GNOME 47 Can Now Be Built With X11 Support Disabled
GNOME 47 Can Now Be Built With X11 Support Disabled
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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I love the fact that it's optional.
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?
XOrg is my daily driver for these reasons:
- I mostly use XFCE, which doesn't have Wayland yet
- last time I tried Wayland (long time ago now on Gnomr), it was buggy and didn't work
- I don't change my setups that much, so I haven't tried it since
- I don't need the features Wayland offers/XOrg covers my use cases
- Wayland drama
That being said, I have no fundamental opposition to Wayland, and will probably use it someday.
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.
@Furycd001@fosstodon.org
I totally expect one day a XFCE (Wayland) option will show up, I will click it, forget I did, and use it forever more.
@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.
I think that could be solved with a XDG portal
@possiblylinux127 That would definitely be part of it, I assume. Does Wayland already track text rendering and its contents?
Because somehow text from any UI would need to be detected.
The actual implementation would be per desktop. The desktop draws to the screen and then the apps connect to the desktop. We already have a window capture XDG portal that is used by things like OBS. We could huild a simular portal for just text on the screen. We would just need some way of either recognizing text or even better some sort of image to text engine like what is in Firefox.
Are you saying to use an image to text engine just for what are text fields in applications? That sounds horribly inefficient...
It would work for images as well. It doesn't need to be exclusively used but sometimes text is rendered at a pixel level.
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.
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.
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.
iirc GWE is unmaintained atm
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.
do you use Xorg and if yes, what's keeping you from using Wayland?
currently sunshine doesnt support wayland. thats it.
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.