Red Hat Developing New xwayland-run & wlheadless-run Utilities

[orzel]

Honestly I can't fathom why some Linux users still insist on buying Nvidia.

Because the hardware is far better, unfortunately.

I've had a hard time buying a non-nvidia card. It's getting better with amd, but still.

And I don't only speak about 1000$/gamers/high perf stuff. For ex, if you want a basic+fanless card for servers or similar, the only ones you can find are 10 years old nvidia. That's about it. Or if you want a basic-desktop-cheap card with nothing fancy 3d wise, but still modern enough for several 4k displays.... -> nvidia only.

[higgslagrangian]

Given that in 2025 X.org is getting dropped for good by pretty much all Linux distros (sans maybe Devuan), it's not funny at all.

Yesterday you were saying that whoever forked Fedora to accommodate Xorg was going to be making the most popular linux distro, and now you are saying Xorg will be dropped by everyone?

I guess you are finally seeing the writing in the wall...

I sincerely hope you can find a suitable replacement for your liking/workflow!

[higgslagrangian]

xorg or xwayland will be there for many years because old apps or new apps who dont support wayland, i expect at least more ten years of this and then that apps and games will need virtualization or emulation to run

Remember when you expected Mir and Unity8 to take over the world? Yeah, I remember that.

[jacob]

Given that in 2025 X.org is getting dropped for good by pretty much all Linux distros (sans maybe Devuan), it's not funny at all.

IMHO Devuan will have no choice but to drop it as well. The bottom line is that by 2025 Xorg is going EOL. Distros that still want to use it as their primary display system past that point would need to maintain it themselves and Devuan is already struggling to maintain packages sans systemd, let alone something like Xorg.

[fitzie]

People who spend their time and money working on wayland and those who used to maintain xorg are one and the same. What some people still apparently don't understand is that wayland was not meant to replace x11 feature for feature, use case for use case, and make sure that xdotool and your very own me-too toy window manager will still run. They never promised that and they never strived for that. It's not their job or goal to port the existing ecosystem over, it's the responsibility of those who still want to keep using the x11-based tools to migrate. It's not like they didn't have some 15-odd years to prepare.

this is a strawman. no one is expecting the wayland protocol to specify a full a suitable replacement for x11, but we did expect that the linux desktop community would collectively have a plan and a roadmap for having a full a suitable implementation of a linux desktop given that wayland blew up all the existing standard.

this is very basic premise of the wayland is a mess argument. for example gnome went out of their way to make the shell a monolith process, rather that define a protocol that users could tap into or other compositors could implement. it is crazy that the dash in gnome-shell crashing causes the compositor to fail, but it does. in order to make "gnome consistent" they've made gnome unstable, and the linux desktop less consistent. really impressive stuff.

there's been plenty of people inside linux desktop community that are trying to fix things, but it's really long past due for these projects (wayland, wlroots, smithay, gnome-shell, kde, gtk, gnome, xdg-portals) to align their roadmap and flesh out this desktop standard, not that every desktop is a clone of each other, but that maximize compatibility for app authors, promotes code reuse, maintains user freedom, and makes it possible not just to get rid of xorg, but also x11. for example it's really long past time for gnome to give up this CSD battle, and realize that the linux desktop will not be successful if there can be no compromise.

for example, I'd love for xscreensaver, a total useless (but fun and good) bit of software to be able to exist on wayland.

look at this:

https://www.jwz.org/blog/2023/09/wayland-and-screen-savers/

why is it that we've just accepted wayland cannot get it's act together to support a basic capability cross compositor? Why do we accept that there needs to be a cabal of say-no-to-everything-until-people-stop-asking in charge of this entire effort?


I hope this better explains the argument, I'm not expecting you to agree, but as a wayland and xorg user, I want wayland to improve.

[fitzie]

That sounds terrible. You are implying Xorg users want other people to spend their own money on something they aren't even using. I don't think that is true.

most xorg users would be happy to switch if the replacement was an upgrade. we did the same thing every other bit of technology upgrade in the past, from mosaic to firefox, from sendmail to postfix, a.out to elf, sysvinit to systemd, from alsa to pulseaudio to pipewire . on and on and on.

for some reason on this one technological jump, there's just this dogma that the wayland crowd that xorg users are some ignorant rubes, and that all the criticism is misplaced, that because your criticism isn't about a specific wayland protocol level aspect then issue is somehow invalid. it's really kinda funny.

