X Window System Turns 38 Years Old

[MorrisS.]

Wayland is more like electric cars and X is gas cars. Wayland has a few models but it still doesn't offer things like trucks & motorcycles as well as it is so new that your town (distro) might not even have charging stations. While we'd be better off with electric cars, there aren't enough charging stations, green power plants, or varieties of models available to make it viable for everyone. Plus, affordable electric cars are more of a pipe dream than Wayland with HDR and VRR, the Year of the Linux Desktop, or GNOME adopting server side decorations.

Tell that to the whales...or any animal Edison came across...

Email is clunky. I read the kernel mailing list articles.

So the problem is not Wayland but the not ready environment, drivers and software in general. The major problem is that many developers are not ready at all.

[MorrisS.]

Is there a pure wayland operating system? a system without xwayland.

[TemplarGR]

Typical linux forum.... Where every half-ignorant user can bash software he doesn't use just because he doesn't use it.

[birdie]

Thing is I'm not even using KDE nor anything in NVIDIA's limitation list. KDE's Wayland implementation in some aspects are still behind GNOME's, although their progress has been very good in recent years. The issues I was facing wasn't the desktop environment, but application specific. For example, Firefox's WebRender can break when running with native Wayland backend on the NVIDIA GPU drivers, the exact same settings works perfectly fine with the amdgpu driver. Based on my experience, Wayland works much better on AMD hardware than NVIDIA's.

While NVIDIA is not solely responsible for the state of Wayland, their current drivers doesn't help the situation and as a major GPU manufacturer, they do hold back Wayland adoption. People won't want to daily drive using Wayland as their backend if their GPUs can't render properly on Wayland and would rather fall back to X11 until it's fixed by the application/DE developer and/or NVIDIA.

I don't want to daily drive Wayland because it completely breaks my workflow (even with God bestowed open source Intel GPU drivers) while I get exactly zero benefits from using it - this is on my laptop. On my desktop under Xorg and NVIDIA everything is extremely fast, buttery smooth, I have no tearing, I have nothing to report. Why would I switch from something which works perfectly to something which breaks my workflow in many ways? Not to mention that my DE of choice is XFCE which doesn't support Wayland in any capacity, nor anyone is working on it because ... bug 233. Again, NVIDIA has almost nothing to do with the poor state of Wayland - they just cannot break something which is already broken.

Is there a pure wayland operating system? a system without xwayland.

You can have it right now, just don't install XWayland. What you're asking for is quite ridiculous. It's not about a distro not using XWayland, it's about a ton of legacy applications which will never be ported from X11.

Typical linux forum.... Where every half-ignorant user can bash software he doesn't use just because he doesn't use it.

Many people here who "bash" Wayland, have tried and used it and just couldn't cope with it. There's no need to insult them. Explain to me how I can run XFCE with Wayland please. I cannot? I need to switch to Gnome/KDE? Well bugger off. I hate both. Gnome 2 was OK, KDE 3.5.10 was incredible, KDE 4 was usable, KDE 5 - no, thank you.

Also read a "bright" comment just on top of yours which indicates the level of "understanding" of the graphics stack and APIs by a Wayland fan. "I don't want XWayland!!!"

[zexelon]

Typical linux forum.... Where every half-ignorant user can bash software he doesn't use just because he doesn't use it.

This statement is flawed... at least in this particular thread. I would say based on some empirical evidence that the vast majority of users here have given wayland a solid try at least and ended up in one of two camps, lovers or haters. Wayland will be considered stable when the third camp of "oh i didnt know this was running wayland for the last 5 yrs" shows up.

[sinepgib]

Many people here who "bash" Wayland, have tried and used it and just couldn't cope with it. There's no need to insult them. Explain to me how I can run XFCE with Wayland please. I cannot? I need to switch to Gnome/KDE? Well bugger off. I hate both. Gnome 2 was OK, KDE 3.5.10 was incredible, KDE 4 was usable, KDE 5 - no, thank you.

Not trying to change your mind since just sticking to X11 is perfectly reasonable, but AFAIK it's only XFWM that doesn't work on Wayland, and IIRC the recommended approach is then to just use Mutter (not all the other ugly stuff from GNOME, just the bare compositor). Or possibly that one that wants to be the OpenBox of Wayland, based on wlroots. Just pointing out there are options to have something real close to XFCE working in Wayland if that's your cup of tea.

