Individual GNOME applications [LWN.net]

Individual GNOME applications

Posted Jun 29, 2025 0:30 UTC (Sun) by linuxrocks123 (subscriber, #34648)
In reply to: Individual GNOME applications by jmalcolm
Parent article: GNOME deepens systemd dependencies

I would be very surprised if more than 50% of Linux desktops were currently Wayland. XFCE, for instance, does not support it, and XFCE is very popular among individual users. Among corporate users, a large percentage of them are probably still on RHEL 7 and therefore very unlikely to be running Wayland.

Anyway, GTK1 will still work, as you say, the programs will just run under XWayland.

Here's my personal plan for Wayland, by the way:
1. On the hardware side, run XOrg until it breaks, then run XLibre until it breaks, then run a Wayland compositor with a single rootful XWayland instance taking up the entire screen.
2. On the software side, use the X11 versions of programs until they stop being released because the toolkits dropped support, then use 12to11 to run programs that won't run directly under X11 anymore.
3. Proceed to ignore Wayland forever.

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Individual GNOME applications

Posted Jun 29, 2025 2:40 UTC (Sun) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (6 responses)

> I would be very surprised if more than 50% of Linux desktops were currently Wayland. XFCE, for instance, does not support it, and XFCE is very popular among individual users.

"Very popular" according to what objective metric?

...I would be surprised if even 15% of the total "desktop linux" install base is using anything other than GNOME or KDE.

But let's take Debian's limited opt-in popcon stats (about 300K respondents). xfce, kde, gnome, mate, and cinnamon come to about 21%, 21%, 42%, 11%, and 4% respectively. That gives about 59% of Wayland-capable environments. mate will probably be there in its next release.

> Among corporate users, a large percentage of them are probably still on RHEL 7 and therefore very unlikely to be running Wayland.

Given that RHEL7 dropped out of support a literal year ago (June 30, 2024), I'm gonna have to go [citation needed] on this one.

Individual GNOME applications

Posted Jun 29, 2025 15:01 UTC (Sun) by linuxrocks123 (subscriber, #34648) [Link] (5 responses)

> But let's take Debian's limited opt-in popcon stats (about 300K respondents). xfce, kde, gnome, mate, and cinnamon come to about 21%, 21%, 42%, 11%, and 4% respectively. That gives about 59% of Wayland-capable environments. mate will probably be there in its next release.

Since all of those desktops also work under X, with those numbers, you'd need about 85% of all desktops that theoretically could be running Wayland to be running it instead of X. That seems unlikely to me.

> Given that RHEL7 dropped out of support a literal year ago (June 30, 2024), I'm gonna have to go [citation needed] on this one.

I've had to use RHEL7 within the last few months. You can buy extended support, and these places do.

Individual GNOME applications

Posted Jun 30, 2025 2:18 UTC (Mon) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (4 responses)

> Since all of those desktops also work under X, with those numbers, you'd need about 85% of all desktops that theoretically could be running Wayland to be running it instead of X. That seems unlikely to me.

You started out using an example of something that didn't support wayland at all (xfce) to support your assertion that most folks weren't using wayland. Now you're moving the goalposts.

Feel free to supply some actual numbers. Otherwise your anectdata is just as worthless as mine. (ie "100% of all linux desktop users I know are running on top of Wayland")

> I've had to use RHEL7 within the last few months. You can buy extended support, and these places do.

"can buy extended support" is not the same as " a large percentage of them are probably still on RHEL 7"

Individual GNOME applications

Posted Jul 2, 2025 5:51 UTC (Wed) by linuxrocks123 (subscriber, #34648) [Link] (3 responses)

> Feel free to supply some actual numbers.

I was using your numbers, from Debian, which back me up? After factoring out the always-non-Wayland desktops, 85% of the remaining desktops, which we don't know are Wayland or X, must be running Wayland in order for over 50% of Linux desktops to be on Wayland. That strains credulity.

But, hey, you want numbers, here are numbers:

https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=wayland
https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=libx11

Debian popularity contest points to about 60% X11, 40% Wayland.

> "can buy extended support" is not the same as " a large percentage of them are probably still on RHEL 7"

The extended support is only offered because demand exists, so, yes, that actually does mean there is a lot of RHEL 7 still out there. I've actually personally used RHEL 7 machines recently -- or were they RHEL 6? -- and _NOT_ because I wanted to. I also used Ubuntu 20.04 just yesterday -- and not because I wanted to.

The corporate world really does not like to upgrade their Unix boxes. This has been true for decades and has also been obvious for decades. Or did you think Red Hat was still patching kernel version 2.6.32 in 2024 just for the funzies of it?

Individual GNOME applications

Posted Jul 2, 2025 11:21 UTC (Wed) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (2 responses)

> Debian popularity contest points to about 60% X11, 40% Wayland.

You're still moving the goalposts!

You started out claiming that most folks were running in a modern environment that was *incapable* of wayland. I pointed out that this was likely incorrect.

Now you're instead claiming that most folks _aren't_ running wayland. Whether you are correct or not, it's a very different proposition -- of course folks intentionally using old versions of software aren't going to have newer features that come with the newer versions.

(Meanwhile, Debian popcon numbers probably aren't representative of Debian as a whole, nor is it likely representative of the rest of the Linux ecosystem)

> The extended support is only offered because demand exists, so, yes, that actually does mean there is a lot of RHEL 7 still out there. I've actually personally used RHEL 7 machines recently --

Great, more anectdata!

....So, how many of these "lots of RHEL7[+rebuilds] out there" are *desktops* versus servers? IME it was overwhelmingly the latter, even when RHEL was the _current_ release instead of being obsoleted three times over.

Individual GNOME applications

Posted Jul 2, 2025 13:21 UTC (Wed) by jzb (editor, #7867) [Link]

Hi folks -- while this discussion is technically on-topic, it seems to have become a personal debate, and one that's less than interesting for the majority of people who follow the comments. I don't think anyone's mind will be changed here, so let's end it here, please. Thanks.

Individual GNOME applications

Posted Jul 2, 2025 13:53 UTC (Wed) by linuxrocks123 (subscriber, #34648) [Link]

Reply: https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=64...

Individual GNOME applications

Posted Jun 29, 2025 3:54 UTC (Sun) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

> XFCE, for instance, does not support it

Wayland support in XFCE is nearly completed: https://wiki.xfce.org/releng/wayland_roadmap

Individual GNOME applications

Posted Jun 30, 2025 5:32 UTC (Mon) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link] (1 responses)

> Here's my personal plan for Wayland, by the way:

So you want to run a Wayland compositor with an X11 root window in it and then use 12to11 to X11-ize your Wayland apps.

I'm sure I'll be sorry to have asked, but seriously: what the heck is (or will be) the point of this exercise? All of this cannot possibly work any better than using Wayland directly.

Individual GNOME applications

Posted Jun 30, 2025 19:06 UTC (Mon) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

> I'm sure I'll be sorry to have asked, but seriously: what the heck is (or will be) the point of this exercise

<snark>I'm sure the flavor of the pixels have a richness and umami that cannot be described or replicated ;-)</snark>

jokes aside, if they want to run things that way because it makes them happy to do so, then we can just be happy that they are happy even if we don't understand or wouldn't do it that way ourselves, as long as they don't require other users to be harmed by breaking more common workflows to support their personal oddities.

Along those lines I saw a recent project called `wayback` which was for running an X11 desktop on a Wayland graphics output, which might be useful to demonstrate some of the large back catalog of interesting and unique window managers which have been created over the years to new generations of people, and might be useful for cases like this.