After more than forty years, everyone knows that it’s time to retire the X Window System – X11 for short – on account of it being old and decrepit. Or at least that’s what t…
And X11 will never be ready for most modern users. They have different goals. But that’s the thing with open source. As long as someone somewhere needs it. Even if 90% of us don’t need X11 for legacy software. It will still be here.
Even if 90% of us don’t need X11 for legacy software. It will still be here.
I most agree with you. The Xlibre project may become popular and do something to make X11 popular again. Who knows?
And I just argued on a forum yesterday that Xorg will keep working for 20 years at least. But a lot of smart people claimed I was wrong about it being able to support new hardware. But I think Xorg is likely to build and run for decades yet.
But the X server implementation that is likely to last the longest is Xwayland. And with Wayback, the “stand-alone” X server that many distros will bundle will be Xwayland running on Wayback (Wayland) and not Xorg.
As I have said elsewhere though, few people will be daily driving an X server (Xorg, Xlibre, or Wayback) simply because many desirable applications will require Wayland.
And what will be the x11 only applications that will make people run an X server to use them? Xeyes? Xfig?
I think even running Xwayland will be pretty niche. X11 is going to be a software preservation project. You can boot up OpenLook, CDE, Trinity, or i3 for the memories (and then go back to Wayland for the apps you need).
I could be wrong. Time will tell. Within a couple of years after the release of GTK5 at the latest, we will know. By 2030 maybe.
I am not sure about that. They have different designs for sure. Mostly because one was designed 25 years later. I guess you mean they have different goals because Xorg did not incorporate some goals in its design (like security). But is it a goal of Xorg to be insecure? That feels like a stretch.
There are design goals in X11 that are not included in Wayland. Take asking the display server to draw primitive shapes for you as an example. But modern X11 apps do not do that either. That is not how things like Qt and GTK work. So, more of a “25 years later” thing than a true difference in goals. The “compositor” approach. The DDX layer. These are more of a reflection of “how things work today” on both systems than they are differences in goals.
Perhaps you mean things like “network transparency” as I hear that one a lot. Wayland’s design is to have a simple core that can be extended. But the same capabilities exist for Wayland. For example:
What goal does Xorg have that Wayland does not? Again, other than poor security (not a goal).
The lack of security in Xorg makes many things easier. Wayland apps run in a sandbox which makes some things harder. Many complaints I see ultimately boil down to this difference. Flatpaks are also sandboxed and a lot of the solutions on Wayland are similar (eg. XDG desktop portal). But again, am not sure crap security was really a “goal” of Xorg. It is simply convenient.
Because of security, things have to be explicitly supported on Wayland while X11 apps can just do them. There is no official way to capture a screenshot on X11 even after 40 years. But any X11 app can do it pretty easily as all apps have access to the entire display (even contents of other windows). On Wayland, there is a protocol for screen capture. There has to be, or it would not be possible. The same is true for many other features. And, I fully admit, some protocols for Wayland to do things done by some x11 apps do not exist yet (or are not yet widely supported by compositors or apps).
But again, I do not really see “poor security” as an x11 design goal. It was simply born in an era where that did not matter as much. Projects that want to modernize X11, like Xlibre, will have to break things on X too. Time will tell what that looks like.
X11 is a display server. Wayland is a presentation layer. Different goals. I have run graphical multi-seat systems using x11. Something like that will never be possible in the same way for Wayland because it is out of the design scope
Xorg is a display server. In Wayland, your compositor is the display server.
“I have run graphical multi-seat systems using x11. Something like that will never be possible in the same way for Wayland”
I have to give you this one. Wayland is not designed to be multi-seat. I do not know about “never” but you are right that multi-seat is a design difference.
I spent 4 years with and external monitor on my desk that I couldn’t use because it was absolutely painful to find a consistent way to make the 2 different DPIs of the screens work in a way that made sense. Only now with proper Wayland can I enjoy and use it. Yeah there’s hacks, but I’d rather let it be dead in a corner than try to work around it. It was a bunch of black screen, inconsitencies between the order I’d plug the external screen, when i did it (before or after logging in), etc… I can’t even imagine all the other pain points about hdr, variable or high refresh rates, etc.
