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submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

For those wanting to build a Wayland-only Linux desktop experience without carrying any aging X11 baggage, GNOME 47 will be able to optionally offer Wayland-only support without carrying X11/X.Org support. This Mutter merge request landed today that allows compiling Mutter with X11 support disabled. That landed today along with this GNOME Shell merge request for being able to disable X11 support too.

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[-] [email protected] 9 points 6 days ago
[-] [email protected] 1 points 6 days ago

If only I wasn't such a moron with trying to navigate around Nvidia drivers and Optimus, this sounds fantastic.

I have yet to figure all of this out and get to a smooth and stable state.

[-] [email protected] 78 points 1 week ago

This is great news. Shipping X11 on a system that doesn’t need it is a big waste.

[-] [email protected] 52 points 1 week ago

I love the fact that it's optional.

[-] [email protected] 35 points 1 week ago

I wonder how long it'll be possible to build Gnome with Xorg support. If I had to guess I'd say there won't be any support within the next 3 years, because keeping future Gnome working with Xorg is work nobody wants to put in.

That said, Xwayland will likely keep being around for the foreseeable future.

Out of curiosity, do you use Xorg and if yes, what's keeping you from using Wayland?

[-] [email protected] 4 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

Not op but we do magic cookie shenanigans at work to run a graphic app as another user. I believe that's not a thing in Wayland.

[-] [email protected] 5 points 6 days ago

I switched to Wayland after GNOME 46 release because it fixed the issues I had with it (artifacts and persistent display failures). Many people may still prefer X11 at least because of the lack of input latency on slow machines.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 5 days ago

Last I tried to do discord streaming, it only worked in xorg

[-] KaninchenSpeed 1 points 5 days ago

You could use Xwayland video bridge or just use the discord web app in firefox

[-] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago

Proper screen sharing and xclicker is Why I occasionally switch back to X

[-] [email protected] 1 points 6 days ago

Have you tried using ydotool or other wayland alternatives to xclicker? Last I used it, ydotool ran great.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 6 days ago

Xclicker is a GUI autoclicker. I heard of a command line tool for Wayland, but it didn't seem to exactly be an autoclicker, and I don't really like command line tools in general.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 5 days ago

Oh I absolutely get it. But I guess someone will eventually end up making a GUI for ydotool (or so I hope). Alternatively, there is this (Wayland support is WIP): https://github.com/RMPR/atbswp

When I say I get it, I mean there was a time I kept Xorg around only so I can use PyAutoGUI (I no longer need it but if I did, I'd have probably created wrapper scripts to allow PyAutoGUI to call grim instead of scrot when on Wayland, or something like that).

[-] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

Not OP, but I use sunshine and moonlight for streaming my pc to various devices. Wayland forces me to use kms and I can't turn the monitors off while I'm doing it. Someone was working on a pipewire backend, so hopefully that goes somewhere.

GreenWithEnvy is also a nuisance on Wayland while Nvidia Settings Panel doesn't even work. I have a custom script just to control my fans on Wayland, but I'm eventually switching from Nvidia anyways, so it won't matter for much longer.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 5 days ago

iirc GWE is unmaintained atm

[-] [email protected] 2 points 5 days ago

GWE

The primary maintainer stepped down, but there has still been work done by other contributors. The primary problem is that the underlying library is reliant on x11. This is the same reason why nvidia-settings doesn't have all of its features on wayland. Basically if nvidia's on tool doesn't work then there is no way that green with envy can either. There is an open merge request attempting to switch to a different library that Nvidia says they plan to move to eventually, but it is slow going.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 5 days ago

do you use Xorg and if yes, what's keeping you from using Wayland?

currently sunshine doesnt support wayland. thats it.

[-] [email protected] 14 points 1 week ago

XOrg is my daily driver for these reasons:

  1. I mostly use XFCE, which doesn't have Wayland yet
  2. last time I tried Wayland (long time ago now on Gnomr), it was buggy and didn't work
  3. I don't change my setups that much, so I haven't tried it since
  4. I don't need the features Wayland offers/XOrg covers my use cases
  5. Wayland drama

That being said, I have no fundamental opposition to Wayland, and will probably use it someday.

