong, please. I don't know what you expect people to prove other than that X and Wayland both have the same problem but since X is so complicated there is only one implementation to begin with, which makes it look like X has solved the problem even though it suffers from exactly the same problem.
    - mikkupikku 10mo ago
      There are in fact multiple implementations of X and xdotool works with all of them. Typical Wayland advocate, doesn't know what the fuck he's talking about while telling people to just ignore the problems they have with Wayland, probaby because you don't even understand the problem in the first place. Why did you even respond to me? To insult me? To waste my time?
      - yjftsjthsd-h 10mo ago
        > There are in fact multiple implementations of X and xdotool works with all of them Are there non-Xorg X servers for Linux that are usable? Asking because I'd like to try them if they exist
  - saint_yossarian 10mo ago
    > all I want to do is fuzzy match window titles to named audio streams in pipewire, > basic desktop functionality I feel your pain, but find your idea of "basic" functionality amusing. That said, `pw-dump` / `pactl` will give you client names, which often match the window titles.
- torginus 10mo ago
  Afaik Xorg is 'only' like ~500k lines of code, which is not huge by the standards of large porjects. In fact, one of the major counter arguments against Wayland, is that the compositor + a few core libs, like wlroots necessary to provide a similar set of functionalities, is already larger that the equivalent X11 code (which has a ton of unused cruft).
  - gf000 10mo ago
    > like wlroots necessary to provide a similar set of functionalities, is already larger that the equivalent X11 code I absolutely don't buy this.
    - TUSF 10mo ago
      You shouldn't, cause it's wrong. libwayland is 40k lines of code. wlroots is 60k loc. And just to check, sway is about 49k loc.
mathstuf 10mo ago
Look 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 ago
  That 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 ago
  I 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 ago
I 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 ago
  Wayland still doesn't support screensavers last I checked, which is wild to me. Truly bizarre that such longstanding feature is just absent.
  - jml7c5 10mo ago
    It'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 ago
  Yeah, 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 ago

Wayland 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 ago
IMO, if you have to rewrite a display server implementation then you're already proving all the protocol advocates right.
- shevy-java 10mo ago
  Why? 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 ago

From 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 ago
Wayland 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 ago
  This 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 ago
    I 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