Wayland is great.
Had to wait a bunch of time and tried many times before and it wasn’t ready for my needs, but now it is and I’m happy. God knows how many rants I’ve done on fedi about it not working for a lot of time on plasma and weird bugs everwhere.
As a user of 3 monitors with different resolutions, different refresh rates, some HDR, different UI scaling, who games and wants to use VRR - Wayland is literally why I was able to effectively switch to Linux as my daily driver.
a consistent way to make the 2 different DPIs of the screens work in a way that made sense
What do you mean? I used multidisplay setups for 15 years, I never checked what’s the DPI of my monitors is and never had issues. I just plug in any external monitors I have around and it works. I did it on desktop machines and many different laptops. I’m always baffled when people say their monitors don’t work because of sync rates or DPI. What are they trying to do and what’s not working?
It’s been a problem with 4k monitors. For them the interface has to be scaled to about 200%. When you have got a 1080p monitor next to that you have a choice of:
Having a ridiculously large interface on the 1080p one
Having a ridiculously small interface on the 4k one
e.g. one monitor is 96dpi, and the other is 192dpi, moving a window from one monitor to the other shouldn’t result in the window becoming a different physical size, and it should render at a natural resolution on both (i.e. scaling it to half size for display on the 96dpi monitor doesn’t count)
Currently, X11 is not really being developed, just maintained, which is the real issue. In this piece they are questioning whether Wayland was a good choice or not. I am using Wayland, have for some time, and I do acknowledge it is still a work in progress, validating the articles list of ‘issues’ yet to be addressed, but unless you are running a really old system, I am guessing the complications affect a very minimal group of users. There are also workarounds, for example on KDE, the gtk apps don’t adhere to those using the global menu. However, there is a fix to get around it.
In reference to using a completely different solution, isn’t it a little late in the game (16 years in development?) I think we are stuck with Wayland, no?
X11 would have needed almost a complete rewrite. Wayland made sense. Eject the technical debt and focus on your use case. We aren’t time sharing on a large central mini computer/mainframe anymore. And even then they generally are full single user systems run in parallel under a hypervisor these days. As wasteful as that might be.
But there’s still occasions when you need to run a legacy application on old AIX, Irix, etc, or vax Hardware. And need a workstation. Which right now Wayland simply can’t do without x.
I need it to run like 3 things via its original use case of “log in to remote computer, run it on linux, see it on your local machine”. still works like a charm.
Yep absolutely. It’s been years since I’ve done that myself. But there’s lots of Legacy software out there. Especially on Legacy systems that are not being developed for at all anymore. That will continue to require X11. One of the other more Niche uses which Wayland doesn’t support I believe are multi graphical users on a single system. Again probably something I don’t think I’ve messed around much with in the last decade. But it was a fun feature. Wayland is much more focused on a single session.
The biggest problem is for new users. Once the dust has settled and Wayland is the default for everything (and there’s plenty of searchable threads for how to fix X problem) then it will be great. But currently if you’re a noob and you install a distro you don’t know what either is. If you have this problem do you fix it with X or Y? Choice is great for enthusiasts, but just another hurdle for new users.
We’ll get there. Honestly I think in the long run Wayland will be easier to troubleshoot and maintain. But then that may just be memories of troubleshooting XFree86 back in the 90s. I still have flashbacks.
Most new users won’t even know that there is a choice until they’re presented with it, and most will just stick with the default option anyway. (which most distros have/are switching to wayland)
Wayland is what new users start on. And Wayland works for most users. In fact, for these users, it works better than Xorg.
So nobody is going to switch to Xorg. The only people using it will be the few that have not switched to Wayland. And, as the applications go Wayland only, that will become a very short list.
It is mot Wayland that has to prove itself. X11 is not winning the battle for new users, or even old ones.
