X.Org Server 21.1 Will Aim To Release In The Coming Weeks

[mppix]

Well remoting is an obvious one and the problems were already explained in the thread (i.e. its completely non standard and every DE implementing Wayland does it differently). I am still stuck using X11 because of this reason.

Agree - remote desktop should receive much more attention in general.
But it is not like X11 offers any reasonable solution here either. Anything that really works reasonably well is a bunch of nonstandard software pieces held together by tape, e.g. x2go.

There are other historical ones, i.e. copy/paste is one (and this is considered basic functionality).

Not sure what you mean by this.

Even for typical usage (i.e. on my laptop) last time I used Wayland a couple of months ago on my distro KDE, quite a few things were broken. I retry every couple of months to see if its more stable.

I'm use Gnome so I cannot comment on KDE's state of affairs. However, please don't blame Wayland for KDE somewhat missing the train.

Sure but this is nitpicking because in reality what the maintainers label X.org as is irrelevant. If people are still using it because they are forced to, then someone will be forced to maintain it even if its not official hence why the new X.Org server is being released now.

Maintainance mode: software will be maintained but no/limited feature work will be performed.
Deprechiated aka 'dead': no maintainance will be performed anymore

[Myownfriend]

Oh, poor Wayland fans continue to perpetuate the falsehood. Show me a single person who's been hacked using Xorg "insecurity" "features", I dare you.

What's false about it? How is it not a security issue to allow any application to snoop on another applications frame buffer and input? You're not even making a case that it's not a security risk, you're just saying that you don't care lol

"Nah dude, it's a feature that allow you to write keyloggers and do frame capture with very little code."

For one, I believe Wayland is a complete failure, a concept which should be buried. The fact that under Wayland each DE must reimplement a display manager is simply outrageous.

Truly, truly outrageous. /s

Wayland will continue to be a fringe graphical environment.

Fringe mainly to Nvidia users...

...unless Wayland developers roll out a universal display manager (akin to Xorg-server) on top of which you can code and build lightweight window managers in less than 1K lines of code without reimplementing a ton of basic features like drag-n-drop, window stacking and moving, global shortcuts, clipboard management, systray, desktop recording and remote desktop features, and even graphical environment configuration file, etc. etc. etc.

Does any of that ultimately lead to any interoperability issues? Do applications themselves need to individually support how different DEs do drag-n-drop or clipboard stuff? If not, then what's the issue?

Also in the case of desktop recording, you would still need to write that code even if there was a common display manager. To actually turn any buffer into a image or video file then you'd need to write something that grabs those buffers and encodes them which I would consider do be out of the scope of a display manager. In the case of video capture, that code might also want to implement support for audio capture which is complete outside of anything that a display server should be doing.

In terms of interfaces that X11 provides for screen or window capture easier, it was just XShm and Xcomposite. For Wayland DEs, Pipewire fills those roles but it does it by securely requesting them and it handles audio routing . That means it does the job of XSHM, Xcomposite, PulseAudio, and Jack which makes the task of implementing capture much simpler.

No one in the Wayland community bats an eye that when a Wayland DM crashes, everything crashes. Wayland DM cannot be replaced or restarted on the fly.

And you're saying that's inherent to the Wayland protocol? This person seems to disagree.

Like people above have mentioned you don't replace something with something utterly broken, incomplete and ... crashy.

Strange. I'm not getting crashes on Wayland. Maybe that's a you-thing?

[mdedetrich]

I'm use Gnome so I cannot comment on KDE's state of affairs. However, please don't blame Wayland for KDE somewhat missing the train.

Actually I can blame Wayland because the whole design of Wayland (i.e. it being only a protocol) basically forces all desktop environments to re-implement everything from scratch, where as with X.Org this was abstracted away (which makes sense because as birdie stated there is a huge amount of boilerplate/duplication here).

Wlroots looked like a promising solution to this problem if it wasn't for the fact that it was created by someone who prevent the software from running if you have an NVidia card in your system (even if you didn't use it for compositing and only for CUDA, i.e. you have a laptop with Intel + NVidia and you used Intel for rendering your DE) which didn't actually create promising signals for adoption by DE's that care about their users.

Maintainance mode: software will be maintained but no/limited feature work will be performed.
Deprechiated aka 'dead': no maintainance will be performed anymore

Yes and as you can see its being maintained, just by someone else and the features what was released isn't limited at all. Again they can call it whatever they wan't, but its not reflecting reality.

Sometimes I wonder if Ubuntu regrets their strategy.

Ensuring that their distro is successful and can be used by a lot of users and not breaking stuff because you feel like it sounds like an odd thing to regret

They created a distro that can be used by idiots - now they also have to deal with them.

Just because someone is not technically savvy doesn't mean they are an idiot. Calling such people idiots says more about your personality than anything else. I mean even Linus Torvalds has echoed that distro should stop breaking software for users all of the time and I doubt he is an "idiot" (it actually got so bad from his end that subsurface, a GUI application that he helped developed didn't even bother making releases/packages for Linux because it was being run by people with the same attitude you have)

So yeah, the only thing thats idiotic here is eagerly breaking functionality rather than doing things properly.

[MrCooper]

XWayland and X.org X11 server can now split and become incompatible with each other.

Not going to happen, if I have any say in it. All DDXen still use the same DIX code, and all changes land on the Git master branch first.

