|
|
Subscribe / Log in / New account

Ubuntu 25.10 to drop support for GNOME on Xorg

Jean Baptiste Lallement, a member of Canonical's desktop team, has announced that Ubuntu will drop support for GNOME on X11 in the 25.10 ("Questing Quokka") release set for October. GNOME plans to remove X11 support in GNOME 49, which is scheduled for September, so Ubuntu is looking to be proactive:

Ubuntu 25.10 is the last interim release before our next LTS (Ubuntu 26.04). By moving now, we give developers and users a full cycle to adapt before the next LTS, align with GNOME 49 and reduce fragmentation while simplifying our support matrix heading into the LTS.

Fedora decided in early May to drop X11 support for GNOME in Fedora 43, which is also due in October.



to post comments

Xlibre

Posted Jun 10, 2025 19:58 UTC (Tue) by ubhofmann (subscriber, #47368) [Link] (73 responses)

At the same time, a fork of X11 appears on GitHub: https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver.git. The Register has more details: https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/10/xlibre_new_xorg_fork/

Xlibre

Posted Jun 10, 2025 20:06 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (5 responses)

I wonder if it would end up in the Tauthon-like state, with one commit per year (to make it compatible with a new GCC) and nothing beyond that…

Xlibre

Posted Jun 11, 2025 21:00 UTC (Wed) by linuxrocks123 (subscriber, #34648) [Link] (2 responses)

So what if it does? There's nothing wrong with software that's finished and therefore needs little maintenance :)

Xlibre

Posted Jun 11, 2025 21:05 UTC (Wed) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (1 responses)

Not if we are talking about software that needs to interact with hardware.

If you want something that may only ever work on retro systems you may simply pick Windows XP or RedHat 9…

Xlibre

Posted Jun 12, 2025 18:53 UTC (Thu) by linuxrocks123 (subscriber, #34648) [Link]

Almost all of the hardware-specific graphics code is in the kernel these days :)

Xlibre

Posted Jun 12, 2025 5:34 UTC (Thu) by alexeiz (guest, #95579) [Link] (1 responses)

metux submitted like a thousand commits to Xorg over the last several years. So one commit a year scenario is just your imagination.

Xlibre

Posted Jun 15, 2025 13:31 UTC (Sun) by RGBCube (guest, #175223) [Link]

metux submitting a thousand patches can only make the (already horrible) X codebase even worse!

Xlibre

Posted Jun 10, 2025 20:13 UTC (Tue) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (29 responses)

The reason for this fork is that its creator was banned from further commits to the main xorg repo due to repeatedly submitting PRs that introduced pretty serious regressions -- of the sort that would have been prevented had the code been even _run_ once.

So by all means, fork away, but they're going to have a really hard time convincing anyone else to care.

Xlibre

Posted Jun 10, 2025 21:20 UTC (Tue) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (19 responses)

> So by all means, fork away, but they're going to have a really hard time convincing anyone else to care.

...and when your fork has an incompatible binary ABI (+API?), you're not going to be compatible with existing proprietary drivers (eg NVIDIA) which has been the primary reason for folks needing to stick with a native xserver.

Xlibre

Posted Jun 11, 2025 8:21 UTC (Wed) by parametricpoly (subscriber, #143903) [Link] (18 responses)

It's also a bit late to the party. Distros are switching to Wayland exclusive DEs (Gnome, Ubuntu) and Wayland basically "works" for quite many use cases as a daily driver. The network effect is directing people to go forward.

If you do objective analysis, Xorg has some limitations and Wayland comes with another set of limitations. Extending and improving X will face some issues as other platforms using X still use the old APIs. At this point it's hard to justify moving back to X even if it will get fixes and updates. Also what would you do with a windowing system if the apps are abandoning it? I'm looking at something like lightdm or sddm. The repos are basically dead.

Xlibre

Posted Jun 12, 2025 19:53 UTC (Thu) by linuxrocks123 (subscriber, #34648) [Link] (17 responses)

I haven't ever used Wayland and don't have any plans to do so anytime soon, and I expect many other plan to continue using X indefinitely. It appears Wayland is still immature in areas such as running on headless servers, automating user input, taking screenshots, and copying and pasting from the clipboard.

Maybe one day they'll be able to reliably implement those cutting edge features.

Xlibre

Posted Jun 13, 2025 2:49 UTC (Fri) by numgmt (subscriber, #167446) [Link] (16 responses)

GNOME Remote Desktop does headless RDP way better than any Xorg solution I could find. It's GNOME-exclusive, but hey, it works for my use case, and that was the quality of solution I needed that nothing else (e.g. XRDP) met.

Xlibre

Posted Jun 13, 2025 10:26 UTC (Fri) by lindi (subscriber, #53135) [Link]

I’m also a big fan of headless gnome remote desktop. I’ve used it for several months now in debian testing and it has been very stable. I hope in the future we could get some public key based authentication as well.

Xlibre

Posted Jun 14, 2025 12:20 UTC (Sat) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] (14 responses)

Can you use it to "remote" the window of a single application, instead of a whole desktop? (This is one killer feature of X11 that I use almost every day).

Xlibre

Posted Jun 14, 2025 13:07 UTC (Sat) by intelfx (subscriber, #130118) [Link] (12 responses)

> Can you use it to "remote" the window of a single application, instead of a whole desktop? (This is one killer feature of X11 that I use almost every day).

It's not really a killer feature of X11, not for a long time. Waypipe[1] exists and in practice works much better over mediocre links than X11 SSH forwarding, much less actual X11 network transparency, ever did.

[1]: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe

Xlibre

Posted Jun 16, 2025 10:30 UTC (Mon) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] (11 responses)

Thanks, good to know for the dreaded day I cannot use X11 any more. But this seems to be a complex 3.party program that might not be available in all installations at both the client and server ends. With X11, you get the functionality out of the box.

Xlibre

Posted Jun 16, 2025 11:03 UTC (Mon) by intelfx (subscriber, #130118) [Link] (10 responses)

> But this seems to be a complex 3.party program that might not be available in all installations at both the client and server ends. With X11, you get the functionality out of the box.

The thing is, you don't.

`ssh -X` is as much of a third-party program as `waypipe` is.

And in the off-chance if you're **actually** talking about X11's **actual** network transparency, i.e., `DISPLAY=somehost:0`, then that stopped working satisfactorily even longer ago than `ssh -X` (unless you limit yourself to Motif and Tk, I guess).

Xlibre

Posted Jun 16, 2025 12:37 UTC (Mon) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] (4 responses)

ssh is nowadays a common piece of infrastructure with multiple uses, so it can be assumed to be available. Rather like sh, ls, cat etc. Waypipe is specialised, complex, and has a ton of dependencies. X11 remoting has worked well for my needs, obviously I am not running games or video editors through it. Anyway, I'll stop grumbling now.

Xlibre

Posted Jun 16, 2025 13:48 UTC (Mon) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (2 responses)

> ssh is nowadays a common piece of infrastructure with multiple uses, so it can be assumed to be available. Rather like sh, ls, cat etc. Waypipe is specialised, complex, and has a ton of dependencies.

So... [random X11 application] isn't specialized, complex, with a ton of dependencies? I mean, if you're trying to run an X11 application remotely, you're going to need at minimum full client xlib+whatever else on one side, and an running xserver+whatever else on the other side. In other words, by definition, both sides need to have everything necessary to run said application, and *all of it* is outside the scope of what ssh provides (ie a forwarded TCP connection)

Along that line, nothing prevents [Portable] OpenSSH adding support for wrapping waypipe, eg by adding -W and associated configuration options. There's plenty of precedence, not just with X11 (via -X) and various authentication agents but also things like scp/sftp which work by forking off separate executables (on both sides) and shuffling data between the two.

(I would also point out that openssh's -X option claims to support interacting with X11 "Security extensions" by default; I don't know exactly what that entails under the hood but it's clearly more than just setting up a port forward and setting $DISPLAY on the remote side)

Xlibre

Posted Jun 17, 2025 1:50 UTC (Tue) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link] (1 responses)

> openssh's -X option claims to support interacting with X11 "Security extensions"

I think this refers to running xauth to set an MIT Magic Cookie value in ~/.Xauthority which is like an API token that prevents other users on the same system from just connecting to your forwarded X11 port on localhost and rickrolling (at best) your screen.

Xlibre

Posted Jun 23, 2025 8:29 UTC (Mon) by cortana (subscriber, #24596) [Link]

The SECURITY extension allows certain clients to be marked as "untrusted" which prevents them from being able to spy on input events, take screenshots of other clients and so on.

Unfortunately many clients break completely under such restrictions. For many years, Debian patched OpenSSH to disable the use of the SECURITY extension by deafult. Nowadays I think the situation is a bit better but I've not used X11 forwarding for a long time so haven't verified.

Xlibre

Posted Jun 16, 2025 16:11 UTC (Mon) by intelfx (subscriber, #130118) [Link]

Of course, OpenSSH (not just ssh, but very specifically OpenSSH) is going to be more widely available than Waypipe, simply by virtue of being an older and more established technology (as well as historical precedent). However, we weren't discussing that:

>> <...> With X11, you get the functionality out of the box. <...>

What we were discussing is that both are structurally *third-party software*. There is nothing conceptually "out-of-the-box" about `ssh -X`, not any more than Waypipe. Whether the latter is significantly more specialized and complex is in the eye of the beholder.

> X11 remoting has worked well for my needs

Nobody was disputing that. We were talking about whether it actually is a "killer feature".

Xlibre

Posted Jun 16, 2025 13:13 UTC (Mon) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (4 responses)

Is there a replacement for XPRA?

I still use ssh -X for some very graphically-limited apps - xterm mostly - but for anything using a modern toolkit you really need XPRA to get good performance. And the persistence / immunity to transient network issues/moves is a nice bonus in some cases; and absolutely essential in other cases. E.g., I use xpra to access the same instance of an app between work and home, without having to restart the app and my flow in it.

Xlibre

Posted Jun 16, 2025 16:13 UTC (Mon) by intelfx (subscriber, #130118) [Link]

> Is there a replacement for XPRA?
>
> I still use ssh -X for some very graphically-limited apps - xterm mostly - but for anything using a modern toolkit you really need XPRA to get good performance.

Waypipe does not need anything like Xpra to get good performance; you get it by default.

> And the persistence / immunity to transient network issues/moves is a nice bonus in some cases

There is no persistence, however. Earlier versions of Waypipe had rudimentary support for reconnection, but it was since dropped — not sure why, perhaps lack of interest on the sole developer's part.

Xlibre

Posted Jun 17, 2025 1:58 UTC (Tue) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

I think in other cases with Wayland the compositors just support RDP or VNC output, VNC being slow but simple and RDP working well over WAN links with various acceleration options available in the protocol (maybe including just encoding as a video stream, same as any modern WebRTC video conferencing and desktop sharing system) if the server takes advantage of them, degrading to something like VNC if not. I think Waypipe is more for the single-app forwarding use case (although I believe RDP protocol is capable of single-app forwarding), and I'd be super happy when it gets integrated directly into Portable OpenSSH or as a Linux-distro maintained extension for the popular platforms.

Xlibre

Posted Jun 17, 2025 8:50 UTC (Tue) by vasvir (subscriber, #92389) [Link] (1 responses)

Well there is wprs (xpra for wayland): https://github.com/wayland-transpositor/wprs

I use it as my daily driver and while it has its issues it is workable...

I have filed some bug reports and some of them have been fixed.

Xlibre

Posted Jun 17, 2025 9:50 UTC (Tue) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

Great news, thanks for the link!

Xlibre

Posted Jun 23, 2025 4:20 UTC (Mon) by wperkins (guest, #767) [Link]

Yeah! This is one feature that I have used every day for many years!

Xlibre

Posted Jun 12, 2025 7:25 UTC (Thu) by daenzer (subscriber, #7050) [Link] (8 responses)

> The reason for this fork is that its creator was banned from further commits to the main xorg repo due to repeatedly submitting PRs that introduced pretty serious regressions -- of the sort that would have been prevented had the code been even _run_ once.

That’s not quite accurate. He was banned from gitlab.freedesktop.org as a whole for violating the corresponding CoC, not for the low quality of his xserver MRs.

