Linux @lemmy.ml pnutzh4x0r @lemmy.ndlug.org 1y ago

GNOME Merge Requests Opened That Would Drop X.Org Session Support

www.phoronix.com GNOME Merge Requests Opened That Would Drop X.Org Session Support

A set of merge requests were opened that would effectively drop X.Org (X11) session support for the GNOME desktop and once that code is removed making it a Wayland-only desktop environment.

Going along with Fedora 40 looking to disable the GNOME X11 session support (and also making KDE Plasma 6 Wayland-only for Fedora), upstream GNOME is evaluating the prospect of disabling and then removing their X11 session support.

Some concerns were raised already how this could impact downstream desktops like Budgie and Pantheon that haven't yet fully transitioned over to Wayland. In any event we'll see where the discussions lead but it's sure looking like 2024 will be the year that GNOME goes Wayland-only.

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Time for Nvidia to step up their driver game... shrugs
- I think they already have. I held off on Wayland on my main machine for a long time due to Nvidia issues. For example, I was getting rendering issues where some windows/popups would be totally invisible until I moused over them. Those issues are now gone, and I've been running Wayland for the last few months with no problems at all.
  
  yeah, it got better, but still not good enough
  
  i still have issues here and there, i hope they step up.
- NVidia won't do shit until they're forced to, which is probably why it's come to this "force everyone over even if its not 100% ready" changeover
Oh hey, it's this months regularly scheduled Wayland drama!
They still haven't solved the problem of a Gnome Shell crash taking down my entire session with it. I need to be able to restart the shell independently of the Wayland compositor for me to switch.
- KDE Plasma will get this feature soon, I hope GNOME Shell will follow their approach.
  
  pretty sure the KDE work will be at least partially compatible with other desktops. one of the demos shown was specifically using the feature to swap between Wayland desktops without losing app state
- I feel like if Gnome Shell is crashing enough for this to be a problem then it crashing is the actual problem.
- ~~ubuntu already compile gnome with the fix~~(edit: i confused it with triple-buffering, that ubuntu compile gnome with, idk if ubuntu compile gnome with the fix to don't take down the entire session), but the merge request is there, and it work, idk with gnome didn't merged it still, maybe other priorities?
  
  Do you have a link to this?
- Yep. I'm not even using Wayland. Every other day its "Oops, there was a fucky wucky!" And I have to log out. I'm on Cinnamon for now.
Well let's hope that massively improves the Wayland experience then. I tried it last week and still had flickering screens, laggy windows, and crashing games. In the current state it would be unacceptable for me to switch
- depends if nvidia care about improving wayland, they don't really have any reason to care today. Maybe if people start purchasing hardware from their competition enough.
  
  I'm having a perfect time on intel at least. Though I have no video game requirements.
  
  My problem is that I'm kinda tied to CUDA and thus Nvidia. If AMD's ROCm would've been a bit better and supported on consumer GPUs I would've went for that.
  
  But having a non-NVIDIA card in order to use the latest GNOME doesn't seem reasonable to me. Then again, maybe the pressure will finally make NVIDIA get their shit together
- I had the same problems until I switched to an AMD card. Since then it's been smooth sailing in Wayland.
- I had those issues with an old nvdia driver version, bun on the recent ones it works better.
What's everyone's Wayland showstopper?

I'm holding out for better autoclickers/macro recorders before I go to Wayland
- Nvidia
- Better Wine support. It's coming soon, but I prefer xorg until Wine properly supports Wayland.
  
  is XWayland not good enough for that?
  
  I recently stopped switching to x11 for gaming. With most games, the performance is 5-10fps better on Wayland
- [This comment has been deleted by an automated system]
- Honestly, Wayland just doesn't give the impression of working well enough with everything to replace my window manager and all kinds of utilities that grew around it (or X11 in general) for a decade or two just to only notice after using it for a few weeks that it won't work with some things. It demands a huge time investment up front for questionable gain basically.
  