For most new users, sure, as they’ll tend to use the most well-known distros. Wayland adoption is still not 100% and it very much depends on distro and DE.
And Wayland works for most users. In fact, for these users, it works better than Xorg.
If they never tried X they can’t compare it, can they?
So nobody is going to switch to Xorg.
Only those that need features Wayland doesn’t provide yet. Not most people, no.
You completely missed the point being made.
Did i? Wayland is being touted as the next big thing when in fact it’s not even ready yet. And this is after what? 15 years?
Most users don’t care either way so long as it works.
Most users saw no reason to want to change.
Eventually it’ll get there, let’s hope so, but for now it reeks of systemd mentality.
Let’s also hope when it’s finally feature-matched to X that it won’t be a mess like X is.
Respectfully, disagree. A lot of the new modern users are into gaming. Something which Wayland specifically does better. I’m not just speaking from personal experience. Yes you could game under X11 before. But it wasn’t as smooth or without issue. I 100% have seen performance increases and stability increases after switching to Wayland with regards to gaming workloads.
I can’t use wayland for gaming because I do multi-monitor gaming, and something that was a very simple xrandr --setmonitor is impossible in wayland…
I 100% have seen performance increases and stability increases after switching to Wayland with regards to gaming workloads.
All I have seen so far is that I get half the fps I get on citron/eden on sway vs i3wm.
They are also fed up with the wayland bugs and decided to force xcb everywhere, one of the bugs is that the app just crashes on wayland gnome, it does not happen plasma, or sway, or any other place, just gnome.
Wayland support for multi-monitor configurations is better than X11. Whatever performance degradation you claim to experience is also a “you” thing, not a “Wayland” thing. There’s an underlying issue with your setup.
Whatever performance degradation you claim to experience is also a “you” thing
It is one of the reasons why Eden disabled wayland by default but sure thing, just a me thing 😆
There’s an underlying issue with your setup.
Yeah, it is called sway.
I don’t even use a login manager, directly login from tty and just launch each respective game, sway is able to use my i3 config directly, the only change in this setup is the window manager.
Also note, this performance issue is not present in BeamNG, it only happens with Eden, citron, etc (all yuzu forks).
I’m sure there’s a little column A and a little column b. The recent update to blender with Vulcan was amazing for instance. Though I don’t think under wine / proton Vulcan is the default yet. But one thing I know Wayland absolutely did help with was tearing under a few applications.
lack of global hotkeys in Wayland, graphics tablet support issues, OBS not supporting embedded browser windows, Japanese and other foreign as well as onscreen keyboard support issues that are somehow worse than on X11, no support for overscanning monitors or multiple mouse cursors, no multi-monitor fullscreen option, regressions with accessibility, inability of applications to set their (previously saved) window position, no real automation alternative for xdotool, lacking BSD support and worse input latency with gaming.
The top comment in the linked article pointed out how that chunk of text was less than truthful:
There’s definitely regressions that need to be fixed, but the way it is presented here is just misinformation, mixing things like project-specific bugs and misunderstandings in as Wayland problems.
*BSD is officially supported by Wayland and by several display servers (a better state than for X11 where the *BSD’s had to patch things quite extensively downstream), the graphics tablet thing is a KDE-specific bug, and global hotkeys is available in some display servers through XDG portals (albeit a bit slowly), and using multiple independent mouse cursors is very specifically a Wayland feature (wayland multi-seat). Restoring window state is also supported, it just works differently than X11, and sway at least supports global fullscreen the same way as i3.
[…]
The other comments pick out the other issues the top comment didn’t go through.
Yes for many it’s not. Lots of those issues, while actual issues. Are niche issues. Issues I’ve personally had brushes with in many cases. As someone who’s used Linux and BSD since the early 90s. I know I’m not the average user these days. And I know X had it’s own similar issues over the years. Still does. For the average person using a single screen who doesn’t steam Etc. Wayland provides a very good experience. All the edge issues will be addressed individually as they were with X.
