Good, it's great to see more people moving to BlueSky11
this post was submitted on 06 Feb 2025
40 points (100.0% liked)
Linux
5864 readers
405 users here now
A community for everything relating to the linux operating system
Also check out [email protected]
Original icon base courtesy of [email protected] and The GIMP
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
The blog post says they're just deprecating X11 APIs at this point; GTK5 will remove them.
I'm still very worried about this. Wayland still has many rough edges and I think forcing a move to X11 is premature. One of the main benefits of the Linux ecosystem has always been that it strived to run on hardware far longer than commercial vendors, who have gotten even worse at forcing obsolescence of hardware for purely revenue-focused reasons (looking at you, Microsoft -- Win11 refusing to work on chipsets it is perfectly capable of running on...)
Wayland doesn't require specialized hardware though. How is it obsolescence?
Deprecation of X11, currently, only affects cutting/bleeding-edge distributions and will, hopefully, push app developers to target Wayland properly.
Those who strictly require features of X11 can continue using desktop environments running on it. It is not like deprecation of X11 in GTK5 will suddenly make all apps using other toolkits require Wayland.
will, hopefully, push app developers to target Wayland properly.
IME, having to force people to do something in OSS is a very bad smell, and cause for reflection.
I admit I may misunderstand the situation; I hear there's a compatibility layer or something named xwayland -- will that allow older apps linked against x11 to run on a wayland desktop?
I'll have to give wayland a try again soon -- if it's stable on my laptops and I can figure out the custom keyboard layout stuff (I posted on another thread recently asking about that -- sounds like there are good solutions for that) then I'll feel comfortable moving to it finally.
I admit I may misunderstand the situation; I hear there's a compatibility layer or something named xwayland -- will that allow older apps linked against x11 to run on a wayland desktop?
Yeah though older apps on Linux are always a bit sketchy. "We don't do that here" is kind of a thing... Most stuff is at least regularly rebuilt.
It's also kind of a weird comparability layer... Like it works really well, but basically they run an X server in the background, and then just paint the windows on the X server to your Wayland desktop and map all the clicks back.
So... X apps get a real X server to run on and then rest of your apps run natively in Wayland which provides a lot of benefits.
In any case, Wayland fixes some stuff it provides more than feature parity. A big one for me is KDE has a composited and non-composited mode on X and they actually have different behaviors. If you launch a game it automatically goes to non-composited mode because how compositors work on X is kind of a mess and it introduces latency that people don't want in their games. On Wayland it's always composited mode but it's designed for that, so you don't have the drawbacks in terms of performance. So... You can play a game without your desktop suddenly functioning differently and without sacrificing performance in the game.
You definitely should. I am running Fedora 41 with KDE Plasma and I don't miss anything running the Wayland session. I am using it for all my gaming, university home assignments in a Windows VM, playing with local LLMs, content creation and programming. In fact, Fedora had Wayland enabled by default for nearly a decade.
The older versions will still stick around for many years; it just means apps specifically targeting GTK5 won't support X11.
In any case, X11 has all but been abandoned already so the writing is on the wall.
Things must move on eventually, I suppose. I just really hope they reach feature parity before then. It sounds like most of the annoyances that have kept people from migrating are being tackled, so I'm hopeful.
I agree.
I wonder what is going to be the stance of Xfce and co about this.
Xfce's stance is that they want to offer Wayland support soon but will remain X11-compatible for the foreseeable future. Going by what their wiki says about it, work seems to be progressing fairly well.
I know. I'm pointing to the thing that this article states - that GTK will drop X11. Won't make things easy for them if they want to keep X11 compatibility.
Fair point. It remains to be seen how well this will work out for them. But given that doesn't seem to be even a vague launch date I'd say there's going to be plenty of time for a transitional phase where they can get their bugs sorted out โ and the underlying operating systems can get Wayland running if they haven't already.
Nice. I've already been happy with GTK4 so far, and it looks like GTK5 is removing a lot of legacy baggage. I hope this makes things more maintable for the devs.
Oh no, please someone pick it up.