  As a multimonitor user with mixed properties, and an AMD user, Wayland has been nothing but a massive gain for me and continues to get better in equally massive strides on KDE (been using kwin-wayland for almost a full year as a daily driver now). It even improved the user experience on my surface pro that I'm running the surface-linux kernel on.
- Mine's mostly just bad electron app support for native Wayland. In theory Electron now offers full Wayland support but hooooo boy is it going to be a while until all of the electron garbage I use finally updates to a new enough version for proper support.
  
  The other gotcha is just general client side decorations support for apps in general. I'm shocked that no one has built a small libadwaita wrapper library that implements client side decorations for apps. It's going to be ages until app developers all implement their own (crummy) CSD that doesn't match system themes at all.
  
  You can still use XWayland though, it's not going anywhere. They are only removing the ability to run a X11-only session.
  
  There's this
- I play Heroes of the Storm through Lutris.
  I have a superultrawide 32:9 monitor.
  In X11, I can get HotS to scale past its normal limits just like I could in windows and take up a full 5120x1440 resolution.
  In Wayland, I can't.
  I will die on this hill.
  
  thy gamescope(that run on steam deck) i think it can scale, if yes, so it's an implementation issue, that need to be fixed by the compositor
- Color management
  
  This is probably the blocker for me, too. There are some other things but this one just feels amateur.
- Autotype for password managers. I don't only have passwords which I use in my browser for which the plugin is fine. But other apps require autotype. And copy & paste can't be the solution for this missing feature.
- For me personally, none. Until around 2 years ago, it was Nvidia, for Kwin usage on desktop, but before that, I was happily using Wayland sessions and WMs on my laptops for some years
- I use my laptop for work presentations and running a presentation with embedded videos doesn't work on external displays.
- SteamVR doesn't work on GNOME Wayland because it's missing DRM (the thing that's needed to use the display of the VR headset)
- I found no Remote Desktop solution to be working well together with wayland. (I’m not quite sure, if wayland was the cause of the issues I had with RDP and VNC, have to test that). The proprietary Remote Desktop all show a warning that wayland is not supported. While TeamViewer does kinda work, despite the warning, it is not a very sable connection.
  
  I've tried this out, and its promising (KDE Plasma RDP Server). https://planet.kde.org/arjen-hiemstra-2023-08-08-remote-desktop-using-the-rdp-protocol-for-plasma-wayland/
  
  ironically this is what x11 was originally built for.
  
  I don't know if this would work for whatever your remote desktop needs are specifically, but I use Sunshine and it works really well.
- i tried rhis autoclicker https://github.com/konkitoman/autoclicker and worked flawless(just needed ticker the suders file because cargo install on .local/bin), but if someone could suggest a macro recorder i appreciate!
- Virtual keyboard support
  
  idk what desktop you're using but GNOME has that built in and it works on Wayland
  
  here's a few: https://gitlab.gnome.org/World/Phosh/squeekboard
  
  https://maliit.github.io/
  
  https://github.com/proycon/svkbd
- For whatever reason it can't seem to suspend my thinkpad. Everything crashes and when I open the lid I have to log in again :/
  
  Is that a Wayland issue? Lots of modern laptops have suspend issues (broken S0ix sleep, missing S3, bios declaring wrong states, etc)
- Probably never gonna happen, given how Wayland is designed.
  
  It's never going to happen on Wayland level. It's absolutely no problem to implement this on a compositor level.
  
  Actually libEI allows for exactly this. It's very new so not widely supported yet but it'll definitely get there eventually.
- Lack of window manager and CSD just seems like a downgrade compared to X11, and I have yet to see anything that would be an upgrade that I care about.
- The name
  
  What are you, a rival DCL school alumnus? I mean, not Weston obviously, cause that’s a thing. It’s a better name for a display server than Lincoln-Sudbury or Cambridge Ridge and Latin
  
  Or are you just traumatized by the 128/Pike interchange traffic?
honestly feels like Wayland won't get many of the fixes it needs until everyone is forced onto it and sends in bug reports. That's gonna suck for lots of people including me but maybe it's now or never
- I'm kinda on the fence about it. On the one hand that is how it is supposed to work. That the new thing gets better, faster when everyone uses it. However, I liked to watch this dude named Brodie Robertson on youtube and a lot of the major features took years to land in wayland.
  