EDIT: nevermind, I just read the links mentioning several key components don't work, sorry.

I'd argue that localized impacts are better than global impacts.

Yep, that's why I mentioned it.

Even then, mass mining requires a lot of fossil fuels which are global impactors. Localized impacts can be mitigated and worked around...strip mines can be refilled, forests can be deforested and replanted in ways that allow wildlife time to migrate, etc; BUT, most all of that requires a lot of fossil fuels due to the heavy, industrialized machinery being fuel based. Electric chainsaws only go so far and are powered by fossils. It's hard to mitigate ice melting and flooding town away for a few thousand years. Dams and levees only go so far.

Right. I didn't even contemplate fossil fuels there.

I think that step one should be to switch mining and other heavy industrialization machinery to nuclear power as well as to implement conservation requirements for mining. We need (sort of) green tools to get green energy and green infrastructure and we need regulations to ensure the process of getting green energy/infrastructure is as green as we can make it.

Indeed. The regulations (and enforcing thereof) may be one of the harder parts.

I wonder how well we could embed wireless charging systems into the road for vehicles? Cut out the need for so many batteries; so much mining for rare earth metals. Unfortunately, that falls into hippie free electricity so that'll never happen (in our lifetimes at least).

Yeah, unless you find a robust way to account for it and charge it, it won't happen.

[Monsterovich]

Wayland is temporary, but Xorg is eternal.

[Old Grouch]

Haven't tested it, but something along those line.
Via XWayland:

xhost +local:<account_name>
XDG_SESSION_TYPE=x11 sudo --preserve-env=WAYLAND_DISPLAY,DISPLAY,XDG_SESSION_TYPE,XDG_RUNTIME_DIR -u <account_name> -H /usr/bin/firefox

Native wayland:

chmod 777 /run/user/$(id -u){,/wayland-1}
sudo --preserve-env=WAYLAND_DISPLAY,DISPLAY,XDG_SESSION_TYPE,XDG_RUNTIME_DIR -u <account_name> -H /usr/bin/firefox

Managing firefox profiles like a sane person:

firefox --ProfileManager

Thank you for the serious reply.

XWayland is fine, but not 'native' as such: but it is nice to know it is there.

The Wayland approach looks interesting, but anything that starts off with a chmod 777 disturbs my security hinky sense.

As for the throwaway comment: it is not for managing profiles, although it could be used for that with some security advantages; I just used it as an example. It is very useful to have multiple user accounts throwing output up on a common display.

[archkde]

I can safely assume that anyone needing Color Management won't be using Wayland anytime in 2023 or 2024....

I missed that it's already 2025.

[ClosedSource]

Thats wrong and there are many examples. Going on you mentioned Windows. When windows totally changed it's UI when going from Win 3.11 to Win 95 that had a huge impact on it's success. When doing away the DOS platform going to a NT driven technology, that was a huge impact and made it even more successful. It's also not true that windows kept totally compatible to each and every legacy standard, there is lots of old software you won't get running on a current gen windows platform.

Sometimes you need to change and get rid of old thinking, even if it kills some current features. There has to be sane reasons but keeping everything in a standstill is no good idea at all.

By the way: In Wayland you're able to run many legacy stuff, too, thanks to XWayland.

Actually the PC boom happened after windows 95. It wasn't even till the Pentium3 when people started expecting their applications to continue working as first class citizens.
Yes, we have xwayland but it's not a first class citizen.
So here's the deal. Wayland may be the future. It may even be something that should have existed over 20 years ago. But it didn't and we're still well behind in this area.
If you buy software AAA from company BBB today, it's company BBB's responsibility that the current version of the software continues to work throughout Windows upgrades. The Linux desktop is no where near the binary stability that can attract more vendors, resulting in less funding for DEs and substandard user experiences. What if the application flickers under Xwayland under mutter but works under Xwayland under another compositors? Even if the app is pure wayland, there is no guarantee it behaves the same under Weston/mutter/kwin/whatever.

I'm not bashing wayland and defending X11. I'm just saying it is far too late to be making changes.