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sho_hn
wmf
For people who absolutely have to have X11 this looks like a better plan than XLibre.
sho_hn
It depends on whether their reasons for "absolutely having to have X11" hinge on actual compatibility with e.g. old binaries or wanting full remoting without streaming pixels.
This project would satisfy people who really actually want Wayland, but were upset by transitional pains or interactions they had around it and want to stick with X11 just-cause while getting some similar benefits. This arguably does describe some people but not sure it's a whole lot in the long run.
But who knows, maybe this could also make an easier to maintain XWayland some day, or a nice basis for implementing more esoteric X11 bits down the road vs. the older Xorg codebase.
PunchyHamster
From my perspective X just got to the point where it just works for me few years ago and Wayland is just introducing more issues than it solves (to be clear it solves no current issue for me, only one that I think might be better for me is handling different refresh rate displays and maybe fractional scaling... and that could probably be done within X11)
Like, why simple "copy the screen" got suddenly so complicated? Why every WM suddenly needs a bunch of features that before were just handled by display server, where they belong ? Why some(most) WMs handle title bars but GNOME doesn't ? Why someone decided title bar management is optional to window manager ?
X11 might need to go but Wayland have learned no lessons from it. It's just knee-jerk "if X11 done it this way, let's do it differently"
vidarh
I don't "actually want Wayland" because I want the simplicity of X and the ability to run my own wm, but I have no need for legacy X11 requests, for some values of "legacy". Whether this will become viable for me remains to be seen, but I need very little from my X11 server.
Qwertious
Wayland made writing WMs needlessly hard, and the benefits of Wayland were frankly not real - most of the reasons given in 2011 were patched in to X11 later. All the Wayland rewrite got us was a situation where Wayland is both bleeding-edge and obsolete simultaneously. Say what you like about X11, but by the time people unironically pushed for mass Wayland adoption, X11 was stable and boringly so.
The future of WMs is, IMO, Arcan - https://arcan-fe.com/ - but that's an ambitious project and I don't blame the main developer for deliberately going out of his way to avoid advertising it before it's ready. In the meanwhile, Wayland and X11 both more-or-less work with the occasional major pain in the ass.
superkuh
The people who absolutely have to have X11 like myself usually have reasons. It sounds like currently a lot of those reasons for using X11 would prevent using this X server. Like reliable non-fragmented and widely supported screenreader protocol. Or the ability to do keyboard and mouse sharing.
>Applications will be isolated from each other by default and can only interact with other applications either through a GUI prompt asking for permission, such as with screen recorders, where it will only be allowed to record the window specified or by explicitly giving the application permission before launched (such as a window manager or external compositor).
nixosbestos
Accessibility? Sure. Everything else? Nah, I'm sorry. There are countless ways to do remoting with Wayland. There are countless ways to do kb+mouse sharing.
shakna
Until Wayland actually has an accesibility story, X is really the only choice. Don't think most grassroots projects will have that.
torginus
Isn't accessibility outside of the scope of Wayland, whose purpose is to composite application buffers, and deliver input events?
Something like a screen reader needs to talk to an app and query the toolkit for the contents of a window in a semantic way - that's a toolkit feature not a compositor one.
nialv7
pretty sure at-spi is independent from the display server
singpolyma3
Long term if x11 starts having issues then probably https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayback/wayback will be it
sorpigal
IMO this is the real future of Wayland. It should always have been "mere plumbing" for X; the few processes that really need the isolation and security (e.g. screen lock) can be native, everything else should just keep using X, and the "in between" programs can mostly be X programs and implement some wayland protocols for the extra bits they need. Best of both worlds, no compat break.
Izkata
> which allows for running full X11 desktop environments using Wayland components
Wait so is this turning Wayland into a client/server model like X11, where eventually it could support existing window managers and other stuff separate from the compositor?
I remember a year or two ago wondering if that would ever happen and I think I only got one reply saying it wouldn't happen because it was unnecessary.
snvzz
Long term? Perhaps, if successful. I am hopeful.
But, right now, XLibre[0] is available, ready for use and very active.
