Forgive me, I'm not an expert when it comes to windowing systems but wasn't Wayland started by basically all the then current head devs of xorg? Isn't that a tacit admission my the people that know best that the project they'd dedicated years if not decades of their lives to had reached a point where further development was untenable?
Beyond the above mentioned tacit admissions, didn't nearly every major active dev on the xorg team state explicitly via various emails, blog posts, and conference talks that they saw no reasonable way forward as a matter of tech when it came to the now 21 year old xorg source, now 34 year old XFree86 source, and 41+ year old protocol model that is X11?
All that said, I wish the best of luck to the X11Libre team on their endeavors.
homebrewer 11 hours ago [-]
There is no team, it's a one man show, and the split is caused by personality conflict between the author and the rest of the xorg team that doesn't feel that simply shuffling code around without putting actual hard work justifies frequent ABI breakage that leaves users with a broken graphics system. Read this for more info:
“Getting the boot” is rather vague. Is there any more information anywhere, background, &c.?
My general impression (quite possibly incorrect) was that X.Org Server is largely treated as “done”, making only bugfixes and such these days.
JimDabell 12 hours ago [-]
From the readme:
> That fork was necessary since toxic elements within Xorg projects, moles from certian big corp are boycotting any substantial work on Xorg, in order to destroy the project, to elimitate competition of their own products. (classic "embrace, extend, extinguish" tactics)
> This is an independent project, not at all affiliated with BigTech or any of their subsidiaries or tax evasion tools, nor any political activists groups, state actors, etc. It's explicitly free of any "DEI" or similar discriminatory policies. Anybody who's treating others nicely is welcomed.
metta2uall 11 hours ago [-]
Doesn't "DEI" basically mean treating others nicely?
msgodel 11 hours ago [-]
No and it never has. The default position on the internet, the one technologists working on open source always took, is that only the ideas matter and if your ideas are good you'll be included. DEI became popular because that wasn't good enough for certain groups of people who consistently failed to produce good ideas and wanted to wedge themselves in anyway.
MrArthegor 4 hours ago [-]
Yeah, from a non-US citizen views, this type of policy feel like target discrimination against certain groups of individuals.
And the message sent is disastrous. Personally I am part of people who have big advantages with actual DEI policy, but I am firmly against that, because I want to be employed for my skills, not because I fit a quota or anything like that.
dragonwriter 4 hours ago [-]
> this type of policy feel like target discrimination against certain groups of individuals.
Every policy is targeted discrimination for or against certain groups of individuals (and you can invert the group and make the same policy switch from "for" to "against".)
The question is what group of individuals.
MrArthegor 3 hours ago [-]
I haven’t remembered any policy like that in past decades, for my country even more ( in the US you have to go back to apartheid to find policy who are discriminated against group of people)
And in context of work or anything like that, the only policy who actively discriminate is the skill, and I don’t place this in the same level of DEI because you can acquire more skill, but you cannot change your color skin or origin for example.
subsistence234 3 hours ago [-]
> Every policy is targeted discrimination for or against certain groups of individuals
Lol are you talking about "discrimination" on the basis of task-relevant skills?
Until 20 years ago, nobody in OS cared who you were IRL, your gender, ethnicity etc. In many cases they didn't even know, plenty people only contributed under pseudonyms. Hard to believe for people who only joined the show after social media had become pretty much mandatory, and the "I don't care who you are IRL"-crowd got drowned out by "who you are IRL is the most important thing, not what you contribute"-crowd.
keb_ 9 hours ago [-]
Any policy can be abused, including DEI. But as a whole, I think DEI has done enormous good.
johnnyjeans 7 hours ago [-]
reading too deeply into it, it's basically an interjection. it doesn't refer to any meaningful facet of objective reality, it only exists according to the socio-political hallucinations of americans. doesn't matter if it's said positively or negatively, it's just a virtue signal long devoid of meaning. a bird's mating dance, if you will, but for burger-eaters.
tommica 11 hours ago [-]
Pretty sure it did, unfortunately it got swung to an extreme extent in some circles :(
krautsauce 7 hours ago [-]
DEI means white men need not apply.
Incipient 8 hours ago [-]
DEI is another selector added to "meritocracy" vs "nepotism".