[-] [email protected] 8 points 6 days ago

Those are all good reasons. XFCE aims to support Wayland with the next release, so if they choose to use an established compositor it shouldn't be too buggy.

With XFCE porting their apps over the setup shouldn't change much, unless you're using Xorg specific tools.

Over the last few years most features I'd expect from a windowing system were added to Wayland, so I expect the drama to cool down. (I don't even know what's still missing (except accessibility), with VRR, tearing, DRM leasing (VR), and global hotkeys being done. It's just apps like Discord that have to cave in under the pressure to fix their apps.)

Once everything works, there's no point talking about it.

@[email protected]

[-] [email protected] 5 points 6 days ago

I totally expect one day a XFCE (Wayland) option will show up, I will click it, forget I did, and use it forever more.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 6 days ago

@Chewy7324 @wer2 I'll happily use wayland once XFCE officially releases support. I'm sure there may be a few kinks to work out or whatever with the initial release, but that's to be expected....

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[-] [email protected] 10 points 1 week ago

@Chewy7324 @GolfNovemberUniform I'd say as soon as screen readers work properly under Wayland, they could drop X11 builds. But they should definitely not do it before fixing that.

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[-] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago

Chances are at some point it will be removed as it requires valuable man hours to maintain. At some point it will be a massive hindrance. I don't think it will be removed for a while but it probably will be forgotten about.

[-] [email protected] 28 points 1 week ago

I think X will still be around for a while but it makes no sense to use it with a full desktop like gnome. Gnome has its own stack so Wayland makes sense.

It will be cool to see desktops like Xfce4, Cinnamon and Mate get support.

[-] user134450 2 points 6 days ago

wouldnt Xfce have to rebrand though? lol

[-] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago

Xfce4 is a name not a acronym. It used to be back in the day but it now uses GTK.

[-] user134450 1 points 6 days ago

yes, it is a name that is literally pronounced like "X face"

[-] [email protected] 4 points 6 days ago

I pronounce it x f c e

[-] [email protected] 14 points 1 week ago
[-] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago

KWin is just a composer though. Plasma as a desktop environment still relies on XWayland

[-] [email protected] 1 points 6 days ago
[-] [email protected] 15 points 1 week ago

How is it relying on XWayland? I don't know of any KDE Plasma components that require X11. The apps you install might need XWayland but that is separate from the Plasma desktop.

[-] [email protected] 5 points 6 days ago

Uninstalling Xwayland breaks it, you're greeted to a black background and your mouse pointer.

Additionally, as per their own website, it says "The workspaces have been developed for X11 and much functionality relies on X11. To be able to make proper use of Wayland these bits have to be rewritten."

[-] [email protected] 9 points 6 days ago

The article you posted is outdated. The last change was in 2022 and most sections are even older. Plasma 6 has full Wayland support.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

This article cites sources from 2015...

Yeah, that hasn't been true for a loooong time

[-] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago

What's happening with the starting letters of the words in your screenshot?

[-] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)
[-] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago

Interesting on what distro and when did you try that?

I didnt know that it relied on XWayland but that seems outdated anyways

[-] [email protected] 1 points 6 days ago

Arch, roughly 2 months ago

[-] [email protected] 1 points 6 days ago
[-] [email protected] 1 points 6 days ago

Yeah. xwayland isn't gonna die ever probably, so there's no rush.

[-] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:


Last week the GNOME 47 development code saw Wayland DRM lease protocol support for enhancing VR headset handling and separately was also accent color support for GNOME Shell.

Adding to the recent slew of changes landing for GNOME 47, the GNOME Shell and Mutter code can now be successfully compiled -- optionally -- without any X11 support or requiring any X11 build dependencies.

For those wanting to build a Wayland-only Linux desktop experience without carrying any aging X11 baggage, GNOME 47 will be able to optionally offer Wayland-only support without carrying X11/X.Org support.

That landed today along with this GNOME Shell merge request for being able to disable X11 support too.

In turn this closes a two year old issue tracker over making X11 dependencies optional on GNOME.

GNOME 47 is shaping up to be a very exciting desktop update due for release in September and will be found with the likes of Fedora 41 and Ubuntu 24.10.


The original article contains 172 words, the summary contains 158 words. Saved 8%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

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this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2024
214 points (96.1% liked)

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