KetoManx64
Just got a major release as well with tons of new contributors and fixes/additions: https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver/releases/tag/xlibre-xser...
adastra22
I’m not sure this satisfies X11 needs without remote display capability.
kiney
I WANT to use X11, its simply better than wayland
themafia
Rewriting it from scratch is so very rarely a better plan than improving what you already have.
shevy-java
> by itself it looks like a fairly reasonable set of choices.
I have not tried this myself, so I can not speak from experience, but if they have removed features that people used, then they are in a similar situation as wayland. So I don't see what the difference then would be. Perhaps your analysis was also incomplete?
sho_hn
I consider Wayland's choices reasonable as well. I.e. I it's not surprising that a reasonable attempt to clean up X ends up looking similar to Wayland, just in a slightly different place on the xy graph that has backwards compat and cleanup as its axis.
undefined
imtringued
The thing is, X11/Xorg is a huge monolith. There is simply no way to implement every single feature in one go and then release the competing implementation.
The very thing that makes people biased towards X11/Xorg both negatively and positively is that it is a huge monolith and the only X implementation on Linux. The moment you have two implementations, you're gonna get the same complaints against the second X server as Wayland is receiving.
You think this is an indictment to the second implementation and that they shouldn't bother by saying an "analysis was incomplete" but in my opinion it's exactly backwards. This is an argument that eternally perpetuates X11 not because of technical capability but rather because it was there first.
After all, the moment there is any implementation that is second it might miss a single feature that nobody actually uses, but theoretically could be used when combining an old binary with a new X implementation.
But this argument misses the obvious fact that X11/Xorg is already dead since any code change will break existing applications. Meaning X11 has become an unsalvageable fossil.
torginus
The Linux kernel is also a monolith yet has worked forever without a rewrite.
I think there is a reasonably agreed on set of things that can be removed from X, like server-side drawing primitives, and GLX
bitwize
Funny, the other day I started writing an X server of my own. While I appreciate and welcome this work, I still use and write software that makes use of old X draw calls, which I intended to incorporate into my server, unlike the author of this work. So I'm glad to see my efforts have not been made largely redundant!
vidarh
I'd at least consider moving older draw calls into an xlib replacement. Not all of them are suitable for that, but e.g. sufficient font handling to beat Xorgs server side handling requires the Render extension plus ca. 1500 lines of C for a basic TrueType renderer, or half that in a higher level language, or just use FreeType which is a dependency for most X clients anyway.
bitwize
It's just a hobby, won't be big and professional like Xorg. Aiming for as much protocol completeness as I can manage within those constraints.
linuxhansl
Tangentially related... Is it just me, but is Wayland still lagging behind X11? From things like window placement, night light, etc. Things seem to work just out of the box in X11, and there are always issues in Wayland.
(For me this is specifically on Fedora, and I always switch back to X11 from Wayland.)
vladvasiliu
Well, isn't this compositor related? I've never had any window placement issues running Sway (i3 for Wayland). I never used night light on that machine, so I can't comment on that particular point, but the thing seems to work just as well as i3.
The only problem I have is with JetBrains IDEs, which seem to have shaky support. They're usable (meaning you can code), but the experience is so wonky that I basically consider they don't support Wayland.
The reason I switched from i3/x11 is that we've got some 27" 5k screens at work that are basically useless at 100%, and Sway handles different scaling settings flawlessly (except for IntelliJ, which seems lost).
mihular
Wayland intellij ide support is in the works, IDEs support X11 out of the box, but you can enable Wayland support explicitly (just search for it).
As per Windows placement, Firefox won't restore windows on original positions supposedly because of Wayland, somebody please correct me if I'm wrong.
Rygian
Using kde on Wayland for a while now, on a Nvidia card (debian trixie, just upgraded to forky a week ago), and i can't relate to any of those issues. My only complaint is a silly kernel module warning that pollutes my syslog.
gabrielgio
At this point it is just you.
I run two different distributions myself, I know a bunch o people on even more different distributions, set of configuration and based on empirical analysis I can assure you that no one has problem with windows placement.
Out of the box I used have more problem with X11 (tearing and font rendering being the most annoyingly common ones) than I have with Wayland.
oblio
It's not just him, but for something else. HiDPI, Ubuntu 24.04, try OnlyOffice or VMWare Workstation. Both don't scale well. I assume other applications also don't scale well. Had to use X. And the scaling isn't even fractional, it's 2x.
ablob
It's not just him. I've had issues with windows popping up on the wrong display and also their scaling. Works without issue on X11; and I don't even know where to start looking on Wayland.