You either give the job to the best candidate, your friend, or a minority.
It has nothing to do with "nice". You can be nice, or an ass. DEI doesn't preclude you being either.
ivewonyoung 11 hours ago [-]
Does this read like treating others nicely to you?
> moles from certian big corp are boycotting any substantial work on Xorg, in order to destroy the project
That's what I've always thought. The "X11 developers" pushing for Wayland weren't original developers so much as RedHat "maintainers," who (understandably) wanted a frontier to explore rather than janitorial work. All I know for certain is that X11 (even as of 15 years ago) mostly worked, while Wayland of 2025 is still full of headaches & breakages.
msgodel 11 hours ago [-]
Most of the stuff that's come out of freedesktop.org always seemed to make things less usable. I'm glad to see people are finally giving up on it.
zzo38computer 2 hours ago [-]
> Most of the stuff that's come out of freedesktop.org always seemed to make things less usable.
I thought so too. I also thought they have many problems and do not help very well. I mostly try to avoid them.
(There are problems with X window system as well (and with Xlib), but still it seems the freedesktop had made things that are designed in a worse way.)
dralley 11 hours ago [-]
X did not "just work" for me 10 years ago, and neither is Wayland "still full of headaches and breakages"
I've had no substantial problems because of Wayland in the last, like, 5 years.
antisol 9 hours ago [-]
Thanks for your anecdotes. Here's a couple of counter-anecdotes:
---
X has "just worked" for me since at least ubuntu 8.04 (that's 2008, april, over 17 years ago, for those counting), probably earlier.
I don't recall having any particular issues with X on the fedora machines I ran before I switched to ubuntu 8.04, but I don't recall clearly enough to be able to confidently say that I didn't have any X issues.
OTOH, I also don't specifically recall having X issues since some time around Red Hat 6 or so, which would be around 1998 or 1999, so it might be more like 25-26 years since X didn't "just work" for me.
---
About a year ago, I heard that wayland might be approaching a usable state. So I decided to give it a try on a raspberry pi that I was setting up.
It took literally about 15 minutes before I ran into a problem where I wasn't able to do something I've been doing for decades on X. And I want to stress that I was hoping it would work - I was not out to find a reason not to use wayland, I just happened to run into one inside of about 15 minutes.
I spent a couple of hours trying to figure out how to do what I wanted to do on wayland. I put a nontrivial amount of effort into trying to solve the issue on wayland. During the course of this, I found several different/conflicting pieces of advice, none of which worked for me. I think IIRC I found one option which sounded promising but which meant recompiling the compositor, or something very-nontrivial like that.
I balked at that and switched the system over to X.
And the problem instantly went away, and everything started working again. And that machine currently has an uptime of well over a hundred days.
I would love for wayland to be a thing that actually works to the point that it's a viable replacement for X, but I grow more and more skeptical every year that this doesn't happen. I Expected it like a decade ago.
bluGill 8 hours ago [-]
X just worked for a large subset of users. However Wayland just works for a large subset as well. In either case if you are in the subset where it doesn't work then you will complain. Wayland has a design such that if things don't work for you today we have a hope that we can make it work for you in the future. Many of the issues where X didn't work for some people could not be fixed, and some of those were issues that are becoming more important.
josephcsible 2 hours ago [-]
> Wayland has a design such that if things don't work for you today we have a hope that we can make it work for you in the future.
The reason we hate Wayland so much is that X is being killed off now, with things only ever maybe working again in the future. Wayland would be way better if the people behind it added support for all of the missing features and use cases first, and only then killed off X.
* design and implement a dbus protocol that does screen sharing the way you want it done
* get buy-in from all the major compositors and applications to implement your protocol themselves
I mean, should be a doddle for any serious project.
moron4hire 11 hours ago [-]
More than 2/3rds of your examples are from over 5 years ago, and one of the links is to a site that replaces its content with an image of a testicle when hotlinked from HN.
blueflow 10 hours ago [-]
> and one of the links is to a site that replaces its content with an image of a testicle when hotlinked from HN.
jwz is calling other people manchilds, but as someone who also had such a script on their website and also had HN blocked this way... he is the manchild who needs to grow up.
hello_computer 11 hours ago [-]
> More than 2/3rds of your examples are from over 5 years ago
Exactly! If you scroll to the bottom of each one, you will see that most are either a) still open, or b) abandoned (too hard or impossible), then closed as stale.
