Gnome @discuss.tchncs.de petsoi @discuss.tchncs.de 10mo ago

GNOME Is Taking Steps Towards Dropping X11

linuxiac.com GNOME Is Taking Steps Towards Dropping X11

Significant changes for the GNOME! Merge requests opened to end X.Org (X11) session support, moving to a Wayland-only environment.

19 comments

This is a great change in my opinion. Nobody wants to give support and effort into dying projects
- I don't use GNOME or Wayland and also think the change makes sense.
  
  It will mean even less attention is given to X11 as project, if that’s possible.
  
  Gnome devs would no longer be interested in resolving any X11-related compatibility issues.
There are other submitted Merge Requests to that gnome-session GitLab repository that are 3 years old and are still open. This is only a proposal, and doesn't actually mean it's happening.

If GNOME developers want to focus on expanding Wayland support instead of maintaining X11 support, surely that's their choice - they're mostly volunteers anyway, shouldn't they get to decide what they want to work on?

If other developers still want X11 support, they can branch these session targets and X11 support code off into a separate package and handle maintaining it.

X11 released in 1987. It had a great run.
- Plus there's still Xwayland, Xorg will still be hanging on for the legacy apps.
Mmm, im not happy about this. Rn there is a bug affecting amd gpus on gnome wayland that crashes the entire desktop. A fix is hoped to arrive in kernel v6.6, but until then ive been using xorg as a fallback.

I understand its gonna take a while until xorg is fully gone from gnome, but ive grown kind to having such fallback whenever wayland has a nasty issue.
- My hope is, when the legacy code has been removed from the code base there is more focus and capacity on improving Wayland.
On ProtonDB using X11 is like, an obvious tweak for a lot of games that aren't native to Linux 😓
Considering Discord still doesn't support Wayland I'm not so sure
- Discord is just a website, you can use an alternative client for VoIP. Xwayland should ensure it remains compatible, though.
- that's Discord's problem, they need to catch up
  
  I agree but they're probably not going to and as long as that is the case I can see GNOME users being annoyed that they can't use the app. It's stupid but it's just reality. Discord doesn't give a rats ass about Linux.
- It might. I believe the Discord app uses electron, if so you should be able to enable Wayland with some command line flags. The Wayland Arch Wiki page covers this.
  
  Regardless, It'll still work under Xwayland.
  
  Yeah but it's using an ancient version of Electron that they refuse to update. Whenever I open Discord on Wayland I just get a black screen. It doesn't work, and I'm forced to use browser Discord.
- Just use Xwayland. Also discord is proprietary and does its own thing.
That makes sense. The last time I used gnome on X it was a buggy experience

19 comments