LeFantome
A lot of people would have preferred this to Wayland if it had come much earlier.
If it also runs Wayland apps, many may prefer it actually.
criticalfault
wondering who those people are given that Wayland was done by xorg devs
IshKebab
Users? Obviously xorg devs want to work on something that isn't ancient and crufty. But users want something that actually works and it has taken almost 2 decades to get to that point.
Actually I still have more issues on Wayland than X. Although it is at least starting to swing in the other direction - e.g. KDE's screen recording feature doesn't work on X. The button's still there but if you click it nothing happens.
undefined
YouAreWRONGtoo
[dead]
socketcluster
The name Phoenix is overused. There is an Elixir framework called Phoenix. I think I also heard of other projects with that same name before.
It's a bit like the name 'Apollo'; besides the moon landing project, I know like 2 dev projects called that and also there is a sales SaaS platform with that name.
Surely people should run a search first before choosing a name...
wewewedxfgdf
From the ashes of some previous project is born some new project.
It's symbolic.
I remember people naming new software projects this back in the 1980s for the same reason.
thiht
We get the symbolic reason. It’s still overused and lazy because it doesn’t even relate to the project itself except for its origin in the most generic way.
They could at least use PhoenX or FenX to link it with X
socketcluster
It's a great name but way overused. I guess everything these days rose from ashes of past failures. Sector is highly competitive.
bloppe
Ya, and that's the same reason all those other projects picked this name too
sodapopcan
Not in the case of Elixir. It’s a play on BEAM processes being revived.
cheschire
Remember when every project acronym used to be YA-something for “Yet Another…”? Or when recursive acronyms were the hot trend?
nxobject
Don't forget startup names that randomly dropped vowels. I don't miss the days of twttr.
elestor
I can second the Apollo thing. I think it might just be a natural name to give something, because when I was a kid I was working on a voice assistant thing instead of touching grass (never finished it) and called it Apollo. This was probably my first project.
rplnt
How many X servers named Pheonix are there? Surely it doesn't matter if there are frameworks and libraries of the same name in other areas. It's inevitable to have collisions like this.
underdeserver
I think all the cool one-word names are used, and overused, by now.
wakawaka28
Firefox tried to use it and was sued for trademark infringement. wxPython also has a Phoenix project. It's definitely a catchy, but overused, name.
LeFantome
I don’t think the problem was with “phoenix”.
It was Project Phoenix (resurrection of the Netscape browser). This resulted in the Firebird browser (Firebird and Thunderbird). But Firebird was an existing database that objected to the name. So, we got Firefox instead.
At least that is how I remember it.
lmz
Wasn't it renamed because of these people? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Technologies
wakawaka28
Mozilla was sued to rename Firefox (like I said) by one Phoenix Technologies. If I remember right, they picked two bad names before picking "Firefox" but I don't remember the other one.
loeg
Firefox was Firebird, not Phoenix.
wakawaka28
I think Firebird was the second name they tried to use that was already taken. They were definitely sued by Phoenix Technologies for one incident. Bryan Lunduke has a podcast explaining the history of this but I saw the one about Phoenix on the Wikipedia page before posting.
Edit: Here you go: https://www.zdnet.com/article/mozilla-holds-fire-in-naming-f...
travisgriggs
Phoenix in the Elixir ecosystem is probably one of the less confusing name uses. Under that stack you get such clear library framework names as: bandit, cowboy, thousand island, and ranch. As well as mint and finch. When not riffing off of previous project names with off axis alternate names, it’s always some sort of ExThing sharing space with at least 3 other varieties of the same (e.g. ThingEx, Thingx, and ExaThing), and you're left guessing which one may have emerged as a conventional standard.
mths
Better not ask them to think outside the box or they'll come up with something like fushichou.
ccakes
This is a great project! I like and use Wayland but the portal protocols and extension mechanism does leave a lot to be desired. Wayland is still quite a way behind Windows and macOS in terms of what productivity users need
An X11 rewrite with some security baked in is an awesome approach. Will be watching!
drpixie
I thought for a long time that rather than move to Wayland, we could come up with a tidied-up version of X. Sounds like a good and useful project, I hope it progresses.
reactordev
I thought this too and originally thought that’s what Wayland was going to do but it went off and did its own thing.