[spicfoo]

most xorg users would be happy to switch if the replacement was an upgrade. we did the same thing every other bit of technology upgrade in the past

Funny that you pretend you know what most Xorg users want or how they handled other transitions. You are only speaking for yourself and nobody else.

for some reason on this one technological jump, there's just this dogma that the wayland crowd that xorg users are some ignorant rubes.

Some users are indeed ignorant and that's ok but they also confidently claim they know more about the tech than free and open source developers who have spend decades working on it and if you do that, I don't believe you.

[jacob]

this is very basic premise of the wayland is a mess argument. for example gnome went out of their way to make the shell a monolith process, rather that define a protocol that users could tap into or other compositors could implement. it is crazy that the dash in gnome-shell crashing causes the compositor to fail, but it does. in order to make "gnome consistent" they've made gnome unstable, and the linux desktop less consistent. really impressive stuff.

That's a gnome problem, not a wayland problem. Any bug in a gnome extension can kill the whole gnome shell. It does it on X11 too. Wayland prevents something like a dock to be a totally separate application with no connection whatsoever to the compositor, like it can be on X11 (there are pros and cons to that), but there is absolutely nothing in wayland that forces compositor extensions to run in the same process and with the same memory space. It's a gnome design flaw (arguably a big one).

there's been plenty of people inside linux desktop community that are trying to fix things, but it's really long past due for these projects (wayland, wlroots, smithay, gnome-shell, kde, gtk, gnome, xdg-portals) to align their roadmap and flesh out this desktop standard, not that every desktop is a clone of each other, but that maximize compatibility for app authors, promotes code reuse, maintains user freedom, and makes it possible not just to get rid of xorg, but also x11. for example it's really long past time for gnome to give up this CSD battle, and realize that the linux desktop will not be successful if there can be no compromise.

Wayland in no way infringes on user freedom. For the rest, it's a matter of opinion. For example, the gnome's Mutter was the first production-grade compositor and all the other projects could have just used it. Nothing forced everyone to implement their own compositor like previously the various desktops were not each writing their own X11 server. I find this argument especially strange given that so many people always claim (partly wrongly) that Linux is "all about choice". They insist that everyone must reinvent the flat tire with their own window manager, dock and file manager, but they expect the compositor to be standardised (but the init system must not be, but the libc must be - except if it's musl, etc.....)

[bearoso]

People who spend their time and money working on wayland and those who used to maintain xorg are one and the same.

Not true at all. The Wayland spec might have come from them, but there is no one Wayland software project. The people implementing Wayland compositors are mostly those who used to do desktop environments, and it was clear from the start that many of them had never been display or graphics programmers before. There are some smart graphics people involved and pushing things forward technically, but the duplicated work is making advancement really slow. We really need a solid, unified, technical backend library so we don't see the same mistakes and subsequent fixes repeated over and over.

[jacob]

Not true at all. The Wayland spec might have come from them, but there is no one Wayland software project. The people implementing Wayland compositors are mostly those who used to do desktop environments, and it was clear from the start that many of them had never been display or graphics programmers before. There are some smart graphics people involved and pushing things forward technically, but the duplicated work is making advancement really slow. We really need a solid, unified, technical backend library so we don't see the same mistakes and subsequent fixes repeated over and over.

There is more to Wayland than a protocol spec. The whole architecture was designed by Xorg developers, using on principles and design decisions based on the lessons they learned from Xorg. Sure, it's not everything to everyone, but for one I appreciate it exactly for that. I think it's more than time for Linux to be opinionated and move beyond the bazaar and "swedish buffet" mentality that is currently holding it back.

The solid, unified Wayland backed has existed for about a decade now, as I mentioned in a previous post: Mutter. Now there is also MIR. Absolutely nothing forces Xfce and other alternative desktops to implement their own compositors instead of using the existing ones, it's their choice alone. It's really no different from them deciding (hypothetically) to implement their own X11 server rather than using the one shipped by Xorg.