XWayland 21.1 Release Candidate Offers Split From The X.Org Server

[uid313]

Well, it doesn't appear that there's ever going to be a "drop in" Wayland replacement for X. Wayland was first released 9 years ago, and XWayland 7 years ago. And yet even the developers still have great difficulty with it.

I understand that the underlying issues are varied and complex, and know the Wayland/XWayland developers are working as hard as they can on remedying them, but X is so different and ingrained in desktops that I don't see a realistic alternative for at least another 5 years.

And it will have to work equally well across all desktops, as I also don't see Gnome or KDE or XFCE enthusiasts dropping their favorite systems simply so they can run Wayland.

Well, it's happening. Ubuntu is reportedly in plans to default to Wayland for 21.04 release.

[tildearrow]

Please give me a compositor-agnostic way of reading the cursor position and image...

[Girolamo_Cavazzoni]

Well, it doesn't appear that there's ever going to be a "drop in" Wayland replacement for X. Wayland was first released 9 years ago, and XWayland 7 years ago. And yet even the developers still have great difficulty with it.

I understand that the underlying issues are varied and complex, and know the Wayland/XWayland developers are working as hard as they can on remedying them, but X is so different and ingrained in desktops that I don't see a realistic alternative for at least another 5 years.

And it will have to work equally well across all desktops, as I also don't see Gnome or KDE or XFCE enthusiasts dropping their favorite systems simply so they can run Wayland.

This may be true for original X11 window managers and/or compositors. From ground-up built Wayland compositors don‘t share most of these difficulties, just take a look at sway or rather wlroots which many projects successfully make use of.

Wayland applications are plenty and perfectly usable today.

[duby229]

This may be true for original X11 window managers and/or compositors. From ground-up built Wayland compositors don‘t share most of these difficulties, just take a look at sway or rather wlroots which many projects successfully make use of.

Wayland applications are plenty and perfectly usable today.

Except for the only 2 DE's that matter of course.... Geez... Talk about wishful thinking^^

EDIT: Almost -all- Linux applications are running on xwayland when in a Wayland session. There are only a handful of exceptions and most of those handful are buggy as hell. Hence the -entire- reason why 94% of all linux users are still on xorg...

EDIT: And this long after Gnome defaulted to Wayland, which necessarily means most people are -choosing- X sessions.

[Shiba]

I'm starting to wonder when DEs will just drop XOrg.

When Wayland desktops become usable.

[CommunityMember]

... so that full xorg x11 will get bitrot. Not instantly, but steadily.

The full xorg has been encountering bit rot for quite some time. Many/most packagers/distros have cherry-picked specific patches to resolve point issues for quite some time. A dedicated XWayland is just an acceptance of that reality with a path forward for that component.

[mppix]

Well, it doesn't appear that there's ever going to be a "drop in" Wayland replacement for X. Wayland was first released 9 years ago, and XWayland 7 years ago. And yet even the developers still have great difficulty with it.

Wayland is stable but not a drop-in replacement for X. I believe you are referring to some of the ancillary tools needed, e.g. for screen-sharing, etc. This work is well underway, see e.g. xdg-desktop-portal, pipewire, waypipe, etc.

I understand that the underlying issues are varied and complex, and know the Wayland/XWayland developers are working as hard as they can on remedying them, but X is so different and ingrained in desktops that I don't see a realistic alternative for at least another 5 years.

Debian, Fedora (and next iteration of Ubuntu) are defaulting to Gnome Wayland. It is perfectly usable in general. What issues are you referring to?

And it will have to work equally well across all desktops, as I also don't see Gnome or KDE or XFCE enthusiasts dropping their favorite systems simply so they can run Wayland.

I'm not sure if I agree on this one. There is no central intelligence in Linux nor will we ever agree across the board. Linux is more like a genetic algorithm/selection: we try a lot of things; the good stuff is maintained; mediocre things replaced after a bit; and bad things are mostly rejected.
That being said, Gnome/Wayland is in good shape; KDE/Wayland is getting better; and I doubt XFCE has the resources to get it done (they may just fork Gnome 3 as WFCE).

[mppix]

When Wayland desktops become usable.

That would be Gnome 3.36 but XOrg is still there :P

[mppix]

This is very likely. All the many non-standard Wayland compositors will recede, realizing the architecture is too time consuming to maintain. Instead they will just focus on XWayland. Then XWayland will basically become just another XServer and everyone can get back to work.

I'm not sure what a XWayland-based XServer is other than a Wayland compositor?
You could of course force every application to use XWayland and get window privacy by running an independent XWayland session for each application. You'd still need the copy-and-paste tools, screen-sharing, etc. introduced by Wayland compositors. Also it would be quite inefficient compared to just run the GUI framework, e.g. GTK4, natively on Wayland...

[kpedersen]

I'm not sure what a XWayland-based XServer is other than a Wayland compositor?

It very likely is going to be implemented as a compositor (due to the Wayland architecture, you have to implement an entire compositor to do anything). But either way, it will ultimately be an Xserver. Basically just a more stripped down re-implementation of Xorg. I personally am fine with that.

Sure, they might screw it up, but it probably still wont be any more annoying than Xsun to deal with.