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.
This is great news. Shipping X11 on a system that doesn’t need it is a big waste.
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.
@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 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.
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.
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.
Laughing in
kwin-waylandKWin is just a composer though. Plasma as a desktop environment still relies on XWayland
Plasma 6?
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!
Better to ship with X11 and make Crapland optional.
L take
I disagree.. The problem actually is that Wayland is optional, and still is.
So everyone was dragging their heels (and some still are). If all the major distro's set a cut off date, then things would speed up. The biggest reason for delay was Nvidia imho, so now that they're sorted, it seems things are falling into place faster.
X11 still hasn't solved any of their real issues, and its still a security nightmare (which can't be fixed). Furthermore, most of the developers have moved off it.
What exactly do you like about X11?
What exactly do you like about X11?
That it works just fine for my purposes. When it does not I will switch to Wayland but I have no reason to at the moment.
That's the default everywhere else, yes
Woohoo! One step closer to killing the tyranny of X11! He's almost dead already, just those pesky Nvidia users... (Or rather that pesky graphics card company)
The newest nvidia driver took care of the one issue I had with a specific game so I'm all Wayland now
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.