While I would like to see BSD support as well. Part of that is on the BSD devs and community. Many who are against it. There’s lots of areas BSD is unfortunately falling behind in. But that’s not everyone else’s problem. I would love to be able to run a BSD desktop. But it simply doesn’t have the software or support I look for. And that’s okay
And X11 will never be ready for most modern users. They have different goals. But that’s the thing with open source. As long as someone somewhere needs it. Even if 90% of us don’t need X11 for legacy software. It will still be here.
I most agree with you. The Xlibre project may become popular and do something to make X11 popular again. Who knows?
And I just argued on a forum yesterday that Xorg will keep working for 20 years at least. But a lot of smart people claimed I was wrong about it being able to support new hardware. But I think Xorg is likely to build and run for decades yet.
But the X server implementation that is likely to last the longest is Xwayland. And with Wayback, the “stand-alone” X server that many distros will bundle will be Xwayland running on Wayback (Wayland) and not Xorg.
As I have said elsewhere though, few people will be daily driving an X server (Xorg, Xlibre, or Wayback) simply because many desirable applications will require Wayland.
And what will be the x11 only applications that will make people run an X server to use them? Xeyes? Xfig?
I think even running Xwayland will be pretty niche. X11 is going to be a software preservation project. You can boot up OpenLook, CDE, Trinity, or i3 for the memories (and then go back to Wayland for the apps you need).
I could be wrong. Time will tell. Within a couple of years after the release of GTK5 at the latest, we will know. By 2030 maybe.
I am not sure about that. They have different designs for sure. Mostly because one was designed 25 years later. I guess you mean they have different goals because Xorg did not incorporate some goals in its design (like security). But is it a goal of Xorg to be insecure? That feels like a stretch.
There are design goals in X11 that are not included in Wayland. Take asking the display server to draw primitive shapes for you as an example. But modern X11 apps do not do that either. That is not how things like Qt and GTK work. So, more of a “25 years later” thing than a true difference in goals. The “compositor” approach. The DDX layer. These are more of a reflection of “how things work today” on both systems than they are differences in goals.
Perhaps you mean things like “network transparency” as I hear that one a lot. Wayland’s design is to have a simple core that can be extended. But the same capabilities exist for Wayland. For example:
https://www.mankier.com/1/waypipe
or even better:
https://github.com/wayland-transpositor/wprs
What goal does Xorg have that Wayland does not? Again, other than poor security (not a goal).
The lack of security in Xorg makes many things easier. Wayland apps run in a sandbox which makes some things harder. Many complaints I see ultimately boil down to this difference. Flatpaks are also sandboxed and a lot of the solutions on Wayland are similar (eg. XDG desktop portal). But again, am not sure crap security was really a “goal” of Xorg. It is simply convenient.
Because of security, things have to be explicitly supported on Wayland while X11 apps can just do them. There is no official way to capture a screenshot on X11 even after 40 years. But any X11 app can do it pretty easily as all apps have access to the entire display (even contents of other windows). On Wayland, there is a protocol for screen capture. There has to be, or it would not be possible. The same is true for many other features. And, I fully admit, some protocols for Wayland to do things done by some x11 apps do not exist yet (or are not yet widely supported by compositors or apps).
But again, I do not really see “poor security” as an x11 design goal. It was simply born in an era where that did not matter as much. Projects that want to modernize X11, like Xlibre, will have to break things on X too. Time will tell what that looks like.
X11 is a display server. Wayland is a presentation layer. Different goals. I have run graphical multi-seat systems using x11. Something like that will never be possible in the same way for Wayland because it is out of the design scope
X11 and Wayland are both protocols.
Xorg is a display server. In Wayland, your compositor is the display server.
“I have run graphical multi-seat systems using x11. Something like that will never be possible in the same way for Wayland”
I have to give you this one. Wayland is not designed to be multi-seat. I do not know about “never” but you are right that multi-seat is a design difference.
