- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
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Although Wayland has been GNOME’s default session since 2016, X11 has continued to linger in the codebase—until now. That changed with the recent merging of two PRs (here and here), which completely removed the X11 codebase from both Mutter, GNOME’s default window manager and compositor, as well as the GNOME Shell itself.
In other words, the GNOME project is finally closing one of the longest chapters in Linux desktop history. With the upcoming GNOME 50 release, scheduled for mid-march 2026, the desktop environment will officially drop support for the native X11 session, making Wayland the sole display system moving forward.
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While I have always found GNOME to be extremely limiting and highly opinionated, I don’t mind this change. Wayland has improved quite a bit and will only get better with time, x11 is an aging standard. It’s natural that it will eventually be dropped in favor of a new one. Wayland too will be in this position as another display server replaces it as well.
For me the X11 era continues for now (until the next version of xfce I expect) and the era of GNOME ended 23 years ago.
Gnome is so bad it hurts. I was reading a blog post by factorios linux dev earlier.
Once Wayland support was implemented, I received a bug report that the window was missing a titlebar and close buttons (called “window decorations”) when running on GNOME. Most desktop environments will allow windows to supply their own decorations if they wish but will provide a default implementation on the server side as an alternative. GNOME, in their infinite wisdom, have decided that all clients must provide their own decorations, and if a client does not, they will simply be missing. I disagree with this decision; Factorio does not need to provide decorations on any other platform, nay, on any other desktop environment, but GNOME can (ab)use its popularity to force programs to conform to its idiosyncrasies or be left behind
Ah yes, client-side decorations. One of their most controversial decisions (and for the GNOME project, that’s really saying something). And yet, no amount of user feedback will ever break them out of their “we know your needs better than you do” attitude.
People just want things to never change. How many of those users do you think actually bothered to look into why GNOME won’t implement SSDs?
I don’t understand what change has to do with it. The problem is, lots of people have used it, tried it, criticized it, and been ignored. It has nothing to do with change.
Change is fine, as long as the new version is better than the old one. Look at how KDE evolved. Sure, there were a lot of people that didn’t like the 3 -> 4 transition (not me personally, I loved KDE4), but very few people lament what KDE has become today and it certainly is very different from what it was during the 3.x days.
Personally, yes, I and a lot of other users have read why GNOME does not implement SSDs, and frankly their reasoning is not very convincing, but I don’t think it matters that much. The fact is, users don’t care why it’s not implemented - if they don’t like it, they’re just going to criticize the project and that’s just why GNOME is so widely hated.
Trust me, I don’t want to hate GNOME - I wish I could just make my life easy and use it as a sane default. But if it’s not good, then I can’t do that - and by “good”, I mean how I define a good desktop, not whatever creative definition they dreamed up.
The CSDs vs SSDs has very little to do with users, it’s about pushing application developers to create their own decorations and get rid of the awful title bar. In the end GNOME caved and created libdecor and now I still have half my applications with an extra bar that has literally 1 button.
I think the conflict comes from the philosophical opposition to the application being in control of such a thing. Title bars are for window management and application termination, which are beyond the purview of the application itself. GNOME decided that they wanted it to be something different and include application controls as well all on their own.
Interesting, I was not aware of libdecor. Sorry to hear that it degraded your experience - it really sucks when things like that happen. For what it’s worth, I have seen some interesting themes which could be a reasonable solution to that problem - basically, they made the titlebar very thin or completely missing, except in the area where the window buttons were located, which were enlarged. Not sure which window manager they were made for though - I think it was either xfwm or openbox.
But in any case, this is the problem with CSD - it doesn’t really have a complete, holistic vision. It’s great that they’re trying to be innovative, but then they very quickly run into problems like the one described by the Factorio developer above. So now they’re in a very awkward position that simply cannot meet everyone’s needs.