(As a member of the xserver project, I do wish the project itself had stood firmer against his flood of mostly-churn MRs though)

Xlibre

Posted Jun 12, 2025 19:46 UTC (Thu) by linuxrocks123 (subscriber, #34648) [Link] (7 responses)

Any details on this? He clearly has some weird and disturbing political views, but did he actually _do_ anything, or is this a thoughtcrime situation?

Xlibre

Posted Jun 13, 2025 0:45 UTC (Fri) by daenzer (subscriber, #7050) [Link] (6 responses)

I don’t know any more details than you. The reasons for CoC action are generally not shared publicly.

The freedesktop.org CoC committee generally bans users only after multiple infractions and unfruitful mediation attempts, so he most certainly has „done something“ though.

Xlibre

Posted Jun 13, 2025 9:35 UTC (Fri) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (5 responses)

"Justice must be done, and must be seen to be done".

Behind closed door enforcement may be problematic.

Xlibre

Posted Jun 13, 2025 10:42 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (4 responses)

> Behind closed door enforcement may be problematic.

Open enforcement may be problematic.

Damned if you do, and damned if you don't.

Especially given that - in many cases - SWIFT enforcement may be necessary to protect the victims, and sometimes that can harm the perpetrators more than necessary. That sentiment has been expressed in these comments. And as a gentoo user I get the impression the project was seriously harmed (a good few years back) because some "bad actors" weren't dealt with quickly.

If you're in a position where you need to say "stop this NOW!", the last thing you need is a load of public bike-shedding. At the end of the day, you need a BDFL who you trust really is B. I don't think I'd do a particularly good job, but I like PJ's definition she used for Groklaw. "If I wouldn't have it in my living room, I won't have it on Groklaw". Simple, clear (pretty much), and there's no comeback.

Cheers,
Wol

Xlibre

Posted Jun 13, 2025 10:52 UTC (Fri) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (3 responses)

Didn't say it had to be slow, or had to be by committee or vote. It should be stated what for and why though, should it not?

Xlibre

Posted Jun 13, 2025 12:41 UTC (Fri) by daroc (editor, #160859) [Link] (2 responses)

While I agree that public decision-making is important for good community-building, I think this thread is wandering increasingly off topic. Let's leave it here.

Xlibre

Posted Jun 13, 2025 14:14 UTC (Fri) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (1 responses)

Course. I think at some point it could be useful to have an article in and around this topic, if there is some appropriate news to thread it around. There have been a number of cases of CoC enforcements that you've reported on where the grounds and process has been murky (and acknowledged as such in at least 1 case I think). Some way to distill the meta issue of "Justice should be /seen/ to be done" out of the various individual cases and see what different approaches there have been and pros/cons, might be useful. Comments will be fun too I'm sure. ;)

Xlibre

Posted Jun 23, 2025 13:32 UTC (Mon) by Wildfurangelplumes (guest, #177995) [Link]

I get the push for transparency, but projects like freedesktop.org aren't democracies. They're run by maintainers who have the right to manage their space, and that includes enforcing CoCs without turning it into a public spectacle. IMO open source doesn't mean every decision needs community consensus, behind-closed-doors processes are often the only way to avoid bikeshedding and harassment. As for Xlibre, the fork isn't the problem in itself. It's the fact that it breaks compatibility and the dev has a history of publicly toxic behavior, including anti-DEI rhetoric. You can fork, sure. But people are also allowed to say "no thanks."

Xlibre

Posted Jun 10, 2025 22:27 UTC (Tue) by alatiera (subscriber, #154895) [Link] (36 responses)

Could you all please stop linking to a fork without any technical merit and for the cherry on top, a fork run by a lunatic that parrots fascists talking points in every mailing list and issue tracker he is allowed to participate in.

Example from the Devuan mailing list in 2018 even:

https://web.archive.org/web/20190404153507/https://lists....

Then we've all seen the LKML thread, and the whole spew of hatred in the Xlibre fork.

Xlibre

Posted Jun 11, 2025 2:33 UTC (Wed) by felixfix (subscriber, #242) [Link] (34 responses)

Could you please stop abusing the term "fascist" and injecting your own politics into a discussion, while decrying someone else for having injected his politics into a different discussion?

Xlibre

Posted Jun 11, 2025 4:59 UTC (Wed) by stephanlachnit (subscriber, #151361) [Link]

Usaully I agree that one should be careful with these terms, but have you read the email? He basically blames WW2 on the british...

Xlibre

Posted Jun 11, 2025 5:09 UTC (Wed) by linuxrocks123 (subscriber, #34648) [Link]

DUDE, read the link first. He is defending Germany's conduct during World War 2 and blaming the start of World War 2 on British aggression. For some reason, he is doing this on a Linux distribution mailing list.

I roll my eyes at "everyone I don't like must be Hitler" groupthink as much as the next Player Character, but this is not that.

Xlibre

Posted Jun 11, 2025 5:27 UTC (Wed) by felixfix (subscriber, #242) [Link] (31 responses)

That's not my point. My point is that he brings politics into a non-political discussion in order to dis someone else for bringing politics into a different discussion.

As for the accuracy of his statement, if you want to get pedantic ... Fascism was Mussolini, not Hitler, whose bag was Nazism.

Xlibre

Posted Jun 11, 2025 5:43 UTC (Wed) by alatiera (subscriber, #154895) [Link] (1 responses)

There was a time where people would be ashamed to throw it back and defend fascists in public. Too bad for all the rest of us that they let you use the Internet unsupervised.

Xlibre

Posted Jun 11, 2025 11:24 UTC (Wed) by jhe (subscriber, #164815) [Link]

This gives me "everyone not joining my crusade is an enemy" vibes. I had that - antifascism - differently in my head.

Xlibre

Posted Jun 11, 2025 6:45 UTC (Wed) by ebee_matteo (subscriber, #165284) [Link] (28 responses)

Extreme political views are very relevant when you ask for public support for your project. Which in the future might also involve corporate funding if successful.

We need to stop this nonsense of "code is non-political, completely separated from the people producing it and their views." It's like "guns don't kill people, people kill people".

This whole idea that ethical considerations can be silenced in favor of technological superiority and thus will usher in an utopia where technology will solve all of humanity's problems is naive and childish. It's what the broligarchs believe. And look what it brought us until now.

I don't want to be associated to a right wing nazi nutjob. And I thank the parent for posting a clear link which proves this beyond any reasonable doubt. Now I can just forget about this fork and move on.

Xlibre

Posted Jun 14, 2025 1:15 UTC (Sat) by linuxrocks123 (subscriber, #34648) [Link] (27 responses)

Code _IS_ non-political and is completely separate from the people producing it and their views. This guy sounds like a crank, and perhaps a Nazi-sympathizing crank, but, if XLibre runs better than XOrg on my machine, I'll use it, and his political views would not deter me from contributing to his project. That's what tolerance means, and I believe in tolerance.

You don't have to agree with me, because you have no obligation to practice tolerance when volunteering your time. In a professional environment, though, refusing to work with a coworker because you don't like his politics will likely get you fired. If your intolerance instead gets the victim of your discrimination fired, that's illegal in California and many other places, and I hope any applicable law is enforced against both you and your employer. It should be illegal everywhere.

In the event the law does not stop you or your employer, rest assured that I and many others will boycott your employer in retaliation. I haven't used Firefox since Brendan Eich, nor Chrome since James Damore.

This is the only issue I've ever boycott a company or organization over in the name of society, because it's the only thing I've seen organizations do that is a serious enough attack on society where I've felt I have a personal duty to retaliate. I feel I have that duty because society only works if we can work together, and cranks have just as much right to make a living as everyone else.

Xlibre

Posted Jun 14, 2025 2:44 UTC (Sat) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (1 responses)

> Code _IS_ non-political and is completely separate from the people producing it and their views.

> if XLibre runs better than XOrg on my machine, I'll use it, and his political views would not deter me from contributing to his project. That's what tolerance means, and I believe in tolerance.

Mighty big words...

> In the event the law does not stop you or your employer, rest assured that I and many others will boycott your employer in retaliation. I haven't used Firefox since Brendan Eich, nor Chrome since James Damore.

... except you don't practice what you preach.

Xlibre

Posted Jun 14, 2025 6:53 UTC (Sat) by linuxrocks123 (subscriber, #34648) [Link]

You can believe what you want and express it, whatever that is. However, if you punish other people for believing what they want, or expressing it, I want you stopped and punished for that.

Boycotting companies that punish their employees for expressing what they believe is practicing exactly what I preach.

Xlibre

Posted Jun 14, 2025 12:35 UTC (Sat) by lunaryorn (subscriber, #111088) [Link] (11 responses)

There's politics, and then there's outright nazism.

It's not as if we're having a minute debate about income tax or building regulations or somesuch everyday politics, or even about contentious topics such as immigration.

We're talking about a guy who openly and publicly sympathises with and advocates for nazism, that is, effectively, murdering other people for no other reason than their religion or skin colour.

Man, you've got to have a limit to your tolerance at this point at least. If you haven't, how can we ever hope to make society a safe place for everyone to live in?

Xlibre

Posted Jun 15, 2025 17:47 UTC (Sun) by linuxrocks123 (subscriber, #34648) [Link] (10 responses)

> We're talking about a guy who openly and publicly sympathises with and advocates for nazism, that is, effectively, murdering other people for no other reason than their religion or skin colour.

Defending Germany in WW2 is certainly troubling, but he also puts this text on his fork:

> It doesn't matter which country you're coming from, your political views, your race, your sex, your age, your food menu, whether you wear boots or heels, whether you're furry or fairy, Conan or McKay, comic character, a small furry creature from Alpha Centauri, or just an boring average person. Anybody who's interested in bringing X forward is welcome.

If those are the principles by which he actually runs his project, I see no problem.

> Man, you've got to have a limit to your tolerance at this point at least. If you haven't, how can we ever hope to make society a safe place for everyone to live in?

Crime is something you do, not something you believe, or something you say. If someone starts _doing_ things that hurt people, rather than _saying_ things that hurt people's _feelings_, _then_ they can be thrown in jail. We can't throw them in jail just because they believe or advocate for horrible things. That's a violation of human rights.

Philosophically extending that principle, I believe it's also wrong to use economic warfare to punish things that aren't crimes. That's just the majority putting on a "mob" mask to hide its "government" face and doing the exact thing government isn't supposed to do.

On a more practical level, while people who believe horrible things are not in jail, because they haven't done anything wrong, what purpose do you think is served by conducting economic warfare against them by attacking their ability to earn a living? Someone who is forced to interact with other people in a professional setting may, over time, change his discriminatory beliefs. Interaction with "the Other" is actually one of the only things that has the potential to change beliefs like that. Also, people with money and a stable existence are less likely to see acting on their terrible beliefs and going out in a blaze of glory as an attractive option. People who have nothing to lose, not so much.

In before someone says "but u boycott companies who fire people so u hippocrit": no, I'm not. Governments throw people in jail who commit kidnapping and false imprisonment, and that's not hypocritical. I'm just fighting arson with fire.

Xlibre

Posted Jun 15, 2025 19:14 UTC (Sun) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (1 responses)

> We can't throw them in jail just because they believe or advocate for horrible things. That's a violation of human rights.

Is someone throwing him in jail? I don't see anyone (in the US) claiming that. A German mentioned having to report him at least, but the laws there around such views are quite different.

> Someone who is forced to interact with other people in a professional setting may, over time, change his discriminatory beliefs.

Isn't Masterpiece Cakeshop exactly the opposite: you can choose to not economically interact with someone based on your religious convictions? But political beliefs are not so blessed? I suppose political beliefs are not (generally) a protected class in the US, so maybe it *is* OK in that sense…but then it cuts both ways and deciding to not interact based on politics is fine?

> …what purpose do you think is served by conducting economic warfare against them by attacking their ability to earn a living?