> image of a testicle when hotlinked from HN
Rightly so.
dralley 9 hours ago [-]
One open issue has a comment at the bottom saying that the issue is fixed and was an issue with Mutter. There's no evidence to think that it was ever a "wayland" issue.
One open issue has had locked comments for 5 years. It's probably fixed but nobody has bothered to close it.
Most of rest were not actually "wayland" issues, either. Yes, someone's hobby project screen recorder might not get updated to work with wayland, but there's dozens of those, feels a bit unfair to ignore that there's alternatives.
hello_computer 7 hours ago [-]
obs, jitsi, & raspbian are not “hobby projects”. do you work for redhat?
blueflow 11 hours ago [-]
Nvidia, vmxgfx. I would run wayland if i could.
mariusor 10 hours ago [-]
> I would run wayland if i could.
You can if you stop buying nvidia. The problem with missing drivers is principally the fault of the hardware vendor not of the kernel community.
blueflow 18 minutes ago [-]
You know what runs on these platforms? Xorg.
jeroenhd 12 hours ago [-]
> It's explicitly free of any "DEI" or similar discriminatory policies.
Ah, one of those projects. Hard pass.
blueflow 11 hours ago [-]
I'm not going to pretend judging people by their skin color (or any other bogus criteria like those outlined by the hacker ethics) is not discriminatory.
Whatever DEI was meant for, due to its unagreeable practices its unrecoverably burned into the ground.
jeroenhd 9 hours ago [-]
I, for one, am in favour of DEI pillars such as pregnancy leave and accessibility to the disabled. Especially the latter seems pretty important when it comes to developing a core component of a computer interface.
akimbostrawman 4 hours ago [-]
that is not DEI
zzo38computer 2 hours ago [-]
I think is good that they don't use DEI. (When one side is DEI and other side is discrimination and racist, both sides are bad.) They do not seem to exclude anyone because of this, and they said they aren't excluding anyone because of this (and hopefully they are not lying). They should include people, and DEI is not a very good way to do it.
I also think is good that they had deliberately being trying to avoid other problems, so that they will not be affiliated with the BigTech and the related stuff.
Hopefully they will actually be able to improve it.
znpy 11 hours ago [-]
You missed the part "Anybody who's treating others nicely is welcomed." (conveniently).
larrled 11 hours ago [-]
Bashing DEI, whether you agree with the principle of race based preference in hiring or not, is imo not “treating others nicely.” Think of how the many talented, hardworking, good people who were part of DEI. The motivation for DEI was pure, and the need to address racial inequality obvious: social problems arise wherever inequality exists. It’s fair to move on to something better for the whole of the workforce, notably for example Asians were more hurt than helped by DEI on average. Things worsening, it’s prudent to readjust the current approach to social problems in the West. But we can do it without hostility towards those who were part of the DEI mission and believed in it, or benefitted from it, for very good reasons.
blueflow 10 hours ago [-]
DEI is not the same as the people behind it. Criticizing DEI is not personal disrespect.
gfhopper 9 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
ZekeSulastin 12 hours ago [-]
The project readme has some thoughts about why X.Org is treated as done and why the dev forked; I think I get why the OP didn’t link that instead.
I don't understand why the link is to the commit list for a branch and not to the repo home page, unless OP was intentionally trying to have people avoid reading the README.
The README contains a minor political rant that primarily complains about corporate influence but also takes a shot at DEI. The CoC page was intentionally left up with just the content "404". Reading between the lines, it sounds like toxicity all around.
bitwize 5 hours ago [-]
It's abandonware. None of the grown-ups in the Linux graphics space are interested in maintaining it beyond the minimum necessary. I suppose new features could be added to Xorg, but anyone who actually knows something about the graphics pipeline is 100% committed to Wayland, so it won't be done.
And Enrico's code was apparently so shitty and disruptive he's earned himself a ban from Freedesktop.org. Or is that because he associated himself with Lunduke?
krautsauce 8 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
AHTERIX5000 12 hours ago [-]
The more I read MR discussions regarding this the less I want to use the forked version. Not that anyone is going to ship it anyway.
mrweasel 12 hours ago [-]
That dude had a crazy amount of patches ready to go. I don't have the technical skills to judge if the patches are any good, but that's an impressive amount of work.
