https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNOME-Mutter-Drops-X11
The merge to GNOME Mutter has finally happened that "completely drops" the X11 back-end to make GNOME strictly focused on Wayland-based environments.
The four month old merge request by Bilal Elmoussaoui to drop the X11 back-end was merged a short time ago. The merge request sums it up as:
"Drop the X11 backend
Completely drops the whole x11 backend."
After the X11 path was disabled by default in the GNOME 49 release, the code is being outright removed for the GNOME 50 cycle.
Following on that was this merge to better adapt Mutter to the dropped X11 backend.
GNOME 50 will continue supporting XWayland clients (apps / games) but moving forward strictly for Wayland-based desktop sessions.
Previously:
• Think Twice Before Abandoning X11. Wayland Breaks Everything!
• Ubuntu Dropping GNOME's X11 Session
• Fedora Considers Dropping GNOME X11 Session From Repositories
• Wayland May Soon Overtake X11 in Linux GUIs
• When Will the Death Watch for the X Window System (aka X11) Begin?
Related Stories
Chris Siebenmann, a UNIX herder at the University of Toronto CS Lab, asserts that the death watch for the X Window System (aka X11) has probably started:
I was recently reading Christian F.K. Schaller's On the Road to Fedora Workstation 31 (via both Fedora Planet and Planet Gnome). In it, Schaller says in one section (about Gnome and their move to fully work on Wayland):
Once we are done with this we expect X.org to go into hard maintenance mode fairly quickly. The reality is that X.org is basically maintained by us and thus once we stop paying attention to it there is unlikely to be any major new releases coming out and there might even be some bitrot setting in over time. We will keep an eye on it as we will want to ensure X.org stays supportable until the end of the RHEL8 lifecycle at a minimum, but let this be a friendly notice for everyone who rely the work we do maintaining the Linux graphics stack, get onto Wayland, that is where the future is.
X11, for all its advantages, also has several incurable design flaws relating to security. However, the major distros have not yet been in any hurry to replace it. Wayland is touted as the next step in graphical interfaces. What are Soylentils thoughts on Wayland or the demise of X11?
May be about to join systemd as the new tech for graybeards to scorn... but adopt anyway:
It has taken about 15 years to get there, but there is mounting evidence that the Wayland display server may soon topple X11 as the most common way to get a GUI on Linux.
We've reported on growing endorsement for Wayland recently. The team developing Linux for Apple Silicon Macs said they didn't have the manpower to work on X.org support. A year ago, the developers of the Gtk toolkit used by many Linux apps and desktops said that the next version may drop support for X11. But this sort of thing feels to us like it's trying to push users towards Wayland, rather than actually attracting anyone.
One of the developers of the Budgie desktop, Campbell Jones, recently published a blog post with a wildly controversial title that made The Reg FOSS desk smile: "Wayland is pretty good, actually." He lays out various benefits that Wayland brings to developers, and concludes:
Primarily, what I've learned is that Wayland is actually really well-designed. The writing is on the wall for X, and Wayland really is the future.
Partly as a result of this, it looks likely that the next version of the Budgie desktop, Budgie 11, will only support Wayland, completely dropping support for X11. The team point out that this is not such a radical proposition: there was a proposal to make KDE 6 sessions default to Wayland as long ago as last October.
- https://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=showheadline&story=19984
The Fedora distribution has defaulted to running the GNOME and Plasma desktop sessions on Wayland for a release or two.