Expressing disapproval of the product/company/processes? Am I obligated to buy something from anyone hawking some widget if I can't find a reason to need or want their widget because that would "[harm] their ability to earn a living"? If I find their widget as actively harmful to the well-being of my community (let's say they sell asbestos/leaded gasoline for vehicles/leaded paint in the gap between knowing it is harmful and the laws enforcing it come into force; perhaps PFAS chemicals would be the modern equivalent), do I have to stay silent because saying something might cause such harm? What if those harms come in the process of the *production* of their widget (e.g., child/slave labor) even if the widget itself is benign (e.g., shoes)? What if I really just don't want to funnel more attention/money/power to an entity I just personally find distateful (Soros, Gates, Musk, Nestlé, take your pick; there's a "villain" for any political view in business today).

Any of those things, on their own, are personal decisions. Stating my decisions publicly is a First Amendment right. It also mentions the right to "assembly" to build a group of like-minded individuals to discuss it. While the First Amendment says the right to "petition the government" (say, get laws passed to ban child labor), why would espousing such views to fellow citizens as such a group (through, say, advertising or social media) not also be protected under the general "speech" category as well?

> Philosophically extending that principle, I believe it's also wrong to use economic warfare to punish things that aren't crimes.

Will you speak out about using threatening lawsuits over the exercise of First Amendment rights (e.g., X suing ad agencies for refusing to buy adspace on X)? Is that not "economic warfare to punish things that aren't crimes" as well?

Xlibre

Posted Jun 15, 2025 19:59 UTC (Sun) by linuxrocks123 (subscriber, #34648) [Link]

> Is someone throwing him in jail? I don't see anyone (in the US) claiming that. A German mentioned having to report him at least, but the laws there around such views are quite different.

Yeah, some guy said he "had" to report him which is almost certainly not true. I didn't realize he was German when I read what he wrote; it looks a lot less kooky now since of course if you're German you're going to care about British war crimes against your country (and I'm sure there probably were some). Anyway, he didn't actually deny the Holocaust happened, whether he thinks that or not, so he's going to be fine legally even if he gets reported.

> Isn't Masterpiece Cakeshop exactly the opposite: you can choose to not economically interact with someone based on your religious convictions? But political beliefs are not so blessed? I suppose political beliefs are not (generally) a protected class in the US, so maybe it *is* OK in that sense…but then it cuts both ways and deciding to not interact based on politics is fine?

All Masterpiece Cakeshop says stands for is that you can't be forced to use your creative talents to express something you don't believe. The gay couple in Masterpiece Cakeshop was free to buy any cake in the baker's store. They just weren't free to force the baker to make a custom cake containing a message the baker did not want to say.

> Expressing disapproval of the product/company/processes?

I'm not talking about an environmental group running ads saying people shouldn't buy from a company because it doesn't use dolphin-safe tuna. I'm talking about mobs creating giant shitstorms to coerce companies to fire individuals the mob has decided should be unpersons. I'm talking, specifically, about Brendan Eich and James Damore. Eich donated to a political cause the mob didn't like, and he ended up cast out of the project he'd been a part of since 1995. Damore wrote an essay containing political views the mob didn't like, and he ended up fired from his job even though he was probably good at it.

When this happens, it's not the government itself doing the dirty work, but letting mobs economically ruin people for expressive conduct or political advocacy still diminishes their de facto ability to exercise their right to free speech. That's why California's political discrimination law would be a good idea for other jurisdictions to implement.

Xlibre

Posted Jun 15, 2025 20:00 UTC (Sun) by lunaryorn (subscriber, #111088) [Link] (2 responses)

> Crime is something you do, not something you believe, or something you say. If someone starts _doing_ things that hurt people, rather than _saying_ things that hurt people's _feelings_, _then_ they can be thrown in jail. We can't throw them in jail just because they believe or advocate for horrible things. That's a violation of human rights.

Under German law, we can, and we do. See §130 StGB, Volksverhetzung.

And, as a German, I'm mighty happy that we do, because I believe that there's no human right to deny human rights to others, nor that anyone should be free to publicly incite genocide or downplay the Shoa.

For history taught us that we should really not wait until someone starts _doing_ this.

Crime can also something you say, for words do have power. Which is why we care so much about freedom of speech, after all.

Xlibre

Posted Jun 15, 2025 21:41 UTC (Sun) by linuxrocks123 (subscriber, #34648) [Link] (1 responses)

> Under German law, we can, and we do. See §130 StGB, Volksverhetzung.

Yup, that's how Europe violates people's human rights!

> And, as a German, I'm mighty happy that we do, because I believe that there's no human right to deny human rights to others, nor that anyone should be free to publicly incite genocide or downplay the Shoa.

AfD just gained 69 seats in your legislature and is the second-largest party now, so how's that political oppression working out for ya?

> Crime can also something you say, for words do have power.

See, that's how Europe doesn't understand what free speech means. Making "something you say" a crime because you don't like what is being said is a direct violation of free speech, and you guys just don't get that.

You'll figure it out eventually, though. You're helping AfD and its friends gain power because they can appeal to both moderate right-wingers and Nazis. The moderate right-wingers like what AfD is saying, and the Nazis know AfD can't say what it really means. You'll eventually figure that out and change your tune.

Or you won't, the firewall will break, and AfD will become part of a governing coalition. Then, they'll turn that nice government oppression cannon you've built right back atcha, and you'll _REALLY_ figure out what free speech means :) Serves you right if you're dense enough to let things get that far, I guess...

Xlibre

Posted Jun 16, 2025 5:54 UTC (Mon) by lunaryorn (subscriber, #111088) [Link]

I'm not sure where you're from, but presuming it is the U.S. that's a tad arrogant a comment, considering the historic and current situation of minorities in the US, or, well, your current government.

We could have a discussion about the different interpretation of human and civil rights in the legal philosophy and the constitution in the US and Germany or the EU, or about the degree of practical political freedom in either country, but not this way. I'm sorry but I feel like this is not going anywhere.

Xlibre

Posted Jun 16, 2025 7:44 UTC (Mon) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (4 responses)

> > We're talking about a guy who openly and publicly sympathises with and advocates for nazism, that is, effectively, murdering other people for no other reason than their religion or skin colour.

> Defending Germany in WW2 is certainly troubling, but he also puts this text on his fork:

Coming from a German Jewish family, can we please stop conflating the Germans with the Nazis. Politics is horribly complicated, and lumping unrelated groups together in the same bucket does not help. Hitler wasn't even German!

> Crime is something you do, not something you believe, or something you say. If someone starts _doing_ things that hurt people, rather than _saying_ things that hurt people's _feelings_, _then_ they can be thrown in jail. We can't throw them in jail just because they believe or advocate for horrible things. That's a violation of human rights.

We do throw people in jail for just saying things. It's called "incitement to violence", where you get other people to do your dirty work for you.

At the end of the day, you always have to draw a line, and it's *never* a clean line. Call it the Heisenberg principle, call it the second law of thermodynamics, call it the "pick two, any two" rule. If you want tolerance you *have* to shut down calls for intolerance. Where I draw the line will almost certainly differ from you.

I don't want to know your political/religious/sexual beliefs. If I don't know, I can't discriminate based on them. If you wear them on your sleeve, I will do my best to ignore them. If you shove them in my face I certainly will discriminate. Other people will take a different attitude ...

Cheers,
Wol

Useful shorthand for the Nazis in power

Posted Jun 16, 2025 8:47 UTC (Mon) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (1 responses)

Coming from a German Jewish family, can we please stop conflating the Germans with the Nazis. Politics is horribly complicated, and lumping unrelated groups together in the same bucket does not help. Hitler wasn't even German!

I use "Third Reich" when referring to the period when Germany was governed by the Nazis; it's still clear what's meant, but doesn't trigger this sort of response.

I don't want to know your political/religious/sexual beliefs. If I don't know, I can't discriminate based on them. If you wear them on your sleeve, I will do my best to ignore them. If you shove them in my face I certainly will discriminate. Other people will take a different attitude ...

This is what unconscious bias is all about, and there's training that's all about ensuring that you consciously adjust for your own biases. It's unlawful to discriminate on certain characteristics, even if you do so unconsciously, after all.

Useful shorthand for the Nazis in power

Posted Jun 16, 2025 9:43 UTC (Mon) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

"Unconscious bias" aka "like likes like".

(To some extent) I can't help but know things like your race. So that's the "if you wear it on your sleeve I will do my best to ignore it". My neighbours are dark skinned and wear turbans. I can't help but be aware of their race/religion, but they're nice people and we get on well. "You're you and I'm me".

If either of us started pushing our views, the friendly relationship would probably break down, but imho that is (a) disrespectful, and (b) as a fundamentalist-inclined Christian, it's also unChristian! "By their works shall ye know them", not by shouting your views from the housetop!

Cheers,
Wol

Xlibre

Posted Jun 17, 2025 2:05 UTC (Tue) by linuxrocks123 (subscriber, #34648) [Link] (1 responses)

Xlibre

Posted Jun 17, 2025 2:32 UTC (Tue) by jake (editor, #205) [Link]

Thanks for moving this elsewhere. We appreciate it.

jake

Xlibre

Posted Jun 14, 2025 14:02 UTC (Sat) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (5 responses)

That is a very bizarre position to take. From what I read:

  • If someone has views you consider unpalatable, and their employer doesn't censure them for said views, then you boycott the employer's software.
  • But if someone has views you consider unpalatable, but doesn't have an employer, then you happily use that person's software.

Xlibre

Posted Jun 15, 2025 4:35 UTC (Sun) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

I guess people contain multitudes...

Xlibre

Posted Jun 15, 2025 4:51 UTC (Sun) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link] (3 responses)

> If someone has views you consider unpalatable, and their employer doesn't censure them for said views, then you boycott the employer's software.

If I'm reading it correctly, they're actually arguing the opposite: They want to boycott the employers who *do* censure people for specific views (Damore and Eich both got fired).

Which is at least internally consistent. Silly, and probably results in boycotting all US employers if you apply it completely literally (see e.g. [1] and [2]), but internally consistent.

[1]: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/490/228/#tab-...
[2]: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/590/17-1618/#...

Xlibre

Posted Jun 15, 2025 13:34 UTC (Sun) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (1 responses)

Oh, I see, I stand corrected.

It's still inconsistent, though. Companies are not governments and they are allowed to express an opinion too. Being fired by a company for something you've said is not a violation of the Constitution.

Xlibre

Posted Jun 15, 2025 14:40 UTC (Sun) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> Being fired by a company for something you've said is not a violation of the Constitution.

XKCD #1357 comes to mind.

Xlibre

Posted Jun 15, 2025 14:45 UTC (Sun) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

Of course, that comes with the thing that the people who actually do the firing are themselves expressing a particular belief. Effectively, you're punishing the people who chose to express their beliefs by refusing to work with someone for daring to have "bad" beliefs…

Xlibre

Posted Jun 15, 2025 12:57 UTC (Sun) by ebee_matteo (subscriber, #165284) [Link] (6 responses)

> If your intolerance instead gets the victim of your discrimination fired, that's illegal in California and many other places, and I hope any applicable law is enforced against both you and your employer. It should be illegal everywhere.

Typical American arrogance, then.

Here in Germany, the views above under German alw require me to report this guy to the police, and have him arrested.

Just because the US has this wackiness of "absolute free speech" it does not mean that the rest 7 billion humans outside the US apply your same laws.

Xlibre

Posted Jun 15, 2025 14:46 UTC (Sun) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

As I see it, Free Speech is one of three things that are subject to the "pick any two" law of nature.

And personally, it's also the one I value LEAST!

The other two are the right to have a functional society that cares for each other, and the right to seek/be wealthy.

(I'd like to value all three roughly equal, but that means compromises in all directions - something a lot of people seem unable to handle.)

So the American obsession with Free Speech and Wealth is basically driving the destruction of society, as more and more people even in the first world fall into deeper and deeper poverty.

Cheers,
Wol

Xlibre

Posted Jun 15, 2025 17:58 UTC (Sun) by linuxrocks123 (subscriber, #34648) [Link] (3 responses)

> Here in Germany, the views above under German alw require me to report this guy to the police, and have him arrested.

Oh my God, German law requires citizens to inform on each other like that? I didn't know your society had fallen so far. Again.

And, in fact, I still don't know that. Can you point me to this "anyone who doesn't report a crime is guilty of a crime" statute? I'm going to have a hard time believing such a ridiculous law exists without proof.