  Not because it was hard, no one wanted to do it, or any of the normal reasons you traditionally see in foss. The reason why it took so long usually seems to be the result of having to argue that it should be done. It is honestly mind boggling that things like disabling vsync, global shortcuts, and many other features that many of us take for granted were all initially dismissed as essentially "not even deserving to exist".
  
  Wayland takes a conservative approach to feature requests. Disabling screen tearing goes against their zero screen tearing goal. Other features, such as X11's remote capabilities, are unnecessary baggage and a security risk. Yes, people who use the remote capabilities kicked and screamed, but they now have Waypipe. Turns out building that into Wayland itself was unnecessary after all, a 3rd-party app made it happen. Their primary goal is to not end up like the mess that is X11.
  
  These are arguments that should happen, they ensure that things in the protocol are done the right way, else there will be a massive duplication of effort as the protocol changes to something better.
  
  Yeah the political side of FOSS is the most frustrating part for everyone involved. I will say however that at least if Brodie's videos are to be believed, Wayland is now actually being pushed to make decisions instead of fence-sitting for years (which is easy when your project isn't hitting crunch time yet)
  
  Dude, reading up on the explanation for including a fucking Trash in the freedesktop specification was really eye opening to me.
  
  It's like these 🧩 honestly need an explanation for why a Trash feature is necessary.
  
  Here it is: https://specifications.freedesktop.org/trash-spec/trashspec-latest.html
- but maybe it’s now or never
  
  That's a real damn shame, because X is causing no issues for me.
  
  It's weird. As soon as (or even before) something is stable, people are already moving on to the next thing.
  
  That's a good way to have a broken system in perpetuity.
Fix the issues with Wayland and everyone will happily make the switch.
This is great. X11 needs to die in modern DEs so we can all move to Wayland for good.
- Fix the issues with wayland so that we are all able to use it, before forcing us to move for "our good".
  
  In my experience, most of the issues with wayland are caused by ~~applications~~ software not supporting it. If we enter a wayland-only world, developers are pushed towards supporting wayland.
Maybe this will help people finally make their apps work on Wayland. I hate so much to install a "privacy-friendly" software or even something related to security and discover it only works under X.
- Seems to me that "nothing I try works with Wayland" is not a good point where you want to cut off support for X11. That only means the software doesn't work with either. Software doesn't magically gain support for something else just because you cut off the old stuff.
  
  That's why I said this will help developers consider making their app work under Wayland, not magically gain support.
So what is the name the new GNOME that supports X11?

Edit: I appreciate the alternative desktops, and they are a great reminder (feel free to keep them coming.)
My point was that open source projects tend to fork every time a less than popular decision is made. Often, removing support for something is seen as a less popular decision. I anticipate GNOME will fork over this. I have no inside knowledge and will not be leading the charge.
- KDE, I suppose.
  
  For now, they're also slowly weaning off of it.
- mate?
Guys, am I the only one?

I dont care about X11. But some weird things just dont work.

I have a stupid AMD mobile GPU which seems to neither support virtualization, nor Wine games.

Also, I only had one keyboard/mouse input at a time, so either shift or running for example. People told me thats because of XWayland.

Is that a thing? This would be a total dealbreaker
- AFAIK wine requires no special hardware support. It isn’t virtualizing anything, it just translates directx calls into OpenGL/Vulkan calls executed by your normal driver. If wine doesn’t work I suspect it’s something else
  
  Yes I know. Not sure what it was, installed rocm-opencl, maybe that is helping??
- Have you enabled virtualisation support in your BIOS/UEFI? Many vendors ship their hardware with this switched off by default (and some hardware actually doesn't support it at all).
  