A new proposal suggests Fedora may remove the GNOME X11 session option from the distribution entirely, dropping GNOME X11 from the package repositories. "Remove the GNOME X11 packages from the Fedora repositories. All users of the GNOME X11 session will be migrated to the GNOME Wayland session." While this change has not been implemented yet, it is likely to happen as GNOME 50 is expected to drop X11 support, making GNOME a Wayland-only desktop environment.
https://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=showheadline&story=20007
The Ubuntu team is following Fedora's example and dropping GNOME's X11 session in the distribution's next version. The announcement for the change reads, in part:
"The login screen (powered by GDM) will no longer offer the Ubuntu on Xorg option. All sessions based on GNOME Shell and Mutter are now Wayland-only and users who rely on X11-specific behaviors will not be able to use the GNOME desktop environment on Xorg. We understand that some users still depend on Xorg's implementation of X11; for example, in remote desktop setups, or highly specialized workflows. If you require Xorg specifically, you can install and use a non-GNOME desktop environment. Xorg itself is not going away, only GNOME's support for Xorg."
https://gist.github.com/probonopd/9feb7c20257af5dd915e3a9f2d1f2277
Wayland breaks everything! It is binary incompatible, provides no clear transition path with 1:1 replacements for everything in X11, and is even philosophically incompatible with X11. Hence, if you are interested in existing applications to "just work" without the need for adjustments, then you may be better off avoiding Wayland.
Wayland solves no issues I have but breaks almost everything I need. Even the most basic, most simple things (like xkill) - in this case with no obvious replacement. And usually it stays broken, because the Wayland folks mostly seem to care about Automotive, Gnome, maybe KDE - and alienating everyone else (e.g., people using just an X11 window manager or something like GNUstep) in the process.
What follows is a very well written "Feature comparison" between Xorg and Wayland.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 07, @12:23AM (10 children)
I tried Ubuntu Desktop, it made ssh connections slower... When you connect via ssh, the OS starts loading in desktop stuff! And that's by design (WONTFIX):
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/pipewire/+bug/1966433 [launchpad.net]
Yeah, those behind "Desktop Linux" have been busy sabotaging it to make it about as bad as Windows.
Sure you can use other distros. FWIW I tried compiling a static aria2c on Ubuntu and it segfaults when you try to run it in Kali... So it's about as bad as Windows except at least Windows exes will often give you a hint on which dll is missing.
So is the following still true after more than 10 years?
"Linus Torvalds on why desktop Linux sucks":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pzl1B7nB9Kc [youtube.com]
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Unixnut on Friday November 07, @10:30AM (7 children)
Yeah, I have to agree with you on Ubuntu generally sucking as a desktop OS. The strange thing is, enterprise companies seem to always push the worst Linux options onto us.
Case in point, the company I work for has rolled out a choice between Windows and Linux work PCs. Once upon a time I would have jumped to the Linux option without hesitation, but the problem is they only offer Ubuntu with the Gnome interface.
Past experience with Ubuntu + Gnome is that the interface is so bad it make Windows look good in comparison. I've asked the corporate blob for an exemption to install my GUI of Choice on their locked down Ubuntu. If they say "no, it is Gnome or nothing" then I may well for the first time in my life pick Windows over Linux as a workstation laptop.
I am not the only one thinking that way, a lot of my colleagues who picked the "Ubuntu" option regretted it, saying that Windows with WSL offers a better end user experience while providing the Unix-like environment needed for us to actually do work (in the end they requested a re-image back to Windows).
You know things are bad with your user interface when Linux people prefer the Windows GUI over what you offer, to the point of picking Windows over Linux. However I don't understand why the Gnome people keep pushing in this direction, nor why Ubuntu does not switch to a more sane GUI. I suspect if it wasn't for the corporate money coming in, Gnome would have faded into irrelevance years ago, they sure as hell don't seem to cater nor care for end-users.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Friday November 07, @01:25PM (3 children)
Its a pity because some projects like NSCDE do everything a user needs and look good
https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE [github.com]
Fundamentally, if its just a bootloader for the same web browser where all work happens inside the browser, does it matter what bootloads the browser?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Unixnut on Friday November 07, @02:13PM (2 children)
At least in my line of work, the web browser is mostly just a web browser. Most of my work involves actual applications. If the OS was just a bootloader for a web browser, then I would not care about the GUI (or the OS it runs on). The GUI would just have to work well enough to launch a browser and set it full-screen, nothing else.