Oh, also, since your Nazi stand-in party just came in second in the 2025 federal elections, it doesn't seem like all your political repression is working very well, now does it? But you're just gonna keep doing the same thing and expecting a different result, aren't you? I wonder how that's going to work out for you guys. Guess we'll find out!

Xlibre

Posted Jun 15, 2025 20:18 UTC (Sun) by jzb (editor, #7867) [Link] (2 responses)

At this point, this conversation has gotten well off course from the article and is straying from "polite, respectful, and informative". This goes for this comment as well as several up-thread.

Let's end this here, elsewhere, in this article, and in future comment threads and articles. Comments like "typical $country-name arrogance" and "I didn't know your society had fallen so far" are never appropriate for LWN under any comment thread.

Xlibre

Posted Jun 15, 2025 21:47 UTC (Sun) by linuxrocks123 (subscriber, #34648) [Link]

Xlibre

Posted Jun 16, 2025 7:53 UTC (Mon) by Subsentient (subscriber, #142918) [Link]

Blernchlboogeržensqüizûløid

Xlibre

Posted Jun 16, 2025 5:31 UTC (Mon) by donald.buczek (subscriber, #112892) [Link]

> Here in Germany, the views above under German alw require me to report this guy to the police, and have him arrested.

I know that the discussion here is supposed to be closed. I hope it is still permissible to comment on facts without passing judgment?

In Germany, there is no general obligation to report crimes. There is an obligation to report knowledge of certain particularly serious _imminent_ crimes whose execution can still be prevented. The list of these crimes is exhaustively enumerated in [§138 StGB], and crimes of expression are not included.

However, there may be additional legal obligations to report crimes based on special laws for certain professions. Civil servants may be obliged to report crimes committed in the course of their duties. Social workers and doctors may be obliged to report imminent threats to the welfare of children.

Finally, there is a general duty to protect others in [§13 StGB], which applies to persons in positions of responsibility (e.g., parents). In some circumstances, the prevention of imminent crimes is legally possible only by reporting them and not by other means of self-help.

All of this obviously serves to prevent particularly serious crimes from happening.

I would like to add that law enforcement authorities, on the other hand, are obliged to prosecute crimes (above a certain level of severity). This “principle of legality” serves to prevent arbitrariness [1].

[§138 StGB] https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/stgb/__138.html
[§13 StGB] https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/stgb/__13.html
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legalit%C3%A4tsprinzip_(Strafrecht)

Xlibre

Posted Jun 16, 2025 7:49 UTC (Mon) by Subsentient (subscriber, #142918) [Link]

Uhhhh. Huh. Yeah. This guy is definitely a fan of the Führer.

On a linux mailing list.

Yeah.
I see the problem.

I guess it's time?

Posted Jun 10, 2025 20:14 UTC (Tue) by yodermk (subscriber, #3803) [Link] (4 responses)

In 2018 I got a fairly high-end Dell Precision with nVidia Quadro P3200 graphics. Only in the last few months (using continually updated Arch Linux) have I been able to reliably run it on Wayland. Prior, I could try it, but would run into unbearable quirks that forced me back to X11 within a day or two. Now it seems (finally) pretty solid in Wayland, with an occasional quirk that may or may not be Wayland related, but not a big enough deal to get me to go back. So with that, and hopefully others with similar experiences, I guess it's time to finally excise X11. It really does need to go.

I guess it's time?

Posted Jun 11, 2025 14:31 UTC (Wed) by cortana (subscriber, #24596) [Link] (3 responses)

After I've been logged into (Wayland) GNOME for a few days, my mouse pointer is noticeably jerky as it moves across the screen. Logging out and in again fixes it, for a time. This doesn't happen with Xorg (which has other problems, I really wish I could switch to Wayland permanently, but it's just not there yet). This is with an RTX 3070 Ti and a GTX 1080.

I guess it's time?

Posted Jun 11, 2025 18:10 UTC (Wed) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

Wild idea: floating point precision loss in some accumulator? The test would be: is it actually time-correlated, or is it actually correlated with total "distance" traveled by the cursor over that time? Is it compositor-specific?

I guess it's time?

Posted Jun 13, 2025 13:08 UTC (Fri) by mgedmin (subscriber, #34497) [Link] (1 responses)

Xorg had a special server thread to watch for mouse events and update the hardware cursor position to make mouse movements feel smooth (at some cost of accuracy: the cursor shape could lag a little bit after moving to a new location if the system was heavily loaded).

I don't believe any of the Wayland compositors have anything like that implemented, although I recall hearing about plans of doing something similar at some point.

I guess it's time?

Posted Jun 20, 2025 13:36 UTC (Fri) by daenzer (subscriber, #7050) [Link]

Mutter has an input thread. It currently can’t update the cursor position as directly as Xorg‘s input thread though, largely due to limitations of the current atomic KMS UAPI. Mutter‘s cursor movement is quite snappy anyway though, the difference in terms of input –> output latency is at most a few milliseconds.

AFAIK the situation is similar with other Wayland compositors.

None of this has anything to do with the Wayland or X protocol, how cursor movement is handled is purely between the display server and the kernel. (As a side note, Xorg‘s asynchronous mouse cursor movement was first introduced as „Silken Mouse“ in XFree86 4.0, when X was of similar age as Wayland is now)

Still have unfixed bugs in focus follows mouse

Posted Jun 10, 2025 23:37 UTC (Tue) by jgg (subscriber, #55211) [Link] (3 responses)

Sadly Ubuntu's desktop in wayland mode still doesn't have sanely working focus follows mouse support, it acts differently than X11 mode and has many annoying bugs..

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/2817

For example. So this will be an annoying thing for people expecting that behavior.

Otherwise Wayland has been running fine for me this last year, which is the first time the Ubuntu LTS had something that is usable/non-crashy on my system..

Still have unfixed bugs...

Posted Jun 12, 2025 14:27 UTC (Thu) by somlo (subscriber, #92421) [Link]

I've been using wayland (with Fedora) for a few years now -- just tired of swimming against the current, I guess...

I like focus-follows-mouse, and I'm still low-key annoyed by the inability to disable raise-on-click (I don't want the whole freakin' window in my face each time I touch it), while still maintaining the ability to raise a window explicitly (by clicking on its *title*).

There's https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1349225, which links to an obsolete gnome bug (https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=767967), with the typical "you're holding it wrong" attitude permeating the comments... :(

Still have unfixed bugs in focus follows mouse

Posted Jun 13, 2025 13:15 UTC (Fri) by mgedmin (subscriber, #34497) [Link]

The bug you're linking to affects X11? Are you complaining that Wayland mode doesn't have bugs you're used to having?

(I've been using sloppy focus myself for many years. I didn't notice switching to Wayland affecting anything about it. I was mildly annoyed when the extra focus delay was added to make it possible to use the global application menu, a few releases before the global application menu itself got deprecated and removed. I got used to it.)

Still have unfixed bugs in focus follows mouse

Posted Jun 13, 2025 20:12 UTC (Fri) by zdzichu (subscriber, #17118) [Link]

This may be a problem with Ubuntu's session on Wayland*, but it is not a Wayland problem. The compositor decides how to give focus to windows. From Wayland's perspective, this is totally outside the scope. That's why Wayland developer may see that their specification is (mostly) complete, and free of problems your encountering. The behaviour you are complaining about is not in Wayland's scope.

* Aren't they using GNOME? I'm a f-f-m user, and I've been using GNOME with wayland since 2012 or so. Without any big focus problems. But again, any problems are Mutter problems, not Wayland's per se.

Not crazy about this...

Posted Jun 11, 2025 1:41 UTC (Wed) by ccchips (subscriber, #3222) [Link] (1 responses)

I really hate Wayland on Raspberry Pi OS. There are keyboard issues, menu peculiarities, and so on, and they have to use Labwc or Wayfire for the window managers. The thing that's nastiest for me, however, is that Flightgear is really sluggish. I don't want to lose X11 and Openbox over there.

Not crazy about this...

Posted Jun 11, 2025 2:43 UTC (Wed) by wt (subscriber, #11793) [Link]

FlightGear doesn't even have any support for HIDPI. I really hope it gets updated at some point. They are doing something with the UI. I hope it has a positive impact on HIDPI support.

Also worked about KiCad. The developers have some angst against for Wayland. I've not dug into it enough to know precisely what's wrong.

What does it mean by removing X11 support?

Posted Jun 11, 2025 4:37 UTC (Wed) by atai (subscriber, #10977) [Link] (24 responses)

Do X11 programs continue to run via XWayland?

What does it mean by removing X11 support?

Posted Jun 11, 2025 5:00 UTC (Wed) by MKesper (subscriber, #38539) [Link] (8 responses)

Sure. It's a problem for people where graphics card or some exotic hardware are not supported. They still can change to Debian.

What does it mean by removing X11 support?

Posted Jun 11, 2025 5:57 UTC (Wed) by LtWorf (subscriber, #124958) [Link] (7 responses)

My exotic hardware: "thinkpad t15 gen2". I am clearly the only person in the world to have a touchpad or a thinkpad.

What does it mean by removing X11 support?

Posted Jun 13, 2025 13:17 UTC (Fri) by mgedmin (subscriber, #34497) [Link] (6 responses)

As a long time ThinkPad user I'm surprised to hear claims that Wayland doesn't work on my hardware.

What does it mean by removing X11 support?

Posted Jun 13, 2025 13:39 UTC (Fri) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (4 responses)

> As a long time ThinkPad user I'm surprised to hear claims that Wayland doesn't work on my hardware.

I don't mean to dismiss LtWorf's problem, but this is yet another example of hardware vendors not caring about anything other than Windows. That said, I've dealt with plenty of laptops over the years whose touchpad was nigh-unsuable (if not completely so) under Windows without the OEM driver; it wasn't Windows' fault for not magically handling those touchpads without the vendor driver, nor is its libinput's fault for not magically handling LtWorf's.

(And from the description and the bug ticket, it does seem like said touchpad "working" under xorg's old synaptics driver was more accidental than anything else, due to bugs canceling each other out)

(Disclaimer -- I'm typing this using a ThinkPad T495 running GNOME/Wayland)

What does it mean by removing X11 support?

Posted Jun 13, 2025 14:40 UTC (Fri) by zdzichu (subscriber, #17118) [Link] (2 responses)

Actually, Lenovo was supposed to cooperate with Fedora to make their hardware working well. And Fedora being Fedora mean it should be supported by upstream, no weird patches nor custom drivers.

That's the theory, though. Shortly after above huge announcement, Lenovo released ARM Thinkpad without Fedora support whatsoever.

What does it mean by removing X11 support?

Posted Jun 13, 2025 14:57 UTC (Fri) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (1 responses)

> Lenovo was supposed to cooperate with Fedora to make their hardware working well.

That's an aspirational statement, and it only applies to "select models" that were to be *shipped with Fedora preinstalled*.

If you buy one of those supposedly supported models with Windows and install Fedora yourself (eg because Lenovo doesn't offer Linux as an option in your region), Lenovo will refuse to support you. (Ask me how I know)

> And Fedora being Fedora mean it should be supported by upstream, no weird patches nor custom drivers.

This means that Fedora only ships what upstream provides. It doesn't mean they're on the hook to preemptively figure out every quirk of the dozens (of not hundreds) that Lenovo releases every year.

> That's the theory, though. Shortly after above huge announcement, Lenovo released ARM Thinkpad without Fedora support whatsoever.

The overwhelming majority Lenovo's lineup remains Windows-only.

What does it mean by removing X11 support?

Posted Jun 13, 2025 16:34 UTC (Fri) by zdzichu (subscriber, #17118) [Link]

I meant Lenovo should be on the hook to provide any necessary quirks, Fedora devs may provide guidance how to integrate them. Or even Lenovo should fix the hardware based on input from Fedora developers.

I'm sorry about your experience with Lenovo's support. But I'm not surprised.

What does it mean by removing X11 support?

Posted Jun 13, 2025 16:02 UTC (Fri) by LtWorf (subscriber, #124958) [Link]

It works fine on linux too, just not if one uses libinput.

What does it mean by removing X11 support?

Posted Jun 13, 2025 16:01 UTC (Fri) by LtWorf (subscriber, #124958) [Link]

Thinkpads only share the brand name. 2 different models will have completely different hardware.

