from Hacker News

Gnome developer proposes removing the X11 session

by malobre on 10/15/23, 2:45 AM with 119 comments

• by JoshTriplett on 10/15/23, 3:36 AM

  GNOME (and many others) have spent years telling anyone who has issues with Wayland that lead them to run an X session to report bugs, and has put a lot of effort into fixing those bugs. This seems like a reasonable next step.

  > This plan seems to The Reg's FOSS Desk to be strong-arming people into adopting Wayland.

  Or, more reasonably, to maintain less code for alternate paths in favor of fixing the issues that lead people to use those alternate paths.

  Wayland has bugs. X has bugs. Fixes to one largely don't help users of the other. Every bit of effort spent fixing a bug in X to help the fraction of users still using it is effort that could have gone into fixing the bugs in Wayland that leave people using X in the first place. A project taking a step like this allows it to consolidate those efforts.

• by uxp8u61q on 10/15/23, 5:52 AM

  As someone who used to be a diehard Linux user and supporter, and then switched back to windows after about a decade, this thread is a good reminder of why I switched back. I've been hearing about the year of the Linux desktop for... Years... And yet here are people who suggest I should put up with an incomplete, partially broken display server, because they don't want to deal with maintenance of the old one. And in this thread, any complaint by real users who are missing features or have encountered bugs is met with a dismissal.

  You know what? The equivalent of X11 in windows may be full of cruft, technical debt, poorly thought out / "unelegant" design decisions... But it fucking works. I'm sorry, but I have other things to do than dealing with the constant churn of Linux desktop software.

  I remember a decade ago when everyone was supposed to switch to pulseaudio, it was the greatest thing since sliced bread, its design was solid and future proof. Migrating from alsa did break everything and was a PITA. And alsa was still there! The fix for many problems was to configure something in the venerable alsamixer. Now apparently we need to migrate to pipewire. All I know is that upgrading broke my rpi4. I don't care about the software, I just want my htpc to play a video with sound when I get back from work. I still had to run alsamixer and flip a few knobs to get it to work again. This is madness.

• by v3ss0n on 10/15/23, 3:31 AM

  Wayland is no way ready

    - O proper screen recording support
    - broken screen sharing 
    - No proper global keyboard shortcut
    - No push to talk support
    - Their developers are seriously crazy on their design decisions.
    - Several problems with multiple screens
  

  A proper refactor of X11 should have been the way to go and there should had been X12 with modern technologies

• by jrm4 on 10/15/23, 3:15 AM

  Go for it, I say.

  It would be one of many in a long line of backward compatibility missteps they continue to make; and would help shore up my reasons for me to recommend other WMs, as well likely encouraging other developers to bring some of GNOME's good stuff elsewhere.

• by bitwize on 10/15/23, 3:15 AM

  X can easily support per-display DPI -- clients just have to eschew the legacy global DPI setting. The Xrandr extension knows the dimensions of each display in both pixels and millimeters from its EDID. Clients interested in making adjustments based on per-display DPI could simply use those values obtained from Xrandr. These values can be wrong, of course -- monitors have been known to lie in their EDID reports -- but they'd be wrong in Wayland too.

  Of course, no one actually wants to do this work because there is a deep-seated intent to salt the earth where X once stood.

• by webkike on 10/15/23, 3:41 AM

  I understand the reasoning here, and frankly supported. I've been using X11 while having an available Wayland session because some applications are subtly broken on Wayland - discord has weird text input issues, same thing with Emacs, and Wezterm just flat out doesn't work on Wayland with Nvidia GPUs. However, the slow breakage I've seen with X11 has caused me to start migrating. To explain, every now and then on X11 my screen will simply go black for a couple of seconds. It happens often enough where I'm no longer willing to accept in. And so thus I've moved to Wayland. And frankly, with a little bit of effort, I've found work-arounds for all of my issues - Wezterm works if you disable wayland, Emacs 29 works fine, and Discord is acceptable in the browser. And thus, I think that disabling X11 is a good idea because finally it would force people to actually make things work well under wayland, instead of being able to rely on X11 as a fallback.

• by janosdebugs on 10/15/23, 4:14 AM

  This is going to leave so many people by the wayside. (Pun totally intended.) Late 2020, my jaw dropped on the floor when a developer from CERN showed up and said that X11 support was needed in ContainerSSH for their use case and then developed it. (The LxPlus service, which acts as a dev host for researchers.) I thought X11 forwarding was well and truly a thing of the past.

  Yes, I know that waypipe is a thing, but it needs to be installed on both ends and I haven't seen any mention of non-Linux support either.

• by charcircuit on 10/15/23, 5:19 AM

  With every year X is still in use more and more tech debt is being built up. It's a big problem in how slow this migration is going. The Linux desktop community should have made this migration its top priority and have had completed it a decade ago. It's sad to see how far behind the Linux desktop is compared to other operating systems.

• by MobiusHorizons on 10/15/23, 5:43 AM

  It seems like this would effectively remove support for the BSDs which use X11. Am I missing something?

• by nathants on 10/15/23, 10:46 PM

  i’m working on a 240hz low latency game on linux.

  currently i run on x11, either directly via startx or via dwm when developing.

  i will switch to wayland in an instant if it demonstrably improves any metric i care about.

  i continue to monitor the situation and look forward to improvements in either stack and in drivers.

• by fgsfds028374 on 10/15/23, 5:02 AM

  Another case of GNOME living in la-la land. So glad KDE became kind of nice in recent years.

• by olgeni on 10/15/23, 6:30 AM

  Reminds me of systemd: we "modern" developers despise anything that reminds us of "traditional" Unix, thus we need to rewrite it in such a way that is not only new, but actively punishes unwelcome users.

  Then we will complain about "embrace and extend" while people try to replace their xdotool scripts and their perfectly working X11 setups.

  Too bad for them: we don't care about custom applications, we still aim to just steal users from Windows. And 2024 will be the Year of Linux on the Desktop.