And wow, a CDE lookalike, I think the last time I used CDE was on an old Sun workstation via remote X11 terminal decades ago. FVWM is also funny, in that its a window manager that seems to crop up everywhere as a base for heavily customised themes. Its like the base layer of almost every "custom WM" I've seen, yet very few people seem to use FVWM directly.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Sunday November 16, @07:44PM (1 child)
If CDE is available on Devuan, it must have another name.
The cde there is a mechanism for packaging everything necessary to move a Linux command to run on another system.
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Monday November 17, @11:43AM
AFAIK CDE was never available on any Linux. Its been so long my memory is fuzzy, but I think it may have been due to GPL/Licencing issues of some kind.
I just checked and it does exist on FreeBSD though, and by extension might be available for the other BSDs as well.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday November 08, @03:01AM
I've never liked Ubuntu and I haven't looked at Gnome in a while, but that's because when last I did, Win10 suddenly looked a lot better. Where are all the basic functions? why is this thing so slow?? (And I fled back to KDE.)
Far as I can tell, Gnome's motivation is "convergence" between desktop PC and cellphone, which it achieves by "simplifying" the interface to the point of retarded. And one suspects corporate likes it because it can be locked on the stupid setting.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by corey on Sunday November 09, @07:55PM (1 child)
Sounds a bit exaggerated mate. C’mon, Windows over Ubuntu? I get your dislike of gnome but do I need to reiterate how much of a spyware/adware piece of software Windows is? And corporate Windows machines are always absolutely slow as hell.
Remember Linux is open source still.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Unixnut on Monday November 10, @12:24AM
Well, firstly we are talking corporate machines. There is no way I would entrust any private information to Windows. However Corporate laptops are to be considered fully spyware infested. No doubt that the corporate Ubuntu will be the same as Windows in that respect. So nothing to distinguish them there.
Performance/Speed wise, I've run both Windows and Ubuntu on the same corporate laptop and I've not noticed any performance difference between them. Ubuntu seems just as bloated and sluggish as Windows (especially SSH). If anything I'd say the Windows interface is a smidge more responsive than the Ubuntu one based on my anecdotal experience.
WSL on windows is pretty decent, as it seems to be some kind of quasi virtualisation, where you run a full Linux kernel as a process in Windows, so you get more or less full Linux command line and tools on Windows, like a more fully developed and integrated version of Cygwin.
Therefore the choice boils down effectively to User interface, and for all the flaws of the Win GUI, it is at least designed to be used with a keyboard and mouse. As was mentioned elsewhere on this topic, Gnome seems to be designing a GUI for tablets and smartphones, which it then shoves onto a workstation as an afterthought without a care to the end users (and Ubuntu somehow things this is a great GUI for a desktop to makes it the endorsed default).
And being open source does not help me when its fully locked down and I can't change anything, it is no different to a proprietary system to me as an end-user in this situation.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Thexalon on Friday November 07, @12:46PM
What's pretty clear to me is that a lot of the UI designers in the Linux world think that Apple and Google and Microsoft do what they do because it's the best thing to do. It's not: They do what they do because they think it will help them sell, not because it's actually nice to use.
The good news is: If you want something like XFCE or Fluxbox, you can do it with some tinkering.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 4, Interesting) by RamiK on Friday November 07, @03:49PM
I imagine Canonical is probably defaulting to turning on pipewire when ssh'ing into Ubuntu since they use the on-board mics and cameras to talk to / surveil users when making remote service calls.
compiling...
(Score: 5, Interesting) by hendrikboom on Friday November 07, @06:28AM (18 children)
I gave up on Gnome years ago when they preemptively introduced the rather incomprehensible so-called Gnome shell.
It seems they have gone further in the direction of a walled garden.
I still use X11, but with different desktop systems -- currently I'm using LXQt. Which has little to do with Wayland or Gnome.