The fact that something might work well on one model doesn't necessarily mean it will work well on all black computers that are covered in rubber and have a red LED on the outside.

Wayland works, it's libinput that doesn't like the touchpad on my model. Unfortunately Xorg supports multiple drivers while wayland only supports libinput, so that blocks me from using wayland entirely.

I hope it's clearer now.

What does it mean by removing X11 support?

Posted Jun 11, 2025 5:28 UTC (Wed) by motk (guest, #51120) [Link]

XWayland does rootless stuff now, there's literally no reason to complain much any more. You'll have far more pain dealing with ssh and xauth than anything else.

What does it mean by removing X11 support?

Posted Jun 11, 2025 7:11 UTC (Wed) by epeeist_pitlochry (guest, #156764) [Link] (13 responses)

Do X11 programs continue to run via XWayland?

One thing that is not there for photographers, is colour management. It is being worked on, but it isn't there yet.

We will continue to have to work with a UI that allows calibration and colour management of displays until it is ready.

What does it mean by removing X11 support?

Posted Jun 11, 2025 8:19 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (6 responses)

Hopefully, the removal of X11 simply means the removal of the HAL.

Aiui (and it's not been clear) the hardware management side of X11 has been deprecated for years. The user-facing end has morphed into X-Wayland and is an active part of Wayland.

So basically, the deprecation/removal is just the removal of the actual client (in X-speak) that actively manages the hardware - that has now been replaced by the Wayland drivers. Is X-Wayland a compositor? Whatever, your X programs should be able to speak to X-Wayland and not realise that Wayland is actually managing the hardware for them.

Cheers,
Wol

What does it mean by removing X11 support?

Posted Jun 11, 2025 14:37 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (5 responses)

> So basically, the deprecation/removal is just the removal of the actual client (in X-speak) that actively manages the hardware

That would be the server, not the client :) X clients continue to work just fine.

What does it mean by removing X11 support?

Posted Jun 11, 2025 15:55 UTC (Wed) by daroc (editor, #160859) [Link] (4 responses)

Unfortunately, X11 does things backward. The part that talks to the hardware is called the client, and the part that talks to other software in order to render it/compose windows/etc. is called the server.

What does it mean by removing X11 support?

Posted Jun 11, 2025 16:39 UTC (Wed) by smcv (subscriber, #53363) [Link] (3 responses)

> The part that talks to the hardware is called the client, and the part that talks to other software in order to render it/compose windows/etc. is called the server.

Are you sure? That's the opposite of the diagram in the Wikipedia article you linked to.

In 1980s-era X11, my understanding is that the client is the application, which might be xterm or xeyes or something, and does not talk to the hardware at all, only to the X server; and the X server talks to the hardware on behalf of all clients. The X server is a server in the sense that it calls listen() and accept() on a socket, and the X client application is a client in the sense that it calls connect() to that socket.

The way in which it is backwards is that if you're using remote X11 to run an application (perhaps something that does heavy number-crunching) on a large computer that you might call an application server, displaying its output on a lightweight terminal that you might call a thin client, then the X client (software) is running on the application server (hardware) and the X server (software) is running on the thin client (hardware).

In newer X11 applications and toolkits, increasingly both the client and the X server talk to the hardware, and the X server's role is more about coordination than rendering, but the connect()/listen() are still the same way round as they always were.

Wayland is also the same way round as X11: the client is the application, which calls connect(), and the server is the centralized thing linking all your applications together (in this case it's called the Wayland compositor), which calls listen().

Other infrastructure components like Pulseaudio, Pipewire and D-Bus are also the same way round as X11 and Wayland, with one centralized server that calls listen(), and lots of clients that connect() to it.

What does it mean by removing X11 support?

Posted Jun 11, 2025 16:55 UTC (Wed) by daroc (editor, #160859) [Link] (2 responses)

> Are you sure? That's the opposite of the diagram in the Wikipedia article you linked to.

Argh. Yes, you're right. I had "X11 uses the terms backward" cached in my head, and didn't invalidate it properly. I suspect Wol may have done the same.

What does it mean by removing X11 support?

Posted Jun 11, 2025 19:16 UTC (Wed) by jem (subscriber, #24231) [Link]

The confusion comes from that a "server" is usually thought of as the big iron tucked away in some machine room and back in the day you interacted with it using a simple text terminal. The X Window System changed all that: now the display server was running on the machine where your graphics hardware was. The "server" was the Sun workstation on your desk, and the client app was typically the xterm program running on a mainframe in some data center.

What does it mean by removing X11 support?

Posted Jun 12, 2025 0:34 UTC (Thu) by gerdesj (subscriber, #5446) [Link]

Yes! The Xserver does the link to hardware and Xclients send their output to the Xserver.

The miss-understanding/interpretation comes about when you are running "remote X" (export DISPLAY=....). Now you run the Xserver locally and the Xclients are running remotely but displaying locally.

You can ssh into a remote box and daisy chain ssh sessions and still get a local X display for a client, if you are careful, even if the remote box does not have a graphical terminal. It will also be bloody slow. Having said that, modern internet connections are 1+Gb/s, which nicely glosses over a protocol developed in the days when LANs with 10Mb FD was a bit of a luxury. The cool kids got the 100Mb FD connections with their swanky PCI based Cisco 595s instead of a ISA based 509. Actually, X is even older than that funky late 1990's gear.

I shouldn't bother nowadays unless as a last resort. MeshCentral does the job, rather better!

Its tools for the job. I have a screwdriver that is an antique - it was my granddad's, then my dad's and I'm 54. It still works but it is a flat 1/2" bit and most screws I deploy are PH or torx. However, if I can, I love to dig out old Betsie because I'm a human and the handle is lovely to ... handle.

I still run X sessions across my home LANs because I can and in the case of MythTV (int al) - rather necessary if the server has no local display.

I rather like the old school charm of running X clients but it is just that - old school. I grew up when records and then tape was your only choice for music and the web did not exist. I do not now own a record player. I have converted my CD collection to FLAC.

So, I shall wipe a tear from my eye for X11 and Xorg (I barely noticed the passing of XFree86). If people who know more about this stuff than me and are prepared to slap code into a repo - then that's all good by me.

I remember when Linux looked shite, really shite on X. Funnily enough some console drivers with a good config got it right and looked lovely. Nowadays I have absolutely gorgeous founts and all sorts of funky stuff going on my screen. I'm happy to wait for the WL boys and girls n that to get things thrashed out. Its a really hard project that is progressing nicely but needs more time.

Sorry about the fount affectation!

What does it mean by removing X11 support?

Posted Jun 11, 2025 11:10 UTC (Wed) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (5 responses)

> We will continue to have to work with a UI that allows calibration and colour management of displays until it is ready.

This functionality has been available since at least Fedora 25 [1], released back in *2016*.

Wayland's "Color Management" has been on par with what X11 provides for at least that long. [2] The "being worked on" features vastly outstrip anything that X11 could ever do. [3]

[1] This is when Fedora switched their GNOME session to defaulting to Wayland.
[2] Associating a display with a profile, loading a LUT/map into the display driver, providing a way for applications to query that profile, and providing a way for tools to perform calibration.
[3] per-surface colorspace/depth parameterization and automagically making everything JustWork(tm) on the current display(s).

What does it mean by removing X11 support?

Posted Jun 11, 2025 12:01 UTC (Wed) by aragilar (subscriber, #122569) [Link] (4 responses)

I guess the question is then why do users/developers of applications which care about colour management repeatedly disagree with the assertion that wayland colour management is ready? I see similar arguments about accessibility (with the series starting with https://fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/i-want-to-love-linux-i... being only the latest example)? Is it lack of documentation, do the wayland (and associated devs) misunderstand the needs and use-cases (and so they're building the wrong thing), or is it something else?

What does it mean by removing X11 support?

Posted Jun 11, 2025 12:47 UTC (Wed) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (3 responses)

> I guess the question is then why do users/developers of applications which care about colour management repeatedly disagree with the assertion that wayland colour management is ready?

It's not fair to lump "users" and "developers" in the same bucket here. I'm not aware of any specific "developer" complaints, but with regard to users, their complaints are overwhelmingly due to them not understanding what color management features that X11 _actually_ provides [1] versus the until-recently-unrealized color management goals of Wayland.

As an example of this, the >5yr-old laptop I am using to type this reply:

1) Has _never_ been booted into a native X11 session (ie GNOME on Wayland from day 1)
2) Was calibrated using GNOME's built-in profiling tools when I first set it up
3) Is currently using said calibration profile
4) Hot-plugged displays each get their own profile and JustWork(tm)
5) Color-aware X11 applicaitons see no functional difference between running under XWayland vs a native Xorg session

> I see similar arguments about accessibility

Accessibility is a different situation; the old mechanisms heavily relied on the "everything has full access to everything else" misfeature of X11 that still didn't work well without deliberate application (ie beyond what the underlying toolkit provides) support. Given that Wayland is explicitly designed to not have that massive "everything sees everything" security hole, a different underlying mechanism for conveying this information was necessary. It is my understanding that the new stuff being worked on relies on explicit exporting of high-level data instead of requiring a full introspective deep dive (filtered by brittle heuristics) into the state of every UI element in the application. This new stuff is not unique to Wayland and there is no technical reason why it couldn't be directly utilized by X11 (or any other type) applications -- not unlike libinput in that respect.

> Do the wayland (and associated devs) misunderstand the needs and use-cases (and so they're building the wrong thing), or is it something else?

Quite the opposite; they have been working hard to understand the *actual* needs [2] and carefully designing protocols and APIs to meet those needs. Taking into account the lessons learned from existing/prior efforts (ie across all OSes).

[1] ie very little, and it all must be managed completely manually by each individually
[2] which anyone that's ever done any UI/UX work can attest is _very_ different from the *expressed* needs

What does it mean by removing X11 support?

Posted Jun 11, 2025 13:34 UTC (Wed) by aragilar (subscriber, #122569) [Link] (2 responses)

My understanding is if you search "wayland" on https://discuss.pixls.us/ you will find numerous complaints from developers there (which again could be due to multiple issues and could even be resolved with the right documentation). So at the very least there is a disconnect somewhere, and given some of the more dismissive comments I've seen around accessibility which align with the blog series I linked (where the "why would you want to do that" having an answer within that series), my feeling is while there is (hopefully) work being done to improve things, such work seems to be undermined (and possibly regressed) by those within the wider wayland developer community (for lack of a better term).

What does it mean by removing X11 support?

Posted Jun 11, 2025 13:52 UTC (Wed) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

A big chunk of the complaints are because Wayland's support for better than X11 colour management has taken a very long time to go from proposal to something that's stable and ready to implement.

Note, though, that a heck of a lot of the difficulty here is that X11 worked by assuming that you have a fixed framebuffer that correctly represents the data sent to the RAMDAC that then drives your CRT, and required hardware to emulate that as we moved away from CRTs and 13W3 connectors, while Wayland wants to work with things like hardware composition (where the final display output is created on-the-fly in hardware from multiple framebuffers, saving energy), and displays whose EOTF can be controlled by software.

What does it mean by removing X11 support?

Posted Jun 11, 2025 13:58 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> (where the "why would you want to do that" having an answer within that series)

"Why do you want to do that?" is a very valid question from a developer's PoV.

Equally "Why do you want us to do that?" is a very valid question from an end-user's perspective.

Speaking as a developer, the number of users who can't differentiate between cause and effect is awful, and demanding I fix the symptom rarely leads to success, it usually breaks things further.

But speaking as an end user, the number of developers who don't appear to have functional ears is also awful - they are so fixated on their wonderful solution that they don't understand how completely impractical it is. This digital world is dreadful - more and more the people I associate with are *abandoning* technology, because change is speeding up just as their ability to cope with change is fading. The latest NHS "drive to digital, everything is now moving to the app" will be a complete disaster as the people who need it most will be those least able to use it. How on earth are you supposed to use an app when you are half blind, have poor motor control, and your forgettery now works much better than your memory? Your typical NHS patient, in fact ... (and the other government drive, enhanced privacy and "you need to take responsibility for your own affairs", is merely pouring petrol on the flames!)

Cheers,
Wol

Very user friendly.