I’m all for an X12.
sho_hn
An X12 was briefly considered by the community before adopting Wayland: https://www.x.org/wiki/Development/X12/
If you take the time to read through that (very partial) list of cruft and footguns in X11 it probably makes it a little easier to understand why a clean-slate approach was able to attract momentum and why many hands-on involved developers were relatively tired of X11. Critics would of course respond that backwards compatibility is worth the effort and rewrites are often the wrong call, etc. It's the Python 2/3 debate and many others.
bdhcuidbebe
Be the change you want to see.
Also happy winter solstice.
viraptor
It was always an option, but "just" needed someone to dedicate all their time to it and pull in a group of long term maintainers. The real question is what will happen with the project in 2 years and will it be stable for day to day use.
bsder
The fact that you can "assume Vulkan exists" helps a lot (both hardware and software renderers exist). Do remember--Wayland predates Vulkan by almost a full decade.
In addition, you can offload OpenGL compatibility to Zink (again leaning into Vulkan).
> pull in a group of long term maintainers.
"Use new cool language" seems to be a prerequisite for this nowadays ...
At least Zig is very compatible with C.
reppap
I don't really understand what is supposedly missing in Wayland for productivity users? At work I have been using gnome with the wayland backend for years at this point and I can't really figure out anything that's missing.
sillystuff
Accessibility is apparently a big problem with wayland. E.g., the most popular / ?only? app that supports hardware eye trackers on Linux does not work with wayland, and states that it likely never will as wayland does not provide what it needs to add support (it is also the most popular app for voice/noise control). Even basic things like screen readers are apparently still an issue with wayland. Without a strong accessibility story, systems running wayland would have been banned at my last employer (a college).
Personally, I have a 3200x2400 e-ink monitor that has a bezel that covers the outer few columns of pixels. I use a custom modeline to exclude those columns from use. And, a fractional scaling of .603x.5 on this now 3184x2400 monitor to get 1920x1200 effective resolution. Zero idea how to accomplish this with wayland-- I do not think it is possible, but if anyone knows a way, I am all ears.
I ran into, at least, ten issues without solutions/work-arounds (like the issue with my monitor) when I tried to switch this year, after getting a new laptop. Reverted to a functional, and productively familiar, setup with X.
pezezin
I don't know about other DE, but at least with Plasma there is a "overscan" option to compensate for hidden borders.
foxrider
The xdg-desktop-portal stuff is still too immature. For example, my friend wanted my help after upgrading his Pop_OS to 24.04, and 24.04 replaced GNOME with COSMIC. COSMI had no RemoteDesktop portal (and still doesn't have it), so we couldn't use RustDesk like we always did without him installing a GNOME session just for that.
I've been an i3 user for almost two decades, but eventually switched to Sway - to this day there's no InputCapture portal, so I can't use Synergy with Sway, forcing me to switch to i3 while I'm working.
It's been over 10 years of things like that. There's always SOMETHING missing.
phito
Screenshots are just completely broken. People always tell me to use other apps like flameshot but IME it just doesn't work and I don't want to have to mess around so much to take screenshots.
I'm still using Wayland because it's what came with my distro (endeavour OS, gnome), but it's really strange how it came broken out of the box.
reppap
I'm curious what OS you are running that has broken screen shots on wayland because that hasn't been my experience on Fedora.
MrDrMcCoy
Headless remote desktop, at least for KDE, is very much not possible today as far as I can tell. It's the last thing I miss from Xorg.
yjftsjthsd-h
FWIW, like everything else in Wayland, it's per-compositor. Here's a working headless sway in a container:
https://gitlab.com/yjftsjthsd-g/docker_sway-vnc
(This is not a defense of Wayland, just trying to share useful information)
linsomniac
>what is supposedly missing in Wayland
My desktop is a bit long in the tooth (22.04), but I've long given up on trying to screen shot or screen share from Wayland. I have my Macbook sitting next to it and use it for those things, where it works basically flawlessly.
