Gnome Mutter Now "Completely Drops the Whole X11 Back End"

[neilv]

I had to look up what "Gnome Mutter" is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutter_(software)

> Mutter is a window manager initially designed and implemented for the X Window System, but then evolved to be a display server ("Wayland compositor"). It became the default window manager in GNOME 3,

Gnome alienated some developers around the time of GTK 3, and there have sometimes been regressions, and some opinionated unconventional design choices that everyone else was stuck with. (At the same time there was much positive benefits from the efforts.)

Even though I don't use the default Gnome desktop on most of my systems (I usually prefer XMonad or i3wm atop X11), I still end up using applications programs written to GTK and Gnome libraries.

Maybe this even harder push by Gnome on Wayland will drive even more effort into the alternative software, and continue to fuel the healthy competition that (for better or worst) the Linux desktop is stuck with.

[microtonal]

fuel the healthy competition is a really positive spin on even more fragmentation. It's sad how Linux desktop eats itself.

GNOME is a perpetrator as well. I usually check the GNOME release notes (since I use GNOME on my NixOS laptop) and on a semi-regular basis there is a note that says: replaced app X by a completely new rewrite Y. And there is still no support for basic things like marking up/annotating a screenshot, even though the basic image viewer has been rewritten N times (anyone remember Electric Eyes?).

[HeinzStuckeIt]

How many X11 holdouts are still around, really? I'm a curmudgeonly old man fond of old tech, but I have still had a Wayland-only setup since early 2020; once Sway was there as a good tiling window manager, and Emacs got its Wayland-ready pure-gtk branch, there was no need to look back.

I of course see people here and there on forums express discontent, but I don't think that demographic is big enough to drive both significant development and the adoption that makes development sustainable.

[shevy-java]

I think the GNOME/GTK devs alienated numerous devs. I tried to talk to ebassi but he censored me on reddit as a consequence. He does not like people speaking up against what the GTK devs do.

I have no hope for GTK. It is a GNOMEy toolkit now.

[znpy]

> Maybe this even harder push by Gnome on Wayland will drive even more effort into the alternative software, and continue to fuel the healthy competition that (for better or worst) the Linux desktop is stuck with.

Competition in this space has been everything except healthy. Wayland people have been essentially sabotaging X11 development.

Example: people wanting to keep X11 alive have been literally banned from the freedesktop.org infrastructure: https://linuxiac.com/xlibre-xserver-project-plans-revival-of...

> In a dramatic turn of events, Red Hat employees banned developer Enrico Weigelt from the freedesktop.org infrastructure. Weigelt’s account, repositories, tickets, and merge requests (more than 140) associated with the Xorg project were also abruptly deleted. As a result of these actions, in a message titled “History repeats: Redhat censored me on freedesktop.org,”.

(more in the link).

As somebody that has a functioning desktop environment (XFCE) and that doesn't bother much with new stuff, this is incredibly annoying, as the Wayland people have been breaking the linux desktop for everybody while pushing for incomplete alternatives (case in point: another comment to this same thread: wayland breaks accessibility: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45824341 - they should have first developed it AND THEN push for it but no, they had to push incomplete and non functional garbage down everybody's throat).

I'm not really against Wayland per se, I'm against the fascistoid appoach that wayland people had all along the way.

[marginalia_nu]

A decade of a their trademark hard line "you're holding it wrong" ethos will likely already have driven away what people might object to this sort of change.

[tokai]

Anti-Gnome people really need to get over it. We get it, just don't use their software.

[ragnese]

Probably yes. And, good. It's free software. I still use GNOME Shell, and the minute the make a change that I don't want to deal with, I'll change to something else. Easy as that.

[lousken]

Wayland is still years away from usable state. You still can't even autotype keepassxc passwords and there are still no good solutions for remote desktop sessions (at least I have not found any last time i checked)

[saturn_vk]

> Wayland is still years away from usable state

… for you, surely. I’m sure there are some wayland users.

> autotype keepassxc passwords

What is that?

> remote desktop sessions

IIRC, gnome comes with an ootb RDP solution that, last I tried, worked as advertised. I’m not a big remote user though.

[bigyabai]

Those are fair criticisms, but neither one of them is a dealbreaker for any OS that I use on a regular basis. As such, most Wayland sessions are perfectly usable to me.

[sharts]

Perhap Claude, Gemini, and Codex will finally make things come along sooner than later

[ranger_danger]

rustdesk supports wayland

[stuaxo]

Really hoping window focus gets fixed, its been broken for me for about a year now, windows come up behind the one I'm using, end up typing into the wrong one etc.

[confirmmesenpai]

Hyper-V connects to a VM desktop using XRDP which uses X. Will that stuff still work? Can you still use gnome through XRDP?

[pseudalopex]

They expect you to use GNOME Remote Desktop instead I think.

[chuckadams]

Being a GNOME thing, I imagine they'll eventually drop Wayland support too so as to not confuse users with options.

(/s in this case, I'm actually all for dropping X11)

[shevy-java]

The GNOME/GTK devs are on a mission - they fight down all xorg users.

That's not good.

[saturn_vk]

There are dozens of you. Dozens!