I'd be a little concerned that this is just one person doing the work, but we'll see if others join in.
ndiddy 6 hours ago [-]
From looking at his Xorg contributions on FDo, his technical work amounts to mostly code style changes and cosmetic-level refactors in an attempt to clean up the codebase. In the course of this, he's broken the master branch on multiple occasions and introduced a large amount of churn in the Xorg ecosystem, all while not fixing any bugs or improving anything user-facing. The reason why he started this fork seems to be that his changes pissed off everyone working on Xorg who could review his MRs, so they started piling up without getting reviewed.
> Changing calls pScreen->DestroyPixmap to dixDestroyPixmap doesn't meaningfully improve the code or make it easier to reason about. Moving byte-swapping of requests and events from one function to another doesn't make the code more robust. Cosmetic changes to the way length fields are written doesn't help with byte vs. word unit confusion, or keep you from writing the wrong amount of data. You're just moving the complexity from point A to point G, not reducing it.
> It is possible to reduce the complexity of the code, by delving deep into the interactions between DIX/MI/FB/DDX to flatten the code flow, making some deep structural changes. Or by using structured (de)marshalling through XCB. Doing this would be incredibly risky, but at least have a much higher payoff than just cosmetic shuffling because it is 'cleaner'.
> The immense value X11 has - that it always had and will have for decades to come - is its backwards compatibility, still being able to run 40-year old apps. You correctly called the codebase 'fragile' - you've been finding this out as your changes repeatedly break things. If you're breaking apps, then what exactly is the value in a codebase which is 'cleaner' to your subjective standard but doesn't actually work?
toenail 12 hours ago [-]
I hope so. I've tried to use wayland more than a decade ago, it was unable to replace xorg. Again last year, same story, and we get told that it's our fault because we need to adapt our workflows to wayland. I chose Linux because I get to choose how I work.
themaninthedark 5 hours ago [-]
Exactly. I came to Linux because Microsoft keeps changing; correct way to do things, configuration files/locations all while deciding to shove ads and tracking down our throats.
jeroenhd 9 hours ago [-]
The MR that caused the drama that caused the fork to happen complained about this author doing tons of work to tons of legacy code with no direct user-facing benefit without testing his changes properly. From the sentiment of the discussion I gather this isn't the first time either.
I think trying to improve the quality of such old code bases is good and "don't touch it in case something breaks" has caused more problems than it solved, but in this case the lack of testing caused X to die when someone runs xrandr. Not exactly a vague use case. Large restructuring work and taking care of tech debt is good, but it should go along with diligent testing.
Until all the work is done, I don't think this will be a very stable alternative to X.org. I also don't think many people will follow this guy to the new project because the comments on the MR seems very "this guy versus everyone else".
Even if the fork stabilizes, that's just where the journey begins. The X.org system interacts with tons of other systems (the kernel and GPU drivers, among others), so that work need to be kept up with. At the same time, developing all of the new features the dev wants to add will be pretty useless unless applications start making use of them, and they're not going to if the project remains small.
If the anti-Wayland people unite behind this project and maintain their own X fork, there may be promise in this fork. But looking at the history, this is more likely to become another X12/Y11, or maybe a Mir if he can get a distro to back him.
felipec 5 hours ago [-]
Wrong. The fork was planned since a long time ago.
sspiff 12 hours ago [-]
Is there any discussion about him being removed from the project on a mailing list or some other channel?
I can't find a "why" in the handful of PRs I opened.
>> I'm a aware that some people from Xorg development team think that @metux changes are not useful enough for various reasons
> Apologies for being blunt, but I'm afraid it's more like "everyone except you" by now. He's managed to fall out with pretty much every other active project member.
>> Xorg is dead anyway
> That's not a reason for me though. I actually feel bad for Xorg users, Enrico's churn is causing pain for them for no clear benefit.
There are evidently both technical and social issues at play.