Kind of waiting for 26.04 to upgrade at this point, but I'm not really expecting any of this to be better yet.
edit: If I had it to do over again, I wouldn't have gone Wayland at 22.04.
reppap
I'm running fedora and have been screenshoting and screen sharing (with the teams PWA) just fine. So might be time to get something newer.
BadBadJellyBean
What keeps you from going to Ubuntu 24.04? I have been screen sharing and screen shotting on Wayland (Gnome and KDE) without problem.
dvtkrlbs
I am on KDE never had any problems taking screenshots.
OsrsNeedsf2P
Autoclickers and screen macros on Wayland are all janky
nish__
> Wayland is still quite a way behind Windows and macOS in terms of what productivity users need
What's missing?
gen2brain
Window positioning? You cannot position the window, you cannot send a hint, nothing? So my pop-up with GTK4 will randomly be placed somewhere, anywhere, without any control. OK, GTK4 went further and also removed popups without the parent, so you hack that with an invisible anchor window and then write platform-specific code for sane platforms that CAN, of course, move the window. And let's not talk about window icons that you have to put somewhere on the file system?
MindSpunk
Have you considered if someone wants to make a compositor where each window is projected onto a facet of a hyper cube and must place windows in 4 dimensions? These are important use cases we should support, we should make cross platform software as difficult possible to develop for Linux by removing features that have been standard on desktop operating systems for decades.
bloppe
It's not technically behind on window positioning. Rather, it was a deliberate choice not to support it. You can very reasonably object to that, but it is sorta a necessary measure to prevent clickjacking.
quantummagic
Ads in the start menu, forced screenshotting of all your activity, and AI integration in every aspect of the desktop experience.
nish__
lol
redeeman
BS, windows and macos cant even do proper window managing for a start, and then it just goes downwards from there on.. You can perhaps install various weird third party things, but it does not come with it by default.
If you took people who absolutely never tried any computing, and gave them macos, windows, and for example Plasma, they would NOT consider windows or macos to be ready for the desktop. If you go 15 years back, even way more so.
even in the early 2000s, windows was so hilariously crappy that you had to make floppy disks to even get to install the thing. If PCs didnt come preloaded with windows, regular users would never ever be able to install it, versus the relative ease a typical linux distribution was to install. This is also one of the large reasons that when their windows slowed down due to being a piece of shit with 1000000 toolbars, people threw it out and bought a new, despite the fact that a reinstall would have solved it.
p_ing
> You can perhaps install various weird third party things, but it does not come with it by default.
A Window Manager and Window Server don't come by default with Linux... It's always an install-time option on the major distros.
> even in the early 2000s, windows was so hilariously crappy that you had to make floppy disks to even get to install the thing.
Windows in the early 2000s installed just fine without a floppy directly from CD or PXE booting.
PunchyHamster
Windows in early 2000s didn't even detect your early 2000s SATA drive
Windows in early 2023 didn't even detect the network card it needed to download network card drivers. After changing mobos I needed to boot into linux to download network drivers for windows...
Windows in early 2025 still uses SCSI emulation to talk with NVMe and only now the server part got a proper driver
Windows in early 2025s still need virtio driver injection to boot properly as a VM without IDE emulation
"Drivers working out of the box" were never windows strong part
tstenner
Unless you needed a SATA driver not included in the installer because you wanted to avoid a legacy IDE emulation for your disks.
redeeman
> Windows in the early 2000s installed just fine without a floppy directly from CD or PXE booting.
when was it sata became the norm? im thinking circa 2001-ish, and what windows was latest here? im thinking windows xp. lets try remember, did windows xp include sata drivers on the installation medium?? oh wait, it didnt. There wasnt even ahci at the time, and windows xp didnt include a single sata driver for any of the chipsets at the time
> A Window Manager and Window Server don't come by default with Linux... It's always an install-time option on the major distros.
desktop distributions generally come with a desktop environment default selected, or prompt you to choose between a few. one feature that has been there since more or less forever is alt + left/rightclick mouse to move/resize windows, which is significantly better than finding the title bar or corners like. for an operating system called "windows" its pretty hilarious it has the worst window management of them all, dont you think?
OsrsNeedsf2P
> If you took people who absolutely never tried any computing, and gave them macos, windows, and for example Plasma, they would NOT consider windows or macos to be ready for the desktop.
There's some truth to this. I've been installing fresh Windows 11s on family computers this holiday season, and good lord is it difficult to use.