Posted Jun 11, 2025 5:55 UTC (Wed) by LtWorf (subscriber, #124958) [Link] (15 responses)

Meanwhile my 4 year old thinkpad's touchpad is not yet decently supported by libinput (no 2 finger scrolling) and it doesn't seem like upstream cares. Which means that machine is only usable with Xorg because synaptics does work instead.

Seems another move like when they pushed pulseaudio and everybody had to learn to do "sudo killall -9 pulseaudio" whenever the sound stopped working.

Very user friendly.

Posted Jun 11, 2025 6:12 UTC (Wed) by DemiMarie (subscriber, #164188) [Link] (10 responses)

Has a bug been reported to upstream?

Very user friendly.

Posted Jun 11, 2025 8:48 UTC (Wed) by LtWorf (subscriber, #124958) [Link] (9 responses)

User-unfriendly hardsoftware

Posted Jun 11, 2025 10:22 UTC (Wed) by jengelh (guest, #33263) [Link] (2 responses)

If anything, touchpad scrolling functions seems so arbitrary, as in, every hard-software combination seems to do their own style.

With the contemporary touchpad model I have, scrolling is done by two-finger dragging, anywhere on the pad.
I remember a time when the touchpad area was divided into two sections, like 90%-10%, and scrolling vertically would be accomplished by dragging a single finger in the 10% region, mimicing dragging a sliderbar on the edge of the screen. (Maybe that's still the case for trivial touchpads that don't support multi-finger gestures?)
So, it's interesting to see that you use a third method of holding one finger and dragging the second. Not sure if it's a case of xkcd.com/927 (Standards) or xkcd.com/1172 (Workflow).

sigh. Everyone should just use the PgDn key, but at the same time, laptop keyboards have turned garbage in the past 25 years, first shrinking movement keys and then moving it to a Fn shift sequence. Outrageous. (Framework, you're in this as well!)

User-unfriendly hardsoftware

Posted Jun 11, 2025 11:27 UTC (Wed) by whot (subscriber, #50317) [Link] (1 responses)

> I remember a time when the touchpad area was divided into two sections, like 90%-10%

This is called "edge scrolling" and is one configuration setting away: https://wayland.freedesktop.org/libinput/doc/latest/scrol...
Touchpads are barely little more than touchscreens with a button behind the hinge (if that) and virtually all functionality is purely implemented in userspace.

User-unfriendly hardsoftware

Posted Jun 11, 2025 14:00 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> This is called "edge scrolling" and is one configuration setting away:

This is the problem. It sounds like the *default* has been "deprecated", and if you don't know where it went, you're up s*** creek.

This is far too much the norm nowadays.

Cheers,
Wol

Very user friendly.

Posted Jun 11, 2025 12:45 UTC (Wed) by zdzichu (subscriber, #17118) [Link] (5 responses)

I can't comprehend what's going on with libinput. From my understanding of the ticket:
– it cares about pressure user's finger exerts on touchpad
– based on pressure, it decides if user used thumb or other finger
– if it decides it was a thumb, then libinput behaves differently than if it was other finger.

I may be wrong, but above sound like very hacky and terrible heuristics.

(FTR, I had many thinpads, currently using t480s and T15 AMD gen2, and the touchpads work fine, although trackpoint is the primary pointing device in them)

Very user friendly.

Posted Jun 11, 2025 15:05 UTC (Wed) by LtWorf (subscriber, #124958) [Link]

I have another much older thinkpad that works ok with libinput (not better, or equally, so I use Xorg and no libinput).

Very user friendly.

Posted Jun 13, 2025 13:33 UTC (Fri) by mgedmin (subscriber, #34497) [Link] (3 responses)

AFAIU from bug comments there what's happening there is that libinput implements gestures (such as pinching), and so it waits a bit more (4 mm of motion in one finger) before starting to scroll, while the Xorg synaptics drive doesn't support gestures and can start scrolling immediately. And then the suggested workaround to disable gesture support doesn't work for unclear reasons.

Very user friendly.

Posted Jun 13, 2025 16:10 UTC (Fri) by LtWorf (subscriber, #124958) [Link] (2 responses)

That's the hypothesis. But I don't think that's it. It takes centimeters to trigger it.

Very user friendly.

Posted Jun 13, 2025 17:17 UTC (Fri) by LtWorf (subscriber, #124958) [Link] (1 responses)

So in the end the issue is closed but 2 finger scrolling does not work. Do you see any willingness to fix it?

Very user friendly.

Posted Jun 13, 2025 23:06 UTC (Fri) by whot (subscriber, #50317) [Link]

> So in the end the issue is closed but 2 finger scrolling does not work. Do you see any willingness to fix it?

The first bugbot comment explicitly states: "we close it, you re-open it when whatever above has been addressed and
then we know we need to look at it again." (and why we use this approach).

So if it's still an issue please re-open and supply any useful log files because writing a statement like "It takes centimeters to trigger it." deep inside LWN comments instead of the gitlab report is not usually going to help getting things fixed. You didn't mention this when I explained the 4mm threshold.

Reading through this again, the answer of "Is there's a chance that you're seeing the erratic behaviour because the second finger may rest in the button area? If you change to clickfinger (--set-click-method=clickfinger in debug-events) does this fix the issue?" was met with a statement about libinput having the wrong default for buttons for you. But that question is still pending.

But, from a personal POV: complaining multiple times in other forums about a project instead of providing the info in the issue trackers is not going to make the maintainers more eager to help. The time I spent writing this could've been spent triaging or fixing some other issue...

Very user friendly.

Posted Jun 11, 2025 13:27 UTC (Wed) by quotemstr (subscriber, #45331) [Link] (2 responses)

> Meanwhile my 4 year old thinkpad's touchpad is not yet decently supported by libinput (no 2 finger scrolling) and it doesn't seem like upstream cares.

libinput adopts a Gnome-like anti-customization policy, sadly. I miss pointer acceleration curve configuration and all the knobs that the old synaptics clickpad driver provided. With libinput, it's as if they know the one right way to mouse, and if you disagree, you're wrong. It's a loss.

It's also a loss that Wayland compositors don't seem to have a decent way of providing input-device-specific XKB layouts like I can do in X11. That means that if I want to remap keys, I need to do it hackily by intercepting evdev events and having the window system use a virtual device. XKB was much cleaner.

Very user friendly.

Posted Jun 11, 2025 14:51 UTC (Wed) by zdzichu (subscriber, #17118) [Link] (1 responses)

Very user friendly.

Posted Jun 11, 2025 15:07 UTC (Wed) by quotemstr (subscriber, #45331) [Link]

Oh, cool. I'll take a look. Thanks!

One thing I wanted to do, also, and that I could do via the Synaptics driver, is define custom mouse avoidance areas. For whatever reason, I keep causing stray mouse events when I accidentally touch the wrong spot on the edge of the trackpad, and I was able to just make those spots insensitive in X11.

Very user friendly.

Posted Jun 12, 2025 16:53 UTC (Thu) by dbnichol (subscriber, #39622) [Link]

it doesn't seem like upstream cares
When I look at that bug, it seems like Peter spent a significant amount of time debugging with you and helped develop the quirks needed to get closer to your desired behavior. I would hardly describe that as not caring.

Boy who cried wolf in reverse?

Posted Jun 11, 2025 7:34 UTC (Wed) by taladar (subscriber, #68407) [Link] (34 responses)

I think the main problem with Wayland is that it will be extremely painful to complete the transition because those with mostly default settings and common use cases have already moved over completely and everyone else has stopped trusting the constant stream of "everything works fine" the Wayland community has produced for the last ten years or so despite all evidence to the contrary long before most things actually started working well.

Since the transition is also generally more work for those with non-standard configurations and use cases just trying it is also much harder in those situations (e.g. unusual hardware, unusual window managers, lots of custom scripts working with X11 tools) and at this point it is hard to motivate giving it another try.

And it certainly doesn't help that where X11 had a relatively simple window manager to implement for many non-standard uses the Wayland way of doing things is to implement fiendishly complex compositors that are essentially an entire X11 server worth of complexity thrown on top of what window managers did. Sure, there is a workaround with wl-roots but that still doesn't seem to make compositors nearly as abundant as window manager choices were on X11.

Essentially the Wayland community has a marketing problem that is sort of similar to the "boy who cried wolf" situation in reverse, they cried "everything is fine" too many times before.

Boy who cried wolf in reverse?

Posted Jun 11, 2025 8:25 UTC (Wed) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link]

Someone should write a wayland compositor that wraps around a X11 window manager...
(or wrap Wayland windows inside X windows and marshal events).

Boy who cried wolf in reverse?

Posted Jun 11, 2025 9:31 UTC (Wed) by aragilar (subscriber, #122569) [Link] (3 responses)

That's also ignoring apps (and some toolkits such as Tk) which are still X-only, and absence a change of heart from specific wayland devs around certain protocols, will never be ported to Wayland.

Boy who cried wolf in reverse?

Posted Jun 11, 2025 14:18 UTC (Wed) by parametricpoly (subscriber, #143903) [Link] (1 responses)

Eh, the undroidwish distribution seems to support Wayland: https://core.tcl-lang.org/tk/tktview/3f58c0871c0be6b457cb

Maybe they should start to react a little? The ticket has been open for 7 years and nothing has happened in the main project. It shows that development is pretty much at a standstill.

Boy who cried wolf in reverse?

Posted Jun 11, 2025 15:26 UTC (Wed) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link]

I think undroidwish is a bit of a hack, but I also think the Tk developers over-estimate the difficulty of supporting Wayland. (Not that I'm volunteering to look into it...)

Tk natively supports X11, MS Windows and Mac OS, which are three platforms as different from one another as they can be. How hard would it really be to add Wayland support?

Two things hold me back from even looking at Wayland: XFCE4 and Tcl/Tk. Can't live without those things and don't want to run them in an emulated X session under Wayland.

PS: The same person behind undroidwish also made a curses toolkit for Tcl called "ck" which was quite amazing! No idea if it compiles against a modern Tcl.

Boy who cried wolf in reverse?

Posted Jun 13, 2025 13:50 UTC (Fri) by mgedmin (subscriber, #34497) [Link]

That's what Xwayland is for. I don't remember hearing about any plans of deprecating it.

Boy who cried wolf in reverse?

Posted Jun 11, 2025 14:34 UTC (Wed) by parametricpoly (subscriber, #143903) [Link]

> everyone else has stopped trusting the constant stream of "everything works fine" the Wayland community has produced for the last ten years or so despite all evidence to the contrary long before most things actually started working well.

It's sad that some vendors have spread baseless hype. I did a switch like 1 to 1,5 years ago on my laptop. Had one (pretty critical) issue with Zoom screen sharing and Pipewire. On my HTPC, did a switch only after Nvidia started to support Wayland, which was also during the last year or so. On my main desktop I have a bit more complex setup to I still need patches for Gnome, but Wayland basically works 24/7. It even fixes few issues such as standby modes for monitors and DE's screen lock. I know there are lots of use cases that are not covered yet, but it works for normal stuff.

> Since the transition is also generally more work for those with non-standard configurations
Those are a small minority. I don't disagree, this is a problem, but not a major one.

> unusual window managers
Well obviously if your WM does not support Wayland, there's nothing to test yet.

> fiendishly complex compositors that are essentially an entire X11 server worth of complexity thrown on top of what window managers did. Sure, there is a workaround with wl-roots but that still doesn't seem to make compositors nearly as abundant as window manager choices were on X11.

True, but you're using it wrong. I've never understood the distro / WM hopping. Most users are happy with a single WM/DE. Besides DEs like Gnome/KDE already implement so many things that duplicating some compositor code is no biggie. For smaller WMs the solution is to build upon wl-roots. Many of the WMs are crap anyway and not intented for large audience. The WM is heavier, but the other stuff is lighter.

> Essentially the Wayland community has a marketing problem

Sure, but again many of the problems will be fixed as time goes by. Xorg doesn't have any decent PR department either. Heck, it doesn't even seem to have any developers anymore outside conspiracy theorists :D I've used Linux exclusively on desktop for 25 years now. There were lots of issues during those years. Fully functional OpenGL/DRI support (e.g. Intel was lagging behind for years and amd/nvidia drivers were blobs), support for two GPUs from different vendors, video playback and hw acceleration, font rendering, gtk/qt toolkit looks on non-native DEs, audio servers (esd, arts etc.).