Later in that thread, Encrico/metux offers a defence, an explanation with detail that this is part of a mission to “make X11 great again”. Don’t read too much into the comparison (please don’t!), but one similarity with the American politician who has been using a similar phrase for the last dedcade is that they don’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. In both cases, some think the broken eggs are acceptable collateral damage toward a worthy goal, and others don’t. In this case, other X11 maintainers aren’t interested in making X11 great again, but would prefer to let it rest obsolete and minimally maintained; and so, taking the best interpretations I can imagine, it’s necessary for this Enrico to fork the project and go it alone. But he’s going to be swimming upstream against a raging torrent. And he seems to be making various mistakes in some changes that weren’t supposed to change behaviour, due to inadequate testing (he offers explanations that at least some consider reasonable; so the errors may not indicate a broader pattern).
cwillu 11 hours ago [-]
Wow: “xrandr doesn't work anymore on xorg-git” “I do not think this should be specifically on you, it is not unreasonable to expect that the author of a change tries their change before even submitting it upstream.” does not give a warm fuzzy feeling about the author of the at-fault patch leading a fork.
I think it's not the one to blame who broke this but those who implemented everything all the time without adding any tests. Xorg has quite a large codebase but almost no automated tests.
cwillu 48 minutes ago [-]
So we agree that the maintainer is at fault: he wanted to change things and not have to thoroughly test his changes by doing the boring work of adding test coverage to the modified area.
felipec 5 hours ago [-]
Autoritarian organizations never explain their reasons.
ibotty 9 hours ago [-]
Well-known as in notorious, right?
Tomte 12 hours ago [-]
Oh, it’s the vaccines are a "human experiment that basically creates a new humanoid race“ guy from LKML!
Never coded, made a change or updated X11. It always just works. But reading this thread that spawned some of the feelings around the ‘fragile’ codebase sounds like it is really hard to work on
I read through some of the context and his commits and the guy seems like an absolute liability. I’m more careful making such changes on our internal greenfield prototype…
jmclnx 11 hours ago [-]
I hope this succeeds plus I hope they are open to allow patches from OpenBSD. IIRC, Xorg would not accept patches from them, them, thus we have xenodm.
Also I hope NetBSD, FreeBSD and DrogonFlyBSD jumps on, this way the BSDs do not have to jump through loops for Wayland and they are not being forced to follow Linux.
And network transparency rules :)
DarkmSparks 11 hours ago [-]
seconded, and yes I guess all that is back on the agenda.
bluGill 12 hours ago [-]
Have fun - there is a reason everone on freedesktop.org went to wayland more than a decade ago though.
logicziller 5 hours ago [-]
I've often wondered why there are so many people who want X to just die and will dismiss any criticism against Wayland. They sure do like shifting the blame elsewhere instead of acknowledging that some users do have issues running their applications.
Just yesterday I checked again if anything's changed, but nope. Jitsi Meet flickers, gr-fospher flickers and doesn't even render the plot, Emacs Application Framework doesn't work, etc. All these work perfectly fine with X.
abenga 4 hours ago [-]
Here is an excellent opportunity for those who believe in the continued development of X to pick up maintenance and push it forward. Time will tell at the end.
WhereIsTheTruth 11 hours ago [-]
Screw redhat and microsoft, they have destroyed linux (gnome/systemd/secure(:clown:) boot/linux foundation)
x11 works on all my machines, wayland and gnome don't
DarkmSparks 11 hours ago [-]
the fork looks like it is backed by nvidia, but it will be a few months until an actual new release is ready. Best linux news all year.
While I doubt Nvidia will back this fork over the real X.org, their open source drivers should be less problematic.
Unfortunately, whether or not you can use their open source drivers depends on what year you bought your GPU, and anything not labeled RTX or GTX-16* will never get a fully functional open source Nvidia driver.
alex_duf 11 hours ago [-]
ok, why? any grand plan? what's the background and why would anyone bet on X.org when wayland has been ok for a decade now?
creatonez 16 minutes ago [-]
There is no grand plan. It's just more garbage piled on top of garbage.
DaSHacka 11 hours ago [-]
> when wayland has been ok for a decade now?
Looks like developers from Valve that were tasked on working on Wayland don't agree[0].
Am I missing something? I don't see where it's mentioned that Valve is exhuming the corpse of X.Org.
11 hours ago [-]
cosnenc 11 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
naikrovek 12 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
krautsauce 8 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
fithisux 12 hours ago [-]
Bravo !!!