I frequently use a program on one machine while using X11 to run it on another. I see no reason to give this up.
Xfree has been forked to liberate it from the Gnome developers. The fork is called xlibre. I expect a number of distros will soon provide xlibre instead of xfree.
(Score: 3, Informative) by KritonK on Friday November 07, @09:07AM (15 children)
Probably not Red Hat, who is going Wayland-only; and, as with systemd, where Red Hat leads, many others will follow.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by canopic jug on Friday November 07, @10:06AM (10 children)
and, as with systemd, where Red Hat leads, many others will follow.
For how much longer will Red Hat be in that position? IBM which owns Red Hat has been firing key employees in large numbers seemingly as fast as they can be identified and turfed out by HR. IBM has really ramped up the firings in recent weeks and looks to accelerate as the year closes. Fedora and derivatives will be on the rocks by then.
Debian derivatives aren't faring much better due to M$ infiltration upstream in Debian itself, including systemd [theregister.com], going back years. That leaves basically Arch, assuming they can vet project participants well enough to keep out the microsofters and other problem agents.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Unixnut on Friday November 07, @10:57AM (1 child)
Red Hat is now IBM, and IBM always manages to plod along, as they have done so for decades now. Many thought IBM would fade into irrelevance, especially after divesting of their PC division (the only IBM thing I've ever seen anyone buy during my decades in IT is their PC line).
However despite this, it seems their mainframe business and decades-long consulting contracts with big companies seem to be able to tide them over indefinitely, and give them enough financial clout to do new things, such as the Red Hat acquisition.
While they may be firing key people, at worst they will retain the "Red Hat" name, along with RHEL and all the contracts that brings in. I doubt they care particularly about "key employees", as they are more like cogs in a machine, to be replaced or removed as and when convenient. Things like Fedora (and CentOS) I suspect they don't care about at all, what minor benefits they bring (i.e. free developer/debugging/QA and some PR brownie-points) probably would not move the needle much for them. They probably see it more as an inherited RH legacy that has not been worth the effort to shut down yet.
In reality Red Hat died the day IBM bought them, its just been a slow death over time.
Yes, although Devuan seems to be fighting for the Debian corner, so there is some small hope left. Arch is one of the branches still kicking, but the problem is that you can't really keep out the "microsofters and other problem agents". They infiltrate the same way they infiltrated everything else: with money.
First by paying developers to work on OSS projects (which allows them to steer the project simply by developing the software in the direction they want) then by getting "their people" in key admin/management positions of said project, and then alignment of the OSS project with their "strategic goals".
If Arch ever explodes in popularity to the point where it looks like it will eclipse the RPM/Deb duopoly, no doubt they will spend much money to co-opt it as they did with the other two.
The idea of OSS software being for techies, by techies falls apart when money is involved, as the money can drive the project in the direction the community does not particularly want it to go, or in some cases is openly hostile against the direction (e.g. systemd).
The problem is you can't just ban any paid contributions to OSS, because (a) you can't confirm whether someone is being paid or not to contribute to the OSS project in the first place, and (b) as the cost of living keeps increasing, fewer and fewer people have the time and means to indulge in free contributions, meaning more and more OSS development is done under corporate payment and direction.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Reziac on Saturday November 08, @03:04AM
Fedora does two useful things for IBM/RHEL:
It offloads individual users, who otherwise would be a support cost.
It offloads beta testing onto those individual users.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Friday November 07, @01:00PM (3 children)
The good news: No it doesn't. So long as we have access to the source code, we can make systems free of systemd. And there are other distros that leave it out, and occasionally pop up to remind us that they aren't dead. Sure, those alternatives might not be the latest and greatest, or the trendiest, but they work just fine and get the job done.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 5, Informative) by canopic jug on Friday November 07, @01:27PM (2 children)
The good news: No it doesn't. So long as we have access to the source code, we can make systems free of systemd.