My mind goes to this project again: https://github.com/wayland-transpositor/wprs
But wprs only runs one compositor so it does not inherently address multi-seat. Support for that would need to be added.
I spent 4 years with and external monitor on my desk that I couldn’t use because it was absolutely painful to find a consistent way to make the 2 different DPIs of the screens work in a way that made sense. Only now with proper Wayland can I enjoy and use it. Yeah there’s hacks, but I’d rather let it be dead in a corner than try to work around it. It was a bunch of black screen, inconsitencies between the order I’d plug the external screen, when i did it (before or after logging in), etc… I can’t even imagine all the other pain points about hdr, variable or high refresh rates, etc.
Wayland is great.
Had to wait a bunch of time and tried many times before and it wasn’t ready for my needs, but now it is and I’m happy. God knows how many rants I’ve done on fedi about it not working for a lot of time on plasma and weird bugs everwhere.
As a user of 3 monitors with different resolutions, different refresh rates, some HDR, different UI scaling, who games and wants to use VRR - Wayland is literally why I was able to effectively switch to Linux as my daily driver.
What do you mean? I used multidisplay setups for 15 years, I never checked what’s the DPI of my monitors is and never had issues. I just plug in any external monitors I have around and it works. I did it on desktop machines and many different laptops. I’m always baffled when people say their monitors don’t work because of sync rates or DPI. What are they trying to do and what’s not working?
It’s been a problem with 4k monitors. For them the interface has to be scaled to about 200%. When you have got a 1080p monitor next to that you have a choice of:
e.g. one monitor is 96dpi, and the other is 192dpi, moving a window from one monitor to the other shouldn’t result in the window becoming a different physical size, and it should render at a natural resolution on both (i.e. scaling it to half size for display on the 96dpi monitor doesn’t count)
Currently, X11 is not really being developed, just maintained, which is the real issue. In this piece they are questioning whether Wayland was a good choice or not. I am using Wayland, have for some time, and I do acknowledge it is still a work in progress, validating the articles list of ‘issues’ yet to be addressed, but unless you are running a really old system, I am guessing the complications affect a very minimal group of users. There are also workarounds, for example on KDE, the gtk apps don’t adhere to those using the global menu. However, there is a fix to get around it.
In reference to using a completely different solution, isn’t it a little late in the game (16 years in development?) I think we are stuck with Wayland, no?
X11 would have needed almost a complete rewrite. Wayland made sense. Eject the technical debt and focus on your use case. We aren’t time sharing on a large central mini computer/mainframe anymore. And even then they generally are full single user systems run in parallel under a hypervisor these days. As wasteful as that might be.
But there’s still occasions when you need to run a legacy application on old AIX, Irix, etc, or vax Hardware. And need a workstation. Which right now Wayland simply can’t do without x.
X11 isn’t gonna disappear, it will always be there as a compatibility layer for old programs. That’s okay.
Oh absolutely. I said as much an earlier post they will coexist even if Wayland will be the default for most distros.
I need it to run like 3 things via its original use case of “log in to remote computer, run it on linux, see it on your local machine”. still works like a charm.
Yep absolutely. It’s been years since I’ve done that myself. But there’s lots of Legacy software out there. Especially on Legacy systems that are not being developed for at all anymore. That will continue to require X11. One of the other more Niche uses which Wayland doesn’t support I believe are multi graphical users on a single system. Again probably something I don’t think I’ve messed around much with in the last decade. But it was a fun feature. Wayland is much more focused on a single session.
The biggest problem is for new users. Once the dust has settled and Wayland is the default for everything (and there’s plenty of searchable threads for how to fix X problem) then it will be great. But currently if you’re a noob and you install a distro you don’t know what either is. If you have this problem do you fix it with X or Y? Choice is great for enthusiasts, but just another hurdle for new users.
We’ll get there. Honestly I think in the long run Wayland will be easier to troubleshoot and maintain. But then that may just be memories of troubleshooting XFree86 back in the 90s. I still have flashbacks.
Most new users won’t even know that there is a choice until they’re presented with it, and most will just stick with the default option anyway. (which most distros have/are switching to wayland)
Most modern users don’t care either way so long as it works.
X11 works for most users.
You completely missed the point being made.
Wayland is what new users start on. And Wayland works for most users. In fact, for these users, it works better than Xorg.
So nobody is going to switch to Xorg. The only people using it will be the few that have not switched to Wayland. And, as the applications go Wayland only, that will become a very short list.
It is mot Wayland that has to prove itself. X11 is not winning the battle for new users, or even old ones.
For most new users, sure, as they’ll tend to use the most well-known distros. Wayland adoption is still not 100% and it very much depends on distro and DE.
If they never tried X they can’t compare it, can they?
Only those that need features Wayland doesn’t provide yet. Not most people, no.
Did i? Wayland is being touted as the next big thing when in fact it’s not even ready yet. And this is after what? 15 years?
Most users don’t care either way so long as it works.
Most users saw no reason to want to change.
Eventually it’ll get there, let’s hope so, but for now it reeks of systemd mentality.
Let’s also hope when it’s finally feature-matched to X that it won’t be a mess like X is.
Respectfully, disagree. A lot of the new modern users are into gaming. Something which Wayland specifically does better. I’m not just speaking from personal experience. Yes you could game under X11 before. But it wasn’t as smooth or without issue. I 100% have seen performance increases and stability increases after switching to Wayland with regards to gaming workloads.
I can’t use wayland for gaming because I do multi-monitor gaming, and something that was a very simple
xrandr --setmonitoris impossible in wayland…All I have seen so far is that I get half the fps I get on citron/eden on sway vs i3wm.
They are also fed up with the wayland bugs and decided to force xcb everywhere, one of the bugs is that the app just crashes on wayland gnome, it does not happen plasma, or sway, or any other place, just gnome.
Wayland support for multi-monitor configurations is better than X11. Whatever performance degradation you claim to experience is also a “you” thing, not a “Wayland” thing. There’s an underlying issue with your setup.
Alright, how do I merge the 3 displays that I have as one then?
https://www.reddit.com/r/wayland/comments/108dgwc/combine_monitors_to_single_screen/
It is one of the reasons why Eden disabled wayland by default but sure thing, just a me thing 😆
Yeah, it is called sway.
I don’t even use a login manager, directly login from tty and just launch each respective game, sway is able to use my i3 config directly, the only change in this setup is the window manager.
Also note, this performance issue is not present in BeamNG, it only happens with Eden, citron, etc (all yuzu forks).
Is that specific to Wayland or due to improvements in Vulcan, Lutris and alike?
I’m sure there’s a little column A and a little column b. The recent update to blender with Vulcan was amazing for instance. Though I don’t think under wine / proton Vulcan is the default yet. But one thing I know Wayland absolutely did help with was tearing under a few applications.
Those who don’t care, don’t have anything to say and should not the deciding factor. Why count voices who don’t care?
You do not have to count voices. We are not having an election. But the people that do not care will be running Wayland. So, if we count desktops…
All things that don’t matter to modern users.
The top comment in the linked article pointed out how that chunk of text was less than truthful:
The other comments pick out the other issues the top comment didn’t go through.
Yes for many it’s not. Lots of those issues, while actual issues. Are niche issues. Issues I’ve personally had brushes with in many cases. As someone who’s used Linux and BSD since the early 90s. I know I’m not the average user these days. And I know X had it’s own similar issues over the years. Still does. For the average person using a single screen who doesn’t steam Etc. Wayland provides a very good experience. All the edge issues will be addressed individually as they were with X.
While I would like to see BSD support as well. Part of that is on the BSD devs and community. Many who are against it. There’s lots of areas BSD is unfortunately falling behind in. But that’s not everyone else’s problem. I would love to be able to run a BSD desktop. But it simply doesn’t have the software or support I look for. And that’s okay