Actually I can blame Wayland because the whole design of Wayland (i.e. it being only a protocol) basically forces all desktop environments to re-implement everything from scratch, where as with X.Org this was abstracted away [...]

Can you give a specific example for an X11 specific abstraction for remoting? I don't think it can be the infamous X network transparency — even Xorg hasn't listened to TCP display connections by default for years. (X11 over SSH works via a proxy X server on the SSH server side, same as waypipe for Wayland over SSH)

[Snaipersky]

Agree - remote desktop should receive much more attention in general.
But it is not like X11 offers any reasonable solution here either. Anything that really works reasonably well is a bunch of nonstandard software pieces held together by tape, e.g. x2go.


Not sure what you mean by this.


I'm use Gnome so I cannot comment on KDE's state of affairs. However, please don't blame Wayland for KDE somewhat missing the train.


Maintainance mode: software will be maintained but no/limited feature work will be performed.
Deprechiated aka 'dead': no maintainance will be performed anymore

I'd like to add, lack of emulated input, especially in a consistent way. Another synergy user, and that's somewhat of a showstopper, given it's the only competent solution I've found that's cross platform. Also for whatever reason, TeamViewer is the only remote access tool my older family members trust, and that comes back to no standard remote desktop


Also, THANK YOU to the gentleman willing to deal with the stonewall that is the xorg committee. I'll see if I can find my list of what merged with little/no rebasing and put it somewhere for him.

[ZeroPointEnergy]

Wayland doesn't work well enough? Fall back to Xorg sessions.
Flatpaks and Snaps don't work? Fall back to Appimage.

If you think it's a problem that people have a choice and can't be forced to use a certain software you are probably in the wrong community. Maybe go back to Apple or Microsoft where not giving the users an option is the norm.

[tomas]

Wlroots looked like a promising solution to this problem if it wasn't for the fact that it was created by someone who prevent the software from running if you have an NVidia card in your system

I can't see how refusing to support EGLStreams that only Nvidia supports can be considered "preventing"? Blame Nvidia for using a "standard" that only they use and nobody else. Anyway, this will soon be a non-issue since Nvidia will soon use GBM and DMA-BUF for their driver. Then it will finally work with wlroots.

I say wlroots does look promising. It is used by sway, phosh and the upcoming Steam Deck by Valve through the means of Gamescope.
I'm also quite certain that at least some of the X window managers and desktops that have yet to migrate to Wayland will use wlroots as well. Because they will have to migrate to wayland one way or the other, the question is just how and when.

[doomie]

Figured this topic would blow up. TY xorg donator for your work. I still don't think I can use my drawing tablet under wayland. Also, last I tried, nothing I could do under Sway or Plasma-wayland would keep my proton games from being a stuttery mess. FPS might even have been decent or a little lower, but actual display times were all over the place and made it practically look like 20fps. Someone said direct scanout, but I've yet to see that function at all. I guess for now I will hold wayland development back :3

[birdie]

Ah, one last critical issue I've just remembered: Xorg and Windows can run an actual rock which supports VESA 2.0.

Wayland by comparison requires full-featured support from the kernel which means whenever you try your shiny Wayland distro on a new PC while not using the freshest newest kernel, you're completely screwed. You basically cannot use it. I wonder what inane arguments Wayland fans will come up with to address the elephant in the room.

And lastly the fact that we're still having this heated discussion speaks volumes about Linux readiness for the desktop or a complete lack of it. Such a basic core feature of any desktop OS is sorely ... not missing of course but utterly incomplete (yeah, Xorg has a fair share of critical issues as well).

Linux was devised in 1991, 30 years ago. Looks like 30 years haven't been enough to have a functional complete bug-free graphical subsystem.

[Myownfriend]

Actually I can blame Wayland because the whole design of Wayland (i.e. it being only a protocol) basically forces all desktop environments to re-implement everything from scratch, where as with X.Org this was abstracted away (which makes sense because as birdie stated there is a huge amount of boilerplate/duplication here).

Wlroots looked like a promising solution to this problem if it wasn't for the fact that it was created by someone who prevent the software from running if you have an NVidia card in your system (even if you didn't use it for compositing and only for CUDA, i.e. you have a laptop with Intel + NVidia and you used Intel for rendering your DE) which didn't actually create promising signals for adoption by DE's that care about their users.

So if you saw Wlroots as a solution to the issue you have with Wayland than is Wayland being only a protocol actually an issue? In order for software (DE or otherwise) to atop X11, it has to explicitly support X.org which is one specific display server . The same is true for Wayland but the applications don't have to explicitly support any specific Wayland compositors. Isn't it preferable to not have that kind of dependency? I feel like the fact that a Wayland application can still work atop a bunch of different Wayland compositors without even being aware of it is pretty nice and is preferable.

Like sure, if you're making a DE and you decide to make a new Wayland compositor from scratch instead of forking or borrowing code from an existing one then you need to do a lot of repeat work but that's decision you made for your project, it's not anything that Wayland forces on you. All that Wayland and the applications asks is that you comply with the Wayland protocol.

As it relates to Wlroots, it sounds like your issue with it has more to do with the Wlroots devs for not supporting EGLStreams and/or Nvidia for not supporting GBM and not with the design of Wayland.