For those wanting to build a Wayland-only Linux desktop experience without carrying any aging X11 baggage, GNOME 47 will be able to optionally offer Wayland-only support without carrying X11/X.Org support. This Mutter merge request landed today that allows compiling Mutter with X11 support disabled. That landed today along with this GNOME Shell merge request for being able to disable X11 support too.
This is great news. Shipping X11 on a system that doesn’t need it is a big waste.
I love the fact that it’s optional.
I wonder how long it’ll be possible to build Gnome with Xorg support. If I had to guess I’d say there won’t be any support within the next 3 years, because keeping future Gnome working with Xorg is work nobody wants to put in.
That said, Xwayland will likely keep being around for the foreseeable future.
Out of curiosity, do you use Xorg and if yes, what’s keeping you from using Wayland?
XOrg is my daily driver for these reasons:
- I mostly use XFCE, which doesn’t have Wayland yet
- last time I tried Wayland (long time ago now on Gnomr), it was buggy and didn’t work
- I don’t change my setups that much, so I haven’t tried it since
- I don’t need the features Wayland offers/XOrg covers my use cases
- Wayland drama
That being said, I have no fundamental opposition to Wayland, and will probably use it someday.
Those are all good reasons. XFCE aims to support Wayland with the next release, so if they choose to use an established compositor it shouldn’t be too buggy.
With XFCE porting their apps over the setup shouldn’t change much, unless you’re using Xorg specific tools.
Over the last few years most features I’d expect from a windowing system were added to Wayland, so I expect the drama to cool down. (I don’t even know what’s still missing (except accessibility), with VRR, tearing, DRM leasing (VR), and global hotkeys being done. It’s just apps like Discord that have to cave in under the pressure to fix their apps.)
Once everything works, there’s no point talking about it.
@Furycd001@fosstodon.org
@wer2 @Chewy7324 exactly the same here. I too daily drive XFCE, never really change my setup, and don’t require anything special that wayland offers. My setup just works for the most part…
@Chewy7324 @GolfNovemberUniform I’d say as soon as screen readers work properly under Wayland, they could drop X11 builds. But they should definitely not do it before fixing that.
Proper screen sharing and xclicker is Why I occasionally switch back to X
Have you tried using ydotool or other wayland alternatives to xclicker? Last I used it, ydotool ran great.
Not OP, but I use sunshine and moonlight for streaming my pc to various devices. Wayland forces me to use kms and I can’t turn the monitors off while I’m doing it. Someone was working on a pipewire backend, so hopefully that goes somewhere.
GreenWithEnvy is also a nuisance on Wayland while Nvidia Settings Panel doesn’t even work. I have a custom script just to control my fans on Wayland, but I’m eventually switching from Nvidia anyways, so it won’t matter for much longer.
I think X will still be around for a while but it makes no sense to use it with a full desktop like gnome. Gnome has its own stack so Wayland makes sense.
It will be cool to see desktops like Xfce4, Cinnamon and Mate get support.
Xfce4 is a name not a acronym. It used to be back in the day but it now uses GTK.
Laughing in kwin-wayland
KWin is just a composer though. Plasma as a desktop environment still relies on XWayland
How is it relying on XWayland? I don’t know of any KDE Plasma components that require X11. The apps you install might need XWayland but that is separate from the Plasma desktop.
Uninstalling Xwayland breaks it, you’re greeted to a black background and your mouse pointer.
Additionally, as per their own website, it says “The workspaces have been developed for X11 and much functionality relies on X11. To be able to make proper use of Wayland these bits have to be rewritten.”