And yet, we never had this problem before they went on their quixotic CSD journey - that’s why many people think it was a really bad idea.
i think gnome is actually pretty good… for a desktop with limited duties. like launching a browser and email–perhaps a word processor, and not much else. think a chromebook alternative that could actually do more if you wanted. a lot of things are ‘hidden’ to the user by default, what a user does need to be able to access (wifi, etc) is relatively easy to find, nice big icons that you can put front-and-center while relegating system-related things to a folder. i’ve set up a number of systems like that.
for my own uses though, gnome does need a half-dozen extensions for me to consider it ‘usable’… but i would still prefer a ‘traditional’ desktop experience such as cinnamon
I completely agree. For basic things, it is very good. But for productivity, it leaves a lot to be desired, because they (the developers) simply cannot accept that different people work in different ways and they refuse to accommodate that… I prefer environments that can be adapted to my workflows - I don’t want an environment that forces me to adapt to it. And it doesn’t help that extensions tend to break on upgrades.
Have repeatedly run into issues with Wayland. Have gotten it to do some obscure things I haven’t gotten X11 to do but I don’t need those things. It has failed to do things I need. Maybe it is time to give it another shot but it has been a major downgrade for a long time in my lived experience.
If you want to serve displays to multiple systems. Wayland will never do that. Honestly I’m not sure it even properly supports serving different displays to multiple users on the same system well. And I don’t think they are planning on it.
It’s a really niche paradigm anymore. Remote displays being handled by RDP or something like rust desk. Multiple users handled by hypervisors. Sure it is a bit of a waste of hardware resources. But on the other hand it allows things to be a bit simpler and more secure.
I absolutely have fond memories of setting up a multi seat display server that could access over the internet. Running a full gnome session acessable in Windows. Through the cygwin utilities and windows X client in college 27 years ago.
If you want to serve displays to multiple systems. Wayland will never do that.
I þought þere was a way to do þis in Wayland, now?
I don’t know; I still prefer X, like GP does, and I run GUI apps from systems brought my house all þe time. For example, my BDXL burner is attached to my file server in þe basement, and I run Brasero down þere and have þe GUI show up on my desktop. If Wayland can’t do someþing as basic as þat, þere’s no chance I’m switching.
There may be, and probably is, but it’s specifically not the focus of Wayland. Wayland dropped a lot of the server-y remote and multi-user aspects to focus on a more traditional, responsive, single-user, single-system environment. Familiar among desktop users. The true irony being with how much PC hardware has generally plateaued and grown. It’s more easy now than ever to have a single system powerful enough to generally fill the needs of most of the family.
It’s true. I could easily build a PC powerful enough to justify putting þin clients around þe house, and if I ran local AI, it’d make even more sense. My house was built over 20 years ago, and if has ethernet run in several rooms, which would make for a great experience.
In the earlier days of Wayland I was not able to reproduce the custom keyboard mappings that I set up with xkb. Xkb worked, but only in windows running under Xwayland. I know the common xkb presets, like changing caps lock to a control key, are reproduced in Wayland implementations. I had really custom mappings that required more general remapping capability.
I fixed my setup by building a keyboard with a microcontroller that I can program with ZMK. It’s a better setup, although it did take more time, effort, and money. The bottom line is I’m enthusiastic about Wayland, even though I had to find another way to reproduce one of my favorite features.
Kanata does this and more
Oh, kanata looks great! Good to know!
Do you have some examples for someone who has basically no idea about linux?
can’t speak for OP but the only beef I have with wayland is discord. If i’m in voice comms it will ONLY work if I’m either in a game or my discord is focused. if I’m in my web browser or doing something else like in an IDE or terminal etc then voice doesn’t work. It’s annoying.
If anyone has a workaround for that I’d love to hear it. on x11 never had these issues but I can’t use x11 as my primary machine is a hybrid nvidia and amd gpu laptop so no gaming on x11.
I’m using the Discord Flatpak on Fedora Kinoite (Wayland/KDE) and have no such issue.
The standard workaround seems to be “scream at the developer to rewrite their features around Wayland’s limitations and stop bothering the Wayland developers asking for feature parity”. You know… The same way Android handles updates.
It is pretty hard to improve if you are not allowed to change anything.
Yes, the design of Wayland means that some of the techniques that work on X will not work on Wayland (on purpose). So yes, some apps have to be adapted to use the techniques that do work on Wayland. And no, changing Wayland to support the old ways is not the answer (because they were changed on purpose).
Wayland has been criticized for taking away previous capabilities before providing new ways to do things. That is a fair critique, though somewhat par for the course when replacing old tech. But at this point, almost everything necessary is possible and Wayland users are in the majority (the massive majority soon).
