What does it mean by removing X11 support? [LWN.net]

What does it mean by removing X11 support?

Posted Jun 11, 2025 12:01 UTC (Wed) by aragilar (subscriber, #122569)
In reply to: What does it mean by removing X11 support? by pizza
Parent article: Ubuntu 25.10 to drop support for GNOME on Xorg

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?

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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