[gabrielgio]

x11 is in maintenance mode at this point and Gnome is not going anywhere. Gnome is used (and financed) by major distributions.

Nothing new is being created with x11 and the people from freedesktop don't seen to be thrilled to maintain it. I don't think should change just for the sake of changing, but I'd start looking to migrate whatever you use that depends on x11.

[DonaldFisk]

I had assumed that XWayland is a drop-in replacement fo X11, and will be available indefinitely.

I regularly write code which relies on a working X11. I have written a virtual machine which makes X11 calls to do 2D graphics and event handling, as well as applications which compile to the virtual machine code. If X11 and now XWayland cease to be available, not only would I have to rewrite large parts of my virtual machine, but also rewrite all the 2D graphics code in applications. All so that I can stand still when the rug is being pulled from under my feet. I'm sure there are others in a similar predicament.

I may be naive about this, but as X11 just works, and has done for decades, it should require little to no maintenance, so why the need to withdraw it? I don't expect, or require, any additional functionality.

[NoGravitas]

Yes, XWayland is intended to continue to be available indefinitely.

[vidarh]

For my part, I have no intention of moving off X11 for the next decade at least. The only app I use that I don't fully control is a browser, and the worst case fallback is to run the browser in a Wayland compositor that runs on X.

[tokai]

Are you also still running python2?

[irthomasthomas]

And wayland is in broken mode. KDE keep changing the default back to wayland after each update, and every time my linux systems are broken until I switch back to x11.

[ColonelPhantom]

What is broken for you? At this point, starting from roughly KDE 6, Wayland has been pretty much flawless for me. KDE 5.27 was pretty much fine already as well.

[exe34]

x11 being in maintenance mode is the best thing that happened to it for my use case. It hasn't crashed in 15 years.

[1313ed01]

It would be sad if, after all those years, it was still missing anything significant. Maintenance mode sounds like a good thing, not something that makes me tempted to switch to some less stable alternative.

[graemep]

The problem is that I find Wayland to be a lot buggier than x11.

For example, terminal transparency using Konsole on KDE flickers for me.

Its nearly there, but not quite. Maybe Gnome has no such issues?

[ColonelPhantom]

Do you have more specifics? I just tried it on my machine (Fedora 42, Plasma 6.5.1 Wayland, Konsole 25.08.2, Radeon 780M) and it seems fine for me. Does it only occur occasionally/under specific circumstances for example?

[NoGravitas]

I've never seen similar issues using a variety of terminals on Gnome, Sway, or Niri. Haven't used Konsole or Plasma, but I wonder if it's maybe a driver issue?

[lousken]

https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver

[ur-whale]

> x11 is in maintenance mode at this point and Gnome is not going anywhere

True.

But does not address the fact that Wayland is a bad solution to X11's problems, and that its architecturally broken from inception.

[gabrielgio]

I don't know the implementation details but I can't really complain about the state of wayland today. It used to be annoying to get working many years ago (worse because I had a nvidia gpu). But today I drive a nigthly build of niri, run it by just spawning an dbuss session and everything works. Bluetooth audio, screen sharing, fractional scaling, no tearing, no font blurring. Every utility I needed has been created and works quite nicely (e.g.: wdisplay). I can even play video games with HDR support.

I have a more stable experience with wayland today than I had with x11. Which to be fair was not only because of wayland but because desktop linux as a whole has made a lot of progress in the last years

[ColonelPhantom]

I don't think it's true that anything is architecturally or fundamentally broken in Wayland (though if you disagree, I'm very curious what you think is so deeply broken).

Most of the issues and slow adoption were because the core protocol was deliberately kept extremely minimal, and agreeing on all the needed extensions took a long time. Don't take it from me, but rather from KDE developer Nate Graham: https://pointieststick.com/2023/09/17/so-lets-talk-about-thi...

As such, anyone who tried it early probably had to deal with a pretty large amount of non-working stuff, but by now the platform is capable of most features people require and the biggest remaining bottleneck is that software needs to use these new APIs.

[user3939382]

Goodbye to any trace of freedom left on Linux when you combine this with proprietary graphics drivers.

[gabrielgio]

I don't think I understand what you mean. Do you mean wayland is not usable with nvidia proprietary driver? I remember that being annoying but possible many year ago (with sway --my-next-gpu-wont-be-nvidia thingy).

But if you use really old nvidia gpu you can have a mixed experience with wayland. Which is a fair problem to complain, but you can't blame that on wayland and call that lack of freedom. That problem was caused by the lack of freedom coming from nvidia gpus and how locked down they are and how nvidia for many year has been hostile towards linux desktop.

[jasonvorhe]

What's the substance behind this claim? It keeps on being repeated but I don't get what it's actually about. Is there anything proprietary about Wayland that I'm not aware of? What's the difference between proprietary drivers using X11 and Wayland?

[dminik]

Freedom is dead when a single implementation is replaced with several competing implementations implementing an open standard.

[happymellon]

Only Nvidia use proprietary graphics drivers?