Personally I would like to see the transport layer moving to ZeroMQ+msgpack.
ZeroMQ has support for Unix Domain sockets even on Windows.
EDIT!!! (I was downvoted but not corrected for my possible fallacy, Modern Times)
ahartmetz 12 hours ago [-]
Why though? From what I've seen, the X protocol serialization is very simple, so it wouldn't solve any actually existing problem.
nikanj 11 hours ago [-]
Why? Well, the existing protocol is 40+ years old, widely used and seriously battle hardened. The new one would be brand new and therefore infinitely better according to basic open source logic
Mir is the definition of NIH syndrome, i.e. an example of what not to do.
ahartmetz 11 hours ago [-]
Mir had an important thing going for it: Much faster progress towards replacing X11 on the desktop with all its features. It took several years after the failure of Mir for Wayland to become really practical.
That said, I'm not sure if Mir would have been a good thing in the long term, mostly because of Canonical's control over it.
fithisux 11 hours ago [-]
I agree.
ptx 11 hours ago [-]
> ZeroMQ has support for Unix Domain sockets even on Windows.
The support for Unix-domain sockets is there, in X and in the OS, regardless of whether you add ZeroMQ in the middle. Adding ZeroMQ wouldn't solve any problem in this regard.
msgodel 11 hours ago [-]
Please no. I've worked on code that used ZeroMQ when it it should have used a more carefully thought out protocol. That's extremely overrated.
Beyond the above mentioned tacit admissions, didn't nearly every major active dev on the xorg team state explicitly via various emails, blog posts, and conference talks that they saw no reasonable way forward as a matter of tech when it came to the now 21 year old xorg source, now 34 year old XFree86 source, and 41+ year old protocol model that is X11?
All that said, I wish the best of luck to the X11Libre team on their endeavors.
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/issues/1760#no...
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/issues/1797
I'll pass.
[0] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/merge_requests...
[1] https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver/commits/xlibre/prepare/
My general impression (quite possibly incorrect) was that X.Org Server is largely treated as “done”, making only bugfixes and such these days.
> That fork was necessary since toxic elements within Xorg projects, moles from certian big corp are boycotting any substantial work on Xorg, in order to destroy the project, to elimitate competition of their own products. (classic "embrace, extend, extinguish" tactics)
> This is an independent project, not at all affiliated with BigTech or any of their subsidiaries or tax evasion tools, nor any political activists groups, state actors, etc. It's explicitly free of any "DEI" or similar discriminatory policies. Anybody who's treating others nicely is welcomed.
And the message sent is disastrous. Personally I am part of people who have big advantages with actual DEI policy, but I am firmly against that, because I want to be employed for my skills, not because I fit a quota or anything like that.
Every policy is targeted discrimination for or against certain groups of individuals (and you can invert the group and make the same policy switch from "for" to "against".)
The question is what group of individuals.
And in context of work or anything like that, the only policy who actively discriminate is the skill, and I don’t place this in the same level of DEI because you can acquire more skill, but you cannot change your color skin or origin for example.
Lol are you talking about "discrimination" on the basis of task-relevant skills?
Until 20 years ago, nobody in OS cared who you were IRL, your gender, ethnicity etc. In many cases they didn't even know, plenty people only contributed under pseudonyms. Hard to believe for people who only joined the show after social media had become pretty much mandatory, and the "I don't care who you are IRL"-crowd got drowned out by "who you are IRL is the most important thing, not what you contribute"-crowd.
You either give the job to the best candidate, your friend, or a minority.
It has nothing to do with "nice". You can be nice, or an ass. DEI doesn't preclude you being either.
https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-full-story-of-the-fa...
HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42944203
Or this one https://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/local/crime/article28...
If anything, it's the opposite.
That's what I've always thought. The "X11 developers" pushing for Wayland weren't original developers so much as RedHat "maintainers," who (understandably) wanted a frontier to explore rather than janitorial work. All I know for certain is that X11 (even as of 15 years ago) mostly worked, while Wayland of 2025 is still full of headaches & breakages.
I thought so too. I also thought they have many problems and do not help very well. I mostly try to avoid them.
(There are problems with X window system as well (and with Xlib), but still it seems the freedesktop had made things that are designed in a worse way.)
