Boy who cried wolf in reverse? [LWN.net]

Boy who cried wolf in reverse?

Posted Jun 12, 2025 16:17 UTC (Thu) by wtarreau (subscriber, #51152)
In reply to: Boy who cried wolf in reverse? by taladar
Parent article: Ubuntu 25.10 to drop support for GNOME on Xorg

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...

to post comments

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.