Not about applications, but about desktop environments, right?

Posted Jul 24, 2025 17:23 UTC (Thu) by jmalcolm (subscriber, #8876)
In reply to: Not about applications, but about desktop environments, right? by callegar
Parent article: Wayback 0.1 released

You are correct. This is a way of running window managers and desktop environments not available on Wayland.

However, while you are running "on Wayland", you are not "in Wayland". This is just an alternative way of running an X11 server and will not run anything that does not work on Xorg. In particular, Wayback cannot run Wayland applications.

From a software preservation point of view, this will allow you to keep running Open Look, CDE, FVWM, and Trinity for a long time. This is awesome. However, they are going to become less and less useful as daily driver desktops as more and more applications become Wayland only.

This is happening already. The first time I tried Wayback, I tested FVWM and the first application I tried to launch was foot because it is a small and fast terminal. When it would not launch I thought it was a Wayback bug until I realized that foot is a Wayland only application. I launched konsole and it worked fine. Not a big deal for now but I am sure we will see some Wayland only toolkits used to write apps people want to use. When GTK5 launches in 2027 or so, there will be many popular applications that will not run on X11 anymore.

Not about applications, but about desktop environments, right?

Posted Jul 24, 2025 18:35 UTC (Thu) by eean (subscriber, #50420) [Link]

Yeah it seems handy for people running old x11 desktops for fun and the year is like 2035. Even ignoring distro maintenance burden it's hard to imagine X11 will continue working on new hardware much longer.

I suspect Xwayland will live for a long time for old games and the like.

Not about applications, but about desktop environments, right?

Posted Jul 26, 2025 7:19 UTC (Sat) by linuxrocks123 (subscriber, #34648) [Link]

> From a software preservation point of view, this will allow you to keep running Open Look, CDE, FVWM, and Trinity for a long time. This is awesome. However, they are going to become less and less useful as daily driver desktops as more and more applications become Wayland only.

For Wayland-only applications, you can use 12to11. I have no intention of ever migrating to Wayland, and 12to11 is my planned solution for dealing with any future applications that do not have X11 support.

Not about applications, but about desktop environments, right?

Posted Jul 31, 2025 8:45 UTC (Thu) by anton (subscriber, #25547) [Link] (2 responses)

This is a way of running window managers and desktop environments not available on Wayland.

That's great! So Wayback will allow me to continue to use twm, which I have used since IIRC 1992; just a few weeks ago I read that Xwayland allows me to use X applications, but not window managers. Good to see that weakness addressed.

If Wayback does not run Wayland applications, that's unlikely to be a problem, because I am not using any such applications now, and if they don't run on my system, it's unlikely that I will get used to them. It would have to be a killer application to make me want to use it.

Well, actually it's most likely that it's a web browser; their maintainers always seem to embrace newfangled stuff and have little considerations for supporting the breadth of existing users; e.g., in earlier times browsers could display on a remote X display; that became impractically slow at some point.

Not about applications, but about desktop environments, right?

Posted Jul 31, 2025 16:39 UTC (Thu) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

I don't think there's much hope in having an X window manager manage a Wayland window. There are a lot of expectations Wayland places on its equivalent that an X window manager (especially one of twm's feature spectrum) just isn't going to be able to meet. (Avid XMonad user myself, so I'm in a similar boat…but I'm tracking `river` as a replacement once I can get time to finish porting my config and file issues for the gaps…)

Not about applications, but about desktop environments, right?

Posted Aug 26, 2025 13:05 UTC (Tue) by daenzer (subscriber, #7050) [Link]

> just a few weeks ago I read that Xwayland allows me to use X applications, but not window managers. Good to see that weakness addressed.

That's mixing up rootless vs rootful Xwayland.

Rootless Xwayland is used for seamless integration of X client windows in a Wayland session, via one Wayland surface per top-level X window. In this case, Xwayland is started by the Wayland compositor, and the latter has to act as the X window manager (XWM). Running another XWM isn't possible in this case.

Wayback OTOH uses rootful Xwayland, which uses a single Wayland surface for the X root window and otherwise works mostly like any other X server. Any XWM can be used in this case.

> in earlier times browsers could display on a remote X display; that became impractically slow at some point.

FWIW, Firefox runs well (including HW acceleration using the GPU on the remote machine) as a native Wayland client via Waypipe, which is conceptually similar to SSH X forwarding.