I wish it were that simple.
There are a few distros without systemd [nosystemd.org], but the work to excise systemd [debian.net] increases month by month. I've followed the Devuan project [devuan.org] from a distance and it's not easy even for a skilled team to do so. systemd [blogspot.com] has metastasized so much throughout the distros it touches that it's really a lot of effort to remove. It contains a large, complex, intertwined payload of dozens of half-baked replacements for established subsystems. Those systemd replacements are all intertangled so that it becomes difficult, nearly impossible, to remove any of them.
According to the license, systemd is open source. However, given the lack of comments and the volume and complexity of the code, dealing with it cannot be done by casual developers. It is something which requires not only a lot of expertise but a near-full-time commitment. Thus they are able to violate the spirit of Free and Open Source Software while pretending to sill be open. It's goals are certainly anathema to the idea of FOSS, and there is m$ with its politics backing it [dev1galaxy.org].
So while there is still an option, support any of the non-systemd distros while you still can. It's not an init system.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Tuesday November 18, @01:13AM (1 child)
It's hard to imagine that completely dropping X11 and moving a lot of executables into /usr aren't time-wasters designed to shake out the systemd-avoiders by imposing huge costs on them. IBM can afford this. Grass-roots linux distros can't.
(Score: 2) by canopic jug on Tuesday November 18, @09:40AM
IBM can afford this.
Can IBM really afford that? They've been firing people like crazy in recent months, with focus on what used to be Red Hat. I guess the question can be raised of whether that touches on any of the systemd people at all.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 3, Informative) by VLM on Friday November 07, @01:20PM (3 children)
The container world runs on Alpine because systemd is fat and unreliable and wildly obscenely overcomplicated. It would make a fine desktop.
LOL Oh look at that, it does: https://hub.docker.com/layers/linuxserver/webtop/alpine-i3 [docker.com]
Linux desktop is dead because desktop is dead. My "desktop" is a set of chrome windows and has been since some time before Y2K. I don't use software that uses "widgets" only html and JS. All I need is a port of Chrome (or similar) to the linux SDL virtual console and I can skip all the desktop windowing trash in between.
(Score: 2) by canopic jug on Friday November 07, @03:03PM
Yeah, I forgot Alpine. It's highly relevant, especially for containers and servers. GNOME + systemd had me distracted about the desktop. My bad.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 07, @03:46PM
"My "desktop" is a set of chrome windows "
Hope you enjoy sucking Google dick
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 07, @08:15PM
Seeing as chrome wasn't released until 2008, why should anyone believe any other part of your post?
(Score: 3, Informative) by sjames on Friday November 07, @06:21PM (3 children)
It's shameful. RedHat used to be a really solid Linux distro in the old days. Now they've gotten to the point of actually ripping btrfs out of the RHEL kernel because it competes with their far klunkier and deeply inferior not quite soloution(s) to snapshotting.
They're even lifting MS's line of demanding an unnecessary hardware upgrade in order to 'upgrade' to the latest RHEL.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by https on Friday November 07, @08:17PM (2 children)
It's really hard to sell a support contract for something that just works.
Offended and laughing about it.
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Friday November 07, @09:11PM
And when you think of it that way, pretty much everything they have done (including the design of systemd) starts to make perfect sense.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Saturday November 08, @01:39AM
There's a lot to that.
(Score: 4, Informative) by bart9h on Friday November 07, @07:43PM (1 child)
So, you liked GNOME 2? Do you wish it was still available and actively maintained?
Good news: https://mate-desktop.org [mate-desktop.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 08, @05:02PM
mate and KDE it is for me. Gnome what's that?
They're also hilariously in some slanderous war with framework.
I'm unaware of anyone who would choose this DE willingly.
(Score: 5, Informative) by sjames on Friday November 07, @06:23PM
They're ripping out functional code in an attempt to cram Wayland down people's throats when they clearly don't want it.