GTK Drops X11!
GTK Drops X11!
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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.
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.
Not the person you replied to, but that's a really interesting explanation, thank you
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.
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.
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.
The quickest way to fix Wayland is to get more people using it.