  I don't have any issues with Xwayland and simultaneous key presses. Tested with Bottles (i. e. WINE), BeamNG (native Linux build) and the games from SCS Software (also Linux-native). I am running Fedora 38 Silverblue with an AMD RX 5500 XT GPU.
  
  Hmm, yes its enabled. This is really weird, a real use case for Coreboot I guess.
Until barrier/synergy works on wayland, I've got to stick with X
- Input Leap? Now that Barrier is no longer being developed, Input Leap is the main fork, and GNOME 45 just added support for it on Wayland.
  
  Hadn't heard of this. The Readme says not to use this as it isn't stable?
- https://github.com/r-c-f/waynergy
  
  For me at least, waynergy doesn't solve my issues, as I host my kb/m on Linux and share with a Windows PC (no builds for windows, and I can't get it to work with barrier for some reason) I ended up just buying a USB switch which works, but it's way slower .. but I love hyprland so it's a net gain I guess
I have to growl at someone
This is the best summary I could come up with:

A set of merge requests were opened that would effectively drop X.Org (X11) session support for the GNOME desktop and once that code is removed making it a Wayland-only desktop environment.

Going along with Fedora 40 looking to disable the GNOME X11 session support (and also making KDE Plasma 6 Wayland-only for Fedora), upstream GNOME is evaluating the prospect of disabling and then removing their X11 session support.

This merge request would remove the X11 session targets within gnome-session: "This is the first step towards deprecating the x11 session, the systemd targets are removed, but the x11 functionality is still there in so you can restore the x11 session by installing the targets in the appropriate place on your own.

That was followed by this merge request that would land later on -- more than likely, one cycle later -- for actually removing the X11 session code.

Some concerns were raised already how this could impact downstream desktops like Budgie and Pantheon that haven't yet fully transitioned over to Wayland.

In any event we'll see where the discussions lead but it's sure looking like 2024 will be the year that GNOME goes Wayland-only.

The original article contains 254 words, the summary contains 193 words. Saved 24%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Any X11 forwarding support or emulation of some kind provided by Wayland? Or will apps detect this over the terminal as they usually currently do and render on the remote machine?
- Can't Waypipe do this?
  
  OMG never heard of this, perfect!! Thank you 😁
I thought Wayland still didn't work with nvidia cards?
- Its the opposite
  
  Pretty sure Wayland does not just work with nvidia cards.
- It works, nowhere near as good as AMD but it works.
- https://wiki.gnome.org/Initiatives/Wayland/NVIDIA
  https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Wayland/Nvidia somehow supports it even better
  According to https://arewewaylandyet.com/ nouveau has support for wlroots and sway
Unpopular opinion but

WE DO NOT BREAK USERSPACE! Seriously. How hard is this rule to understand?

Linus Torvalds

Forcing Nvidia to update drivers by breaking your system otherwise us not the correct way to do it.
- That's for the kernel. Userspace often breaks userspace.
- Well, there are better reasons for getting rid of fossil software... Like xorg being a giant clusterhack :)
  
  Still not convinced Wayland won't end up the side-line fossil to be perfectly frank. It just isn't compatible enough considering how long it has been developed and the "every compositor needs to essentially implement the whole protocol itself" model seems like a huge design flaw.
- User space is not breaking often enough for nvidia users. If it'd break regularly maybe users would either buy something with proper support, or force nvidia to open their stuff so it can be maintained like the rest, and no longer is a roadblock for progress.
  
  nvidia has open-drivers, it's shit, but they have
  
  (sometimes i go there to laugh)
  
  maybe these push can make nvidia fix the problems
- That's the kernel apis. Those have to be stable. Userland always changes much faster.
Sounds good!

That's a hard work to try to be compatible with X11 and Wayland.

I hope that could simplify that.
- They could just drop Wayland support if it is too much work.
  
  But wayland is actually getting development and security updates and every single X11 dev moved onto it... that's like saying we should drop electric cars for gas because there's more gas stations right now.
The MacOS of DEs

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