The number of tweaks I had to configure to prevent actively hostile programs from ravaging disk read/writes (HDD pain), freezing and crashing, or invasive popups was absurd.
figmert
As someone who came from Windows, and has used Linux as my primary OS for 15 years, and MacOS here and there (cos work provided laptop), I can tell you that Linux was not ready for prime time 15 years ago. Today, I feel it is, but definitely not 15 years ago.
akho
I use Linux on the desktop since 1997, and there was no point where Windows was even slightly more attractive.
I don't know what "prime time" means here.
edit: apart from, you know. Applications and drivers for random hardware.
7bit
15 years back people were given Windows macOS and Linux and people voted which OS were ready for the Desktop and which were not. The only BS is your inflammatory contribution to this topic.
PunchyHamster
Nope, Macs were expensive stuff games did not run on, and linux was just not pushed by near anyone.
It was not a war "which desktop is easier to use", it was "which system can run stuff I need". And if "the need" was "video games and office stuff", your only choice was windows.
grim_io
The average user only cares what they can run on the desktop. Linux did not have as much choice back then.
redeeman
they were not, they purchased what was in the stores, which was only windows. all the way from first windows to windows xp it was the biggest pile of shit imaginable. the average user wouldnt even have half a chance of installing it, and certainly couldnt use it with any kind of reasonableness, it was a giant mess, it was just the mess people were used to. Most people would throw out their computer and buy a new when windows became slow, because, of course it gradually becomes slower, makes perfect sense, no?
KDE from 15 years back was HUGELY better than windows at the time, and frankly, also windows now
someguyiguess
I can’t tell if this is satire.
MangoToupe
[flagged]
sho_hn
Windows is reasonably OK, but MacOS' window management has always been really terrible.
Just think through the many different iterations over the years of what the green button on the deco does, which still isn't working consistently, same as double-clicking the title bar. Not to mention that whatever the Maximize-alike is that you can set title bar double click too (the options being Zoom and Fill, buried in settings somewhere) is different from dragging the title bar against the top of the screen and chosing single tile. Which is different from Control-Clicking the green button. Maybe. It depends on the app.
What a mess.
Both of them miss (without add-ons) convenience niche features I cherish, such as the ability to pin arbitrary windows on-top, but at least the basics in Windows work alright and moreover predictably and reliabily. Window management in MacOS just feels neglected and broken.
There may be many other ways in which MacOS shines as a desktop OS, and certainly in terms of display server tech it has innovated by going compositing first, but the window manager is bizarrely bad.
binarin
There is at least one area where both macos and windows suck - handling window focus. MacOS is regularly having trouble with tracking focus across multiple monitors and multi-window apps, making it unusable with keyboard only. And Windows just loves to steal focus in the most inappropriate moments.
lelanthran
>> windows and macos cant even do proper window managing for a start
> Well they certainly manage them better than x11 and wayland.
X11 doesn't manage Windows. You'd know this if you used it, and if you've used it, you'd know why some consider the window management on Windows and MacOS very primitive.
undefined
Arch-TK
I don't use a Mac, but have you ever used Windows?
I mean, maybe you have, but if you are not fussy then at worst MacOS is quirky and Windows and Linux are identical and merely have different icons.
If you pay a little bit of attention you will notice that on linux things seem more flexible and intuitive.
If you are very finnicky, there is nothing that comes close to X11 window managers when it comes to window management flexibility, innovation and power.
AndyKelley
As the application author you can set the release mode in the build script so that the release flag looks like `zig build --release` instead, and the user doesn't choose the optimization mode.
As a user you can pass `--release` to `zig build` to request release mode. If the application doesn't want to pick for you, you'll get an error and then you can pick for yourself.
In this case, it looks like the author of Phoenix wants to choose ReleaseSafe as the official release mode of the application.
Phoenix is the name of my hometown, btw.
iamnothere
This is the kind of initiative I’d prefer to see from X preservationists. Great job, I hope it succeeds. I prefer Wayland, but there’s still a place in the world for X; it just needs new dev teams to shoulder the burden.
grim_io
I disagree. The choices in the Linux ecosystem lead to unnecessary fragmentation and development/packaging nightmares.