In some years Wayland be in the same state as Xorg.

Boy who cried wolf in reverse?

Posted Jun 11, 2025 16:13 UTC (Wed) by mb (subscriber, #50428) [Link] (22 responses)

Yes, sadly that is also my experience from the past decade. I tried to transition about 10 times during that time frame and it always resulted in either a right out crashing WM or a black screen or at best an unusable sluggish crashing and only partially working desktop (a couple of days ago with KDE).

Last time I tried was today with labwc.
How am I supposed to get from a black screen that only offers me an "exit" context menu to a primitive working desktop? You know, where I can actually do something.
Without reading tons of documentation and modifying configuration files, of course.
I have no idea. So I uninstalled it again. Ain't Nobody Got Time For That, I'm sorry.

I would *love* to use Wayland, but it simply doesn't work for me. For whatever reason. I don't know why.

Boy who cried wolf in reverse?

Posted Jun 12, 2025 7:43 UTC (Thu) by daenzer (subscriber, #7050) [Link] (13 responses)

Sounds like a labwc issue, not a Wayland one.

Users don’t „use Wayland“, they use a desktop environment with Wayland as the main display mechanism. From a user’s point of view, a GNOME / KDE Plasma session works mostly the same with Wayland as with X.

Boy who cried wolf in reverse?

Posted Jun 12, 2025 17:15 UTC (Thu) by mb (subscriber, #50428) [Link] (12 responses)

> Sounds like a labwc issue, not a Wayland one.

That's exactly the attitude that is the problem here.
Since a decade I hear "Wayland is usable/stable/ready/etc...".
Of course the user expects that it would mean to actually be usable as a whole (Desktop daily work). That's the only sane thing to assume, right?

That's the same thing as saying: "Your room is ready. What? The staircase to your room is completely blocked? Well, that's a whole different story! I only said your *room* was ready."

For a user it doesn't make a difference.

And no, apparently it's not a labwc issue. It works as expected. labwc is *designed* to start up as user unfriendly as possible. For whatever weird reason. It's clearly documented here: https://labwc.github.io/getting-started.html
Sorry, this is not going to make users happy.

I tried *multiple* ways to use Wayland and so far *none* of it worked for me.
That's why Wayland as a whole doesn't work for me, yet.

Boy who cried wolf in reverse?

Posted Jun 13, 2025 0:32 UTC (Fri) by daenzer (subscriber, #7050) [Link] (1 responses)

> And no, apparently it's not a labwc issue. It works as expected. labwc is *designed* to start up as user unfriendly as possible. For whatever weird reason. It's clearly documented here: https://labwc.github.io/getting-started.html

That confirms it’s a labwc issue which has nothing to do with Wayland vs X.

Boy who cried wolf in reverse?

Posted Jun 13, 2025 5:43 UTC (Fri) by mb (subscriber, #50428) [Link]

Wow.... .

Boy who cried wolf in reverse?

Posted Jun 13, 2025 9:18 UTC (Fri) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (9 responses)

This is the same attitude as "Rust sucks - I tried to compile ripgrep for my machine with GCC-rs, and it didn't work at all. Clearly Rust is not ready to use in serious code".

Wayland is a protocol used to communicate between clients and servers. X11 is a protocol used to communicate between clients and servers. labwc is one implementation of a Wayland server; it's not the only one, and it's working as intended by the developers.

Other implementations of the Wayland protocol exist (I'm using KDE Plasma 6.3 as the server side here, with various clients such as Firefox, KMail and XWayland), and will have different issues.

Boy who cried wolf in reverse?

Posted Jun 13, 2025 13:10 UTC (Fri) by mb (subscriber, #50428) [Link] (8 responses)

>Other implementations of the Wayland protocol exist

Did you actually read my post?
I tried lots of them.
So far, I found none that works properly.

>and will have different issues.

That's my point.
All of them have issues and none of them work as good as X11.
That's simply the reality that I face since a decade.
On lots of different machines, lots of different combinations of compositors and whatever.

Currently there is *no* way for me to use Wayland. And therefore the claims that Wayland was production ready that I hear since over a decade are just meaningless.

You may like it or not. But it is what it is.

That's obviously a *completely* different thing than "I don't like riprep, therefore Rust sucks".

Show me one compositor that just works (tm) like Xfce on X11 (and is not Gnome) and I will shut up.

Boy who cried wolf in reverse?

Posted Jun 13, 2025 13:23 UTC (Fri) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> All of them have issues and none of them work as good as X11.

Exactly; for my use cases the Wayland compositor I'm using now works *better* than its X11 equivalent.

> Show me one compositor that just works (tm) like Xfce on X11 (and is not Gnome) and I will shut up.

Sounds like you want a specific desktop environment, not a "compositor" per se.

If the Xfce folks finish their nascent port to Wayland [1], you may get your wish. If not, you're free to ask for your money back.

[1] https://wiki.xfce.org/releng/wayland_roadmap

Boy who cried wolf in reverse?

Posted Jun 13, 2025 13:31 UTC (Fri) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (6 responses)

Show me one Rust compiler that just works for compiling ripgrep such that it outperforms GNU grep (and is not rustc).

KDE Plasma 6.4 works just fine for me; I don't know what's different about your setup to mine that means that it doesn't work for you. But KDE Plasma 6.3 and 6.4 and GNOME 40 have all been fine as Wayland setups for me.

And no, it's not obviously different - you're excluding things that are known to work, and then saying that Wayland as a whole does not work because, when you exclude the implementations that work, the remaining implementations don't work.

When I put it like that, it's obvious why your statement is problematic - you're excluding implementations that are known to work well for other people, and saying that the protocol is not ready, because you as one person cannot make it work after you exclude the implementations that do work. But you get upset when I try to do the same with Rust.

Boy who cried wolf in reverse?

Posted Jun 13, 2025 13:42 UTC (Fri) by mb (subscriber, #50428) [Link] (5 responses)

The only implementation I exclude is Gnome, because that is not acceptable for me regardless of X11 or Wayland.
Anything else is fine.

KDE, labwc and Xfce-Wayland don't work for me.
Please tell me. Which one should I test next?
I heard Wayland was ready for use. So which one is it that works? Is it really only Gnome?

Boy who cried wolf in reverse?

Posted Jun 13, 2025 13:45 UTC (Fri) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (4 responses)

Why doesn't KDE work for you? KDE Plasma 6.0, 6.1 and 6.2 had some bugs that affected me (but broadly worked for me, as long as I didn't trip up the bugs), but Plasma 6.4 just works, and works better than it does running over X11 to X.org as server.

And you still haven't answered my question; which Rust compiler produces production ready code, apart from rustc which doesn't work for me? Or are you saying that Rust isn't ready for production use, too?

Boy who cried wolf in reverse?

Posted Jun 13, 2025 13:48 UTC (Fri) by mb (subscriber, #50428) [Link] (3 responses)

>Why doesn't KDE work for you?

I don't know *why* it doesn't work.
But I tried it a couple of days ago and it did not work at all.
Crashes, not working buttons, hanging unresponsive UI, etc. It was completely unusable.

>And you still haven't answered my question

I have.

Boy who cried wolf in reverse?

Posted Jun 13, 2025 13:49 UTC (Fri) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (1 responses)

I missed it - which Rust compiler did you say was production ready for arbitrary Rust code, apart from rustc, which I'm excluding for reasons that I won't discuss with you?

Boy who cried wolf in reverse?

Posted Jun 13, 2025 13:50 UTC (Fri) by mb (subscriber, #50428) [Link]

Okay. Let me press the mute button then.

Boy who cried wolf in reverse?

Posted Jun 13, 2025 14:39 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

Plasma/KDE/Wayland has a bunch of known annoyances. I haven't updated my system for a bit, but windows all centre on the screen at boot, it doeesn't remember properly what was/wasn't running, probably a few more. All papercuts that are anooying but not serious.

For me, everything seems to work "good enough", but I can understand people not being willing to put up with it. I like KDE, so I do.

Cheers,
Wol

Boy who cried wolf in reverse?

Posted Jun 12, 2025 12:25 UTC (Thu) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link] (7 responses)

> I would *love* to use Wayland, but it simply doesn't work for me. For whatever reason. I don't know why.

Computer programs can smell distrust and fear.. and will stop working when they do. People say that is crazy talk, but we all know deep down its true :)

[the above is meant in humour]

Boy who cried wolf in reverse?

Posted Jun 12, 2025 13:32 UTC (Thu) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (6 responses)

Maybe it's meant in humour, but it's real.

The other day, my brother-in-law said "Help please; my email's not working..."

I went over to my sister's house. Did not even touch his laptop. I just had to glare at it and the email started working again...

I bet many people who've given tech support have had similar experiences. 🙂

Boy who cried wolf in reverse?

Posted Jun 12, 2025 13:38 UTC (Thu) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (3 responses)

> I bet many people who've given tech support have had similar experiences. 🙂

I've always heard it referred to as "the consultant effect"

Boy who cried wolf in reverse?

Posted Jun 12, 2025 16:54 UTC (Thu) by madscientist (subscriber, #16861) [Link] (2 responses)

A friend in college had the OPPOSITE effect. He would break things just by trying them, when they worked fine for everyone else.

And yes, his first job out of college was in QA...

Boy who cried wolf in reverse?

Posted Jun 12, 2025 20:10 UTC (Thu) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (1 responses)

I have that skill too... I am very good at breaking things, which is quite a useful thing in testing/QA.

Boy who cried wolf in reverse?

Posted Jun 12, 2025 21:41 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

IBM allegedly had the "Black Team" - a collection of those sort of people.

Devel;opment teams used to quake in their boots when told their software was being paid a visit by these people.

Cheers,
Wol

Boy who cried wolf in reverse?

Posted Jun 13, 2025 17:21 UTC (Fri) by hmh (subscriber, #3838) [Link] (1 responses)

There is a whole bogon source/sink pseudo-quantum-mechanics joke theory around this.

But I don't think anyone did a double-blind mass experiment to search for individuals that really experience significant more issues (or significant less issues) than the median... And I struggle to even come up with a remotely serious attempt at how would one even design such an experiment.

Boy who cried wolf in reverse?

Posted Jun 14, 2025 10:32 UTC (Sat) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

I think this is partly to do with brain wiring.

If the programmer thinks one way, and the user thinks another, then the default expectations won't match. The user won't use the program the way the programmer thought they would. So the user is much more likely to tickle bugs. Throw in the sort of user who also thinks "what happens if I try THIS?" and they can be a nightmare for programmers as they break everything left right and centre.

As a textual person, not a visual, I don't like wysiwyg, and you've heard me wax lyrical about WP's "reveal codes". I hate Word (and by extension lowriter, sorry), because I simply cannot get my head round how it works, so as a result "nothing works" for me ...

Cheers,
Wol

Boy who cried wolf in reverse?

Posted Jun 12, 2025 16:17 UTC (Thu) by wtarreau (subscriber, #51152) [Link] (4 responses)

That's also my concern. I'm seeing a big and strong push for this thing that still appears quite incomplete and doesn't seem much concerned with the support for existing tools and applications. Will I still be able to load my Xmodmap file and my Xterm settings ? Not sure. Will I still be able to use my window manager of choice ? I guess not, for having read sufficient horror stories about WM maintainers giving up due to the complexity of the task. Will I still be able to forward X applications over SSH or native TCP between my laptop and PC on the same desk ? From what I've read it's a nightmare. It looks like there's a race to support only a few very fat environments that are used by those who try to make their parents switch from windows to linux, and that those using lighter and way more efficient stuff will be out of the game very quickly. I'm really really fed up with this recurrent trend consisting in declaring stuff that works as obsolete and deciding a complete rewrite that purposely ditches the features they didn't figure how to implement. Till now all I've read about Wayland is about functional regressions from X11. I have *yet* to read about a single improvement that relates to my use cases, which have been working flawlessly for decades now.