I've had no substantial problems because of Wayland in the last, like, 5 years.
---
X has "just worked" for me since at least ubuntu 8.04 (that's 2008, april, over 17 years ago, for those counting), probably earlier.
I don't recall having any particular issues with X on the fedora machines I ran before I switched to ubuntu 8.04, but I don't recall clearly enough to be able to confidently say that I didn't have any X issues.
OTOH, I also don't specifically recall having X issues since some time around Red Hat 6 or so, which would be around 1998 or 1999, so it might be more like 25-26 years since X didn't "just work" for me.
---
About a year ago, I heard that wayland might be approaching a usable state. So I decided to give it a try on a raspberry pi that I was setting up.
It took literally about 15 minutes before I ran into a problem where I wasn't able to do something I've been doing for decades on X. And I want to stress that I was hoping it would work - I was not out to find a reason not to use wayland, I just happened to run into one inside of about 15 minutes.
I spent a couple of hours trying to figure out how to do what I wanted to do on wayland. I put a nontrivial amount of effort into trying to solve the issue on wayland. During the course of this, I found several different/conflicting pieces of advice, none of which worked for me. I think IIRC I found one option which sounded promising but which meant recompiling the compositor, or something very-nontrivial like that.
I balked at that and switched the system over to X.
And the problem instantly went away, and everything started working again. And that machine currently has an uptime of well over a hundred days.
I would love for wayland to be a thing that actually works to the point that it's a viable replacement for X, but I grow more and more skeptical every year that this doesn't happen. I Expected it like a decade ago.
The reason we hate Wayland so much is that X is being killed off now, with things only ever maybe working again in the future. Wayland would be way better if the people behind it added support for all of the missing features and use cases first, and only then killed off X.
2019-01-04 (only took 3 1/2 years to resolve!) https://github.com/flathub/us.zoom.Zoom/issues/22
2020-03-07 https://github.com/vkohaupt/vokoscreenNG/issues/51
2020-03-07 https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/issues/2471
2020-03-24 https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/issues/6389
2023-09 https://www.jwz.org/blog/2023/09/wayland-and-screen-savers/
2023-11-17 https://github.com/raspberrypi/bookworm-feedback/issues/149
* design and implement a dbus protocol that does screen sharing the way you want it done
* get buy-in from all the major compositors and applications to implement your protocol themselves
I mean, should be a doddle for any serious project.
jwz is calling other people manchilds, but as someone who also had such a script on their website and also had HN blocked this way... he is the manchild who needs to grow up.
Exactly! If you scroll to the bottom of each one, you will see that most are either a) still open, or b) abandoned (too hard or impossible), then closed as stale.
> image of a testicle when hotlinked from HN
Rightly so.
One open issue has had locked comments for 5 years. It's probably fixed but nobody has bothered to close it.
Most of rest were not actually "wayland" issues, either. Yes, someone's hobby project screen recorder might not get updated to work with wayland, but there's dozens of those, feels a bit unfair to ignore that there's alternatives.
You can if you stop buying nvidia. The problem with missing drivers is principally the fault of the hardware vendor not of the kernel community.
Ah, one of those projects. Hard pass.
Whatever DEI was meant for, due to its unagreeable practices its unrecoverably burned into the ground.
I also think is good that they had deliberately being trying to avoid other problems, so that they will not be affiliated with the BigTech and the related stuff.
Hopefully they will actually be able to improve it.
https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver/tree/xlibre/master
The README contains a minor political rant that primarily complains about corporate influence but also takes a shot at DEI. The CoC page was intentionally left up with just the content "404". Reading between the lines, it sounds like toxicity all around.
And Enrico's code was apparently so shitty and disruptive he's earned himself a ban from Freedesktop.org. Or is that because he associated himself with Lunduke?
I'd be a little concerned that this is just one person doing the work, but we'll see if others join in.
I think this comment from an Xorg maintainer sums things up (from this issue: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/issues/1797 ):
> Changing calls pScreen->DestroyPixmap to dixDestroyPixmap doesn't meaningfully improve the code or make it easier to reason about. Moving byte-swapping of requests and events from one function to another doesn't make the code more robust. Cosmetic changes to the way length fields are written doesn't help with byte vs. word unit confusion, or keep you from writing the wrong amount of data. You're just moving the complexity from point A to point G, not reducing it.
> It is possible to reduce the complexity of the code, by delving deep into the interactions between DIX/MI/FB/DDX to flatten the code flow, making some deep structural changes. Or by using structured (de)marshalling through XCB. Doing this would be incredibly risky, but at least have a much higher payoff than just cosmetic shuffling because it is 'cleaner'.
> The immense value X11 has - that it always had and will have for decades to come - is its backwards compatibility, still being able to run 40-year old apps. You correctly called the codebase 'fragile' - you've been finding this out as your changes repeatedly break things. If you're breaking apps, then what exactly is the value in a codebase which is 'cleaner' to your subjective standard but doesn't actually work?
I think trying to improve the quality of such old code bases is good and "don't touch it in case something breaks" has caused more problems than it solved, but in this case the lack of testing caused X to die when someone runs xrandr. Not exactly a vague use case. Large restructuring work and taking care of tech debt is good, but it should go along with diligent testing.
Until all the work is done, I don't think this will be a very stable alternative to X.org. I also don't think many people will follow this guy to the new project because the comments on the MR seems very "this guy versus everyone else".
Even if the fork stabilizes, that's just where the journey begins. The X.org system interacts with tons of other systems (the kernel and GPU drivers, among others), so that work need to be kept up with. At the same time, developing all of the new features the dev wants to add will be pretty useless unless applications start making use of them, and they're not going to if the project remains small.
If the anti-Wayland people unite behind this project and maintain their own X fork, there may be promise in this fork. But looking at the history, this is more likely to become another X12/Y11, or maybe a Mir if he can get a distro to back him.
I can't find a "why" in the handful of PRs I opened.
>> I'm a aware that some people from Xorg development team think that @metux changes are not useful enough for various reasons
> Apologies for being blunt, but I'm afraid it's more like "everyone except you" by now. He's managed to fall out with pretty much every other active project member.
>> Xorg is dead anyway
> That's not a reason for me though. I actually feel bad for Xorg users, Enrico's churn is causing pain for them for no clear benefit.
There are evidently both technical and social issues at play.
Later in that thread, Encrico/metux offers a defence, an explanation with detail that this is part of a mission to “make X11 great again”. Don’t read too much into the comparison (please don’t!), but one similarity with the American politician who has been using a similar phrase for the last dedcade is that they don’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. In both cases, some think the broken eggs are acceptable collateral damage toward a worthy goal, and others don’t. In this case, other X11 maintainers aren’t interested in making X11 great again, but would prefer to let it rest obsolete and minimally maintained; and so, taking the best interpretations I can imagine, it’s necessary for this Enrico to fork the project and go it alone. But he’s going to be swimming upstream against a raging torrent. And he seems to be making various mistakes in some changes that weren’t supposed to change behaviour, due to inadequate testing (he offers explanations that at least some consider reasonable; so the errors may not indicate a broader pattern).
e.g.
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/merge_requests...
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/issues/1797
Also I hope NetBSD, FreeBSD and DrogonFlyBSD jumps on, this way the BSDs do not have to jump through loops for Wayland and they are not being forced to follow Linux.
And network transparency rules :)
Just yesterday I checked again if anything's changed, but nope. Jitsi Meet flickers, gr-fospher flickers and doesn't even render the plot, Emacs Application Framework doesn't work, etc. All these work perfectly fine with X.
x11 works on all my machines, wayland and gnome don't
Unfortunately, whether or not you can use their open source drivers depends on what year you bought your GPU, and anything not labeled RTX or GTX-16* will never get a fully functional open source Nvidia driver.
Looks like developers from Valve that were tasked on working on Wayland don't agree[0].
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41640420
Personally I would like to see the transport layer moving to ZeroMQ+msgpack.
ZeroMQ has support for Unix Domain sockets even on Windows.
EDIT!!! (I was downvoted but not corrected for my possible fallacy, Modern Times)
That said, I'm not sure if Mir would have been a good thing in the long term, mostly because of Canonical's control over it.
The support for Unix-domain sockets is there, in X and in the OS, regardless of whether you add ZeroMQ in the middle. Adding ZeroMQ wouldn't solve any problem in this regard.