I say let X11 die, bury it, and never let it rise again.
Then we can all focus on making just one display server as good as possible.
ori_b
Which one? The Gnome Wayland, the KDE Wayland, the xroots wayland, Weston, or one of the others? Each one is an independent implementation of a Wayland compositor, with a differing, incompatible set of extensions.
X11 was a single, pretty janky implementation. Wayland is the worst of both worlds -- it's cleaned up a little, but it's still kinda janky. In exchange for a little bit of cleanup, mainly around bitmap fonts, it's no longer a unified protocol.
And to top it off -- it kept the worst part of the X11 protocol, the XKB extension, but got rid of input handling entirely, which means that every platform needs to reach for platform specific code to implement reading from the mouse and keyboard.
Yay.
roenxi
If we're hypothesising a perfect world, ideally they standardise some way of sharing framebuffers between programs into Wayland. I suppose maybe they already have I gave up on the ecosystem in the early 2020s. That seems like it should be long enough ago now that they've got even advanced features like screenshots under control and rolled out.
grim_io
Sure, but I don't see a world where keeping X11 alive, in addition to all of this, makes anything better or easier, for anyone in the medium to long term.
morshu9001
The answer has been Gnome Wayland for years
yjftsjthsd-h
> The choices in the Linux ecosystem lead to unnecessary fragmentation and development/packaging nightmares.
You cannot possibly use this as an argument in Wayland's favor. X11 sucked because it baked everything, including multiple outdated kitchen sinks, into a single Xorg monolith. Wayland sucks because it factors out everything, including really important features, into optional extensions, ensuring that anything more interesting than "draw pixels to a window" will always be different on every single compositor.
rabf
Completed in 2007.
esjeon
The *original* X11 should die, but the modern Linux GUI stack has long abandoned most of its features anyway. X11 was already reduced to a bit-blitter protocol long before Wayland.
So, in theory, we can embrace a rather-minimal X11 implementation that can run the modern UI, including some desktop features missing in Wayland.
nish__
This is the worst argument ever. The choices in the Linux community is what's made it the best OS in the world today.
grim_io
Linux on the desktop only took of because Ubuntu, with mixed results and a lot of controversy, decided to standardize and polish the experience for "normies".
The distribution sprawl I largely see as a detriment to the ecosystem.
morshu9001
There isn't a successful Linux desktop OS. The Linux kernel is successful on servers and appliances, but only the kernel. And there aren't many even-split choices on your typical server. Like yeah zsh has a bit of a following, but everyone assumes you use bash, which is a good thing.
bashkiddie
> I say let X11 die, bury it, and never let it rise again.
totally awesome! And once we are done with X11, lets put pulseaudio to the grave! We can all focus on having an audio stack that does realiably stream to many sinks!
And polkit... su and sudo should have been enough
yjftsjthsd-h
> And once we are done with X11, lets put pulseaudio to the grave!
That'll happen first, I think. The trick is that pipewire is actually a fully functional replacement, instead of trying to declare everything out of scope, so with only minor effort people can just switch and everything works.
noosphr
Sound like you should use a BSD instead of Linux if you don't like choice.
morshu9001
FreeBSD is indeed nicer to use than your average Linux distro, and has a really good manual. The blocker is that everything is made for Linux.
jbverschoor
I’d love to have a proper x11.
Run gui apps in your container, local or remote.
Perfect
self_awareness
Why would a new rewrite be better preservation strategy than a full refactor and refresh of existing stable and working codebase?
cardanome
Please prioritize to keep accessibility features working.
This is really the main issue with wayland. Yes, it might be more stable these days and work fine for you. We can talk how how it makes writing you own WM needlessly complicated and all that but the one thing that makes wayland unacceptable is its lacking accessibility story. After so many years.
Accessibility is not something you can worry about adding later. It is the first thing you should think about when designing new software.
hambes
As someone who is not deep into linux desktop history: Can you please elaborate on the missing accessibility features in wayland or direct me to resources on that?
I've been using wayland for a while now and am very happy with it, but my accessibility needs are pretty basic.
cardanome
See this comment for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46380075#46381858
Here is a slightly-hopeful article: https://fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/i-want-to-love-linux-it-d...
hambes
thank you!
bigyabai
> Accessibility is not something you can worry about adding later.