Sadly Linux has turned highly proprietary these days. With Canonical making their own choices and being used as the de-facto standard distro targetted by a lot of software (just read the many README.md on github projects to get a sense of this), in the end it's this company that is defining what Linux should be, and it's no longer the users. Some will say "they have no other choice, GNOME is dropping support" but GNOME is only dropping support because they're seeing that a few bleeding edge distros are shipping this unfinished stuff to newcomers who don't complain since they don't have existing software to support and they cannot miss anything :-/ If distros would only adopt what completely works (as it used to be the case a long time ago), environments like GNOME would only drop legacy support once the new one is feature complete. At this point we still seem to be very far from this situation. Then again we'll complain that people don't upgrade their systems...

Boy who cried wolf in reverse?

Posted Jun 12, 2025 17:58 UTC (Thu) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (2 responses)

>Will I still be able to load my Xmodmap file and my Xterm settings ? Not sure

Why wouldn't you? XWayland is still X11.

> Will I still be able to use my window manager of choice

There's no technical reason why one couldn't run nothing but XWayland on top of of a bare-bones Wayland compositor and proceed to use whatever X window manager you'd want.

> Will I still be able to forward X applications over SSH or native TCP between my laptop and PC on the same desk

Again, XWayland is still X11. You can forward X over SSH, allow random X clients to connect to your machine, set $DISPLAY To whatever you want, and so forth. (I might add that you can trivially forward *Wayland* over SSH too; I typically do this a few times a day. And anectdotally, Wayland forwarded over chained SSH connections works a _lot_ better over the internet than using X...)

> and that those using lighter and way more efficient stuff will be out of the game very quickly.

Those who care about those "Lighter and way more efficient" environments need to step up and actually maintain/adapt them. F/OSS has always been a "do-ocracy" -- Folks work on (and/or support) what they want or otherwise care about.

Yes, getting paid to do something is a mighty powerful motivator. Should that not be allowed?

> and it's no longer the users.

The user counts beg to differ. In absolute terms (and probably relative too), Linux (and/or any sort of UNIX) on the desktop has never been more popular.

> GNOME is only dropping support because they're seeing that a few bleeding edge distros are shipping this unfinished stuff

X11 is also "unfinished stuff", and by your logic should have never been shipped.

> GNOME would only drop legacy support once the new one is feature complete.

What *exact* feature(s) are you referring to here?

Boy who cried wolf in reverse?

Posted Jun 12, 2025 20:53 UTC (Thu) by Kamilion (subscriber, #42576) [Link] (1 responses)

> I might add that you can trivially forward *Wayland* over SSH too

Oooh? Pray tell, how is that accomplished? I've only seen RDP in use so far.

Boy who cried wolf in reverse?

Posted Jun 12, 2025 21:27 UTC (Thu) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> Oooh? Pray tell, how is that accomplished? I've only seen RDP in use so far.

man waypipe ?

Boy who cried wolf in reverse?

Posted Jun 12, 2025 20:10 UTC (Thu) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link]

Sadly Linux has turned highly proprietary these days.

No, not Linux... just a certain subset. I'm happily running Debian 12 (Debian 13 on some machines) with XFCE4 and it's fine... no proprietary nonsense at all.

Just stay away from Canonical and you'll be OK.

"drop support for X11" isn't really true

Posted Jun 11, 2025 16:53 UTC (Wed) by smcv (subscriber, #53363) [Link] (1 responses)

I think describing this as dropping support for X11 is misleading. The linked Ubuntu forum post says "drops support for GNOME on Xorg", and the linked GNOME blog post is about dropping the "X11 GNOME Session" - both of those are more accurate ways to describe what is being dropped.

X11 is a protocol, not an implementation, and I expect that it will be supported for a long time. In a Wayland session, the Wayland compositor normally runs Xwayland, an X11 server (either on startup, or on-demand). X11 clients connect to Xwayland, which acts as a Wayland client on their behalf (with a varying level of functionality when compared with the Xorg session, depending what exact features the X11 client wants to use), while native Wayland clients bypass Xwayland and talk directly to the Wayland compositor.

Xorg is an implementation of the X11 protocol as a top-level display server that talks directly to the hardware. The thing that Ubuntu and upstream GNOME are both interested in dropping is the desktop session labelled "GNOME on Xorg", which uses Xorg as the X11 server, and runs the GNOME window manager, compositor and applications on top of that.

The possible regressions here are:

- if the combination of Xorg and GNOME's X11 compositor works as intended on a particular hardware/driver combination, but GNOME's Wayland compositor does not;
- or if an X11 application is relying on a particular X11 feature that Xwayland cannot emulate faithfully, most commonly because Wayland security restrictions don't allow it or because Wayland doesn't have a protocol for it

"drop support for X11" isn't really true

Posted Jun 11, 2025 18:09 UTC (Wed) by jzb (editor, #7867) [Link]

I've changed the title accordingly. Thanks for the note -- typically we prefer that corrections be sent to lwn@lwn.net, that way they will definitely be seen and more swiftly corrected. Thanks!

Why all this pain?

Posted Jun 12, 2025 21:41 UTC (Thu) by cyperpunks (subscriber, #39406) [Link] (1 responses)

Why on earth did Wayland end up in this hopeless situation where distros must disable X11 to force adaption of in-complete software?

So now both Wayland and X11 will die, great moves indeed.

Why all this pain?

Posted Jun 12, 2025 23:49 UTC (Thu) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> Why on earth did Wayland end up in this hopeless situation where distros must disable X11 to force adaption of in-complete software?

Distributions are disabling (or removing) this stuff because *upstreams* are disabling (or removing) increasingly-bitrotten code that nobody has worked on in many years and they're sick of carrying the dead weight.

It turns out that maintaining all of this old infrastructure is very hard work that requires (a) technical skills, (b) people skills, and (c) motivation.

How many resources for professional graphics

Posted Jun 13, 2025 18:36 UTC (Fri) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link] (4 responses)

I don't feel the need to wade into and repeat the arguments about what flavor the pixels are (it's only Unix graphics of it comes from the X11 region, otherwise it's just sparkling Microsoft) but I think it's useful to understand some differences between the last 10-20y and the previous 20y, IMO when X11 was stabilized and became the standard display tech across Unix, replacing proprietary systems from HP, DEC, Sun, IBM and others there was a lot of big companies with commercial interest in selling high powered graphical workstations who funded the effort to build the X11 ecosystem including all the detail work accessibility, UX testing, QA, etc and that made it so beloved of so many people here. I don't see Wayland (which is a better fit for the Linux graphics stack and how GPUs have worked for 20y) as having the same kind of resources behind it as the decades and billions of dollars thatade X11. Wayland has some fine developers some of whom are full-time and some commerce and specific vertical industries which depends on it but it's still much closer to a volunteer project than its nearest analog the Apple Quartz stack on MacOSX Unix, there is no Sun trying to sell SunRay terminals that depend on it, and it kind of missed the timing to be used for Android or ChromeOS. If there was more pressure then it wouldn't take years to agree to protocol extension proposals and conventions between the major desktops, those disagreements would be forcibly resolved in weeks or months at most because no one shipping product has time/money to spend waiting for consensus, the environment which created the ICCCM conventions isn't the environment today.

I'm just an armchair opinion-haver though, maybe someone more knowledgeable can elaborate and tell me how and why I'm wrong ;-)

How many resources for professional graphics

Posted Jun 15, 2025 14:47 UTC (Sun) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

The other really important thing is that hardware's changed.

When X11 was stabilizing, graphics output hardware consisted of a framebuffer feeding data to a RAMDAC that fed a CRT. If you were lucky, the output hardware had a simple overlay for the pointer, where it would switch the RAMDAC to getting data from a different palette and data source for a small rectangle (often in a different format, too - e.g. 4 bit with palette for the pointer, 8 bit with a different palette for the main framebuffer), with one data value reserved for "display the underlying framebuffer, not the pointer".

In this world, you could do things like colour correction by changing the RAMDAC setup slightly; change how it mapped framebuffer bits to voltages, and you got different pictures on the CRT.

Today's graphics output hardware isn't like that. We have a variety of display technologies, and we transfer the picture over a digital link. The graphics output hardware generates the image it sends over that digital link by compositing different framebuffers together, each with their own colourspace conversion, so that you can have a link that's 10 bpc RGB, being fed from an 8 bpc YUV framebuffer and three 8 bpc ARGB framebuffers each with their own conversions to 10 bpc RGB, and with those conversions happening on-the-fly. Further, the graphics output hardware may even be able to alpha-composite framebuffers together; if it can do this, it can sometimes do it before conversion to the link format, sometimes after, and sometimes even in an intermediate format (some hardware can composite in 12 bpc RGB, converting for output).

On top of that, the conversions have become more complicated; in the days when X11 stabilised, your conversion hardware was (at the most sophisticated end) a palette to RGB lookup, followed by a 1D LUT to turn each of R, G and B into voltages. In the modern world, you have 1D LUTs to convert digital values to digital values, 3D LUTs that convert 3 input values as a trio to three output values (so you can do things like have strong green reduce blue a little bit), and even conversion matrices, where you treat the input values as a vector, and multiply by a matrix to get an output vector. And, just to make things even more exciting, the graphics output hardware can directly read some compressed framebuffer formats; instead of having the framebuffer as a literal 1:1 mapping of pixel to output, you can have framebuffers that include shortcuts for things like "the next N pixels are all this fixed value"; this doesn't map nicely to X11's view that it can directly access pixels from the CPU.

X11, in as far as it handled modern hardware capabilities, did so by treating them as acceleration layers; you had the "main" framebuffer, the output link was configured to match the main framebuffer (possibly via a conversion layer for colour correction), and then any compositing was treated as layers for use by things like the Xv extension. For multiple monitor support, the graphics hardware was configured to have a single "virtual" framebuffer, with the output hardware scanning out its own chunk of the virtual framebuffer.

All of this means that the X11 model of hardware is hopelessly out of date, and to actually make full use of the silicon you're paying for (saving power, reducing output latency, reducing DRAM bandwidth used by iGPUs, having multiple colour-corrected windows, handling mixed HDR and SDR content etc), you need something that doesn't look like X11 any more.

How many resources for professional graphics

Posted Jun 16, 2025 9:55 UTC (Mon) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (2 responses)

> here is no Sun trying to sell SunRay terminals that depend on [X11]

Pretty sure SunRay actually used its own protocol - not X11.

SunRay long predated standardisation on X11 across Unix workstations. Talking more the Sun SparcStation days when X11 became standard.

How many resources for professional graphics

Posted Jun 16, 2025 13:05 UTC (Mon) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

Sigh...

> SunRay long predated standardisation on X11 across Unix workstations.

I of course meant: "standardisation of X11 across Unix workstations long predated SunRay.".

How many resources for professional graphics

Posted Jun 17, 2025 1:36 UTC (Tue) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

Sure the wire protocol for a SunRay wasn't X11, because it wasn't suitable for remote display even then, but there wouldn't have been applications to run on a SunRay without a local X server that could output to the SunRay protocol, much like how you could run a Wayland compositor which outputs to RDP and runs Xwayland for local apps. The apps didn't natively speak SunRay, so Sun invested in the X11 ecosystem with GNOME and StarOffice to make their product useful. While GNOME and KDE and COSMIC and LibreOffice and Firefox all exist today and are maintained by amazing volunteers, I don't see any vendor with the same kind of urgency putting effort into Wayland and accessibility to dot all the 'i's and cross all the 't's

Resistance to change

Posted Jun 14, 2025 6:41 UTC (Sat) by jem (subscriber, #24231) [Link] (1 responses)

Wayland can be compared to battery electric vehicles. BEVs are simpler and more efficient than the ICE cars they are replacing. The user interface when driving is almost exactly the same. But "they don´t match my use case", "they wear out tires more quickly", and "they don´t sound right". And yet there are tens of millions of BEVs out on the roads every day.

Resistance to change

Posted Jun 20, 2025 13:14 UTC (Fri) by daenzer (subscriber, #7050) [Link]

The transitions are at different stages though. If the ICE –> BEV car transition was at the same stage as the X –> Wayland one, there would be around the same number of vehicles each in circulation (corresponding to users of X / Wayland desktop environments), and ICE vehicles would be a shrinking minority now or in the near future. However, BEV cars haven’t reached break even in terms of vehicles newly entering circulation, let alone in terms of vehicles in circulation.


Copyright © 2025, Eklektix, Inc.
Comments and public postings are copyrighted by their creators.
Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds