Now Ubuntu is Also Ditching Xorg Completely for Wayland!
Now Ubuntu is Also Ditching Xorg Completely for Wayland!
Ubuntu is following Fedora’s lead in adopting Wayland.
About time. Wayland has worked great for several years on Intel and AMD systems. Nvidia is finally caring to catch up.
Its perpetually fixed the next common Xorg complaint, including disabling vsync, redirection outside of the DE for fullscreen apps, multi monitor scaling, fractional scaling, global keyboard shortcuts, a tiling wm implementation, HDR support, session restore, and soon remote access
The software that doesn't support it and doesn't want to support it will never adapt and have alternatives.
Its been ready, reliable, and a much better experience for so long. Ubuntu coming around is a testament to that.
Linux idiot here. What is wayland? And what is XOrg?
They are display server communication protocols. Essentially, the computer clients give the display server information, and then the display server processes that information and sends it to the screen. For example, a game might say, “The player is controlling a red guy with a hat and mustache” and the display server draws a Mario on the screen.
X Server is 40 years old. It’s tried and tested, but is not built on modern coding standards. For example, it has not kept up with modern security, allowing a bad actor to tell X to draw a bit of malicious code that tricks the display server into giving it control of other programs. For this reason, the developers of X are sunsetting it and have designed Wayland to replace it.
Wayland is a rewrite of X from the ground up, and is much more secure. It keeps each program in its own bubble, so if a rogue app tries to gain control of programs outside its bubble, it can’t. However, such a large change requires other programs to buy in, creating s vicious cycle where developers don’t want to switch to Wayland until it’s mature, and Wayland is unable to mature without developers buying in. That’s why this “new” protocol has been in progress for the past 16 years, and yet linux users still disagree on whether it is mature enough for wide adoption.
GNOME desktop environment has been at the forefront of Wayland adoption, and has announced plans to stop using X in a future release. Ubuntu, which uses GNOME by default, has announced they are dropping X so they can see how it works in their short-term release before pushing it to their 2026 long-term release. Essentially, they are doing it when the timing works best for them rather than wait until GNOME forces them to drop it.
Emphasis on the protocol part. There is only 1 implementation of X11 (Xorg). Wayland however is just protocols. There are several implementations of varying quality.
Depending on your DE, you could be using one of Weston (reference impl), Mutter (GNOME), Kwin (Plasma), wlroots (hyprland, sway), etc.
Two different frameworks for providing a graphical user interface. X is older.
ELIS5 version. Wayland and Xorg are what draw the screen on your monitor. Xorg is based on stuff that's 40 years old and Wayland is meant to replace Xorg as a more modern way to draw on your monitor.
Been using Ubuntu since 2008... looks like this will be the last year for me.
I'd be surprise if you notice the difference.
Other mainstream distros cannot even be installed by blind users because screen readers are broken on wayland
the ludwicks of Void Linux ftw!
i'd actually like to do something else with my lifetime besides constantly being tossed around for no apparent benefit. i'm sure there is a good excuse. There always is.
Not sure what the hullabaloo is about, I'm on Ubuntu using Wayland and it's fine. What use cases would people have for x11, and could it be solved by using another desktop environment like Mate or XFCE?
Mate and xfce are not on wayland yet, so yes, and the biggest things missing are accessibility protocols and xdotool functionality.
The only issue I have seen with Wayland is that Eclipse IDE crashes every few hours. And for those that say there are alternatives, sure, but why do I have to setup a new IDE and learn how to use it? Wayland does not add anything for me, so it is easier to just install X11 myself or stop using that distro.
I think most of us would consider that an eclipse bug, but yeah, until it's fixed it'd make sense to work around it.
Kinda similarly, I have a mostly identical setup on several machines, and on one of them Firefox has a memory leak, which even showed up just recently. It also seems to manifest if I have certain pages open, the most noticeable of which is Reddit.
It's the kind of stuff I could dig into, buuut it's just a PITA.
Sometimes, I feel like the average Linux user is just on very old or at the very least pretty old hardware.
I know I am probably wrong, but it just seems odd that in X11 my 8 year old ultrawide 144hz 1080p monitor is literally a stuttery and jittery mess when moving windows, when animations play, and even moving the cursor around. I believe I tried playing a game, and it also being a stuttery mess, but I can't remember as that was around 6-7 months ago.
Using Wayland, on the other hand, as soon as I logged in for the first time it was definitely noticeably NOT like it was in X11. Frame rate was 144hz, everything mentioned above just worked as I would expect. It even feels smoother than Windows which I still have to use every now and then. Gaming on it is a blast 99% of the time, and I game A LOT! (completed ~10 games on openSUSE Tumbleweed just this year!)
So, sometimes I just feel like I said, and as I also said, I'm probably wrong. I have never logged back into X11 except when I upgraded my graphics card a month or so ago because of the stuttery feeling of X11. Some things did work better under X11, I guess, but that is probably because of the stagnant adoption of Wayland?
Besides me using Linux since the beginning of this year until now, I am still a Linux noob, so my opinions are just that. I have no real knowledge of Linux that would qualify me to be any good source of info. I just don't get the slow adoption is all!
I use Plasma 6 on Wayland on devices as old as 2009 and as new as 2020. Apple laptops to Intel desktops with GPUs from Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA.
Wayland is better than Xorg on every machine I run.
Me with Xubuntu with XFCE:
Hmmm how's the future of my Ubuntu flavour? 🤔