I don't think there's any concrete proof of this. Ideally I think people want accessibility handled by their WM/DE; you're not getting Windows or macOS-quality a11y "for free" unless your desktop embraces it. At which point you might as well make it a separate, aftermarket protocol and slap it into d-bus.
If the Linux ecosystem is going to be fragmented and move past single-point-of-failure, polishing Xorg's accessibility works against the goal of standardized a11y.
gsnedders
Not just WM/DE, but also the toolkit too.
PixelForg
Same author behind https://git.dec05eba.com/gpu-screen-recorder/about/ , the best screen recorder for wayland imo (I had tried other alternatives but none of them helped in recording at 4k 60fps, this worked out of the box).
shevy-java
I have no idea how well this one works, but I am all up for more projects that can compete against the singularization that corporations currently try (see paid developers for wayland, GNOME and now also KDE). I wonder how much money would be needed to make the xorg server adapt to the modern era; I don't even know the featureset that is missing for this either. But I also know that wayland, after 20 years (!!!), will never cover those requests users had over tohse 20 years, simply because it tries to cater to a narrow specification wanted by corporations rather than the people - so much is now clear (wayland protocol was released in 2008, so it is soon 20 years actually; in a few days we have 2026, so it will be 18 years).
__d
So … does xterm work? emacs? xfig? ghostview? xload? xev? oclock? xmodmap? xpilot?
donio
I gave it a quick go and very few things work at the moment. None of the programs you listed do.
From the README:
At the moment it can render simple applications that do GLX, EGL or Vulkan graphics (fully hardware accelerated) nested in an existing X server.
glxgears on the other hand does work :)
esjeon
It’s possible that most of old X11 toys would not work properly, because many of them rely on X11 drawing APIs, but they are pretty simple to implement anyway.
CerryuDu
motif apps? xmag? xfontsel? forwarding over ssh? ~/.XCompose? "links2 -g"?
superb_dev
> The compositor will get disabled … if the client runs a fullscreen application and disabled vsync in the application.
This is interesting to me, why would vsync being enabled mean that the desktop compositor needs to stick around for a full screen app?
amiga-workbench
I imagine because vsync and triple buffering introduce latency. There are cases like games where you don't want all that lag.
superb_dev
If the goal was to reduce latency, wouldn’t you want the desktop compositor out of the way when vsync is on?
amiga-workbench
That's very true, and I believe Wayland has a DRM leasing extension just for this use case. SteamVR uses it to punch through the compositor and draw straight to the screen.
smj-edison
Bit of an observation, but I've noticed that there's been quite a few pragmatic projects started in Zig. Bun vs Deno comes to mind (one focused on DX, the other on security), and now this vs Wayland. Not to say that designing something properly is wrong, just that it tends to throw away a lot of important interoperability.
vzaliva
Multiple screens support is listed as non-goal. Would that prevent its usage with window managers which support virtiaul desktops? I am i3 user and it is a critical feature for me.
sho_hn
In short: No.
In X11 "screen" has a particular meaning, and only supporting a single screen doesn't preclude multi-monitor support or virtual desktops.
ddtaylor
Is this why back in the day sometimes a Linux distro would have a multi-monitor setup where each monitor was an actual different desktop cube for example. There was a time when each window for an Nvidia graphics card in that type of configuration could not be moved from one screen to another, etc.
sho_hn
Yep!
ndiddy
Given that they're fine with adding breaking changes to the protocol, I think it's a shame that they're not supporting multi-screen. This will lead to the same problem with Xrandr based multi-monitor where you get screen tearing with mixed refresh rate displays. I would prefer to see "traditional X11 multihead but you can move programs between screens" as the solution for multiple monitors. Even if it worked like Mac OS X where you can't have a single window span across multiple monitors, it would still be better than the current state of X11.
esjeon
As others have already mentioned, the continuous multi-monitor(Xinerama) was an afterthought. A good news is that, by design, it’s actually pretty easy to add in the later steps.
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Pretty interesting approach to make an X server that is essentially "Wayland-like" (merging display server/compositor by default, isolated apps by default, no remoting of GLX, dropping legacy protocol features to the point of breaking compat with the core protocol, etc.). Not sure who this is for, but by itself it looks like a fairly reasonable set of choices.