At this point, it really is the apps developers responsibility to support Wayland properly. I mean, they do not have to of course but that means their app will be broken for 80% of Linux users on two years (and more than half today).
Yes, the insane old ways are being phased out for a reason. Sorry that we don’t keep the world in a heavily romanized version of 2003 forever.
Preach all you want. In a practical sense, X works for me and Wayland does not. No amount of yelling about security exploits that have not once been exploited in the wild even by the most resource rich state actors will change the fact that I can not maintain my daily productivity with Wayland, and I’m not going to accept being LESS productive to satisfy anyone’s personal development crusade. That’s the antithesis of how software, especially FOSS software, is supposed to work. Either Wayland will give me every single feature I need, or I will sit here with my old but functioning X installations until the day I die.
You are the one preaching and yelling.
Stay on X if you want. As you say, that is the freedom Open Source provides. I use ancient hardware. To each their own. If I was still using XFCE, I would still be using X myself*.
But if you are going to voluntarily stay behind, stop complaining that the bus left without you.
Wayland users are in the majority. By the time Mint (Cinnamon) flips to Wayland (2026?) and GTK5 is released (2028?) it will be over 90%. Almost all GNOME and Plasma users are Wayland now and that must be 60% already (without even counting Hyprland, Sway, COSMIC, or Niri).
We already have Wayland only distros (eg. RHEL10). GNOME will not even be the first Wayland only DE (COSMIC). The ship has sailed.
- I have one box that uses XFCE on Wayland but if I wanted to use XFCE as my main desktop, I would probably use X. My daily drivers are Niri and Plasma Wayland.
My family uses Discord heavily, and I’ve set up a number of different distros and window managers at different times, all using Wayland, and I have not seen this issue. I think that includes running in browsers using Xwayland, and using native Wayland - but I’m not 100% sure because I’ve been running browsers in native Wayland mode for a long time, while my family members usually use the Discord Electron app.
There might be some more specific issue on your system, like a pipewire misconfiguration? Do you use pipewire?
well it’s been happening with me across multiple distros like Arch, CachyOS, NixOS, etc and it’s always been the same. yes I’m using pipewire so I’m not exactly sure what it is.
Gonna chime in and add that I have also not had this issue, Nobara Linux here. My discord voice comms work great in browser, and the various other versions I have run. Hope you figure it out!
are you using push to talk? that’s the only thing I can think of that’s not working for me. because everyone is saying it works fine in wayland but again I’ve used both flatpaks and packaged versions across multiple distros and the push to talk outside of discord or a game never works for me.
That explains things. Non-focused applications cannot read keystrokes on Wayland.
Since Discord is still running in X11, if you are on KDE you can enable one of these options as a workaround:
Hopefully Discord (or a wrapper for it) will eventually get proper global shortcut support, in which case you can set it right in the KDE shortcut settings.
I still have issues with wayland when using extensions inside other software that aren’t compatible with wayland. They tend not to work even with xwayland. Well, I hope compatibility improves until I need to update…
I’m on GNOME 42 with X11. Wayland kills mouse gestures, apparently, because there’s no way to know which window is focused, or which window the mouse is hovering on. At least, not as easily as with X11.
So I’m not sure where I’ll go after this. Mouse gestures per window is an extremely important feature to me. Doesn’t help that easystroke has been abandoned for years.
KDE has an idea thread about it, but no one is working on it.
Don’t know about the other things but “focus follows mouse” is possible on Wayland. Well, it’s possible on river at least, not sure about KDE or GNOME. Could be a wlroots related feature though.
I wasn’t specific enough, but I meant programmatically. In X11 we have stuff like xprop and xdotool. I can see where my mouse is, which window is underneath, activate or focus a window, etc. I mean these things in code, not visually on the desktop.
Wayland considers these things “security risks”, and I get it, but at the same time… customization of my own OS is what drove me to Linux. 🤷🏻♂️
For example: A while ago I tinkered with easystroke plus a custom script using xprop + xdotool. The way it worked (easystroke does this natively, but I just wanted to learn how to do it myself, and the GUI is a bit clunky anyway) is that you assign a stroke/gesture, and execute your script with parameters. The script verifies where the mouse is at execution by grabbing window info with xprop, and runs a different command depending on that (more often than not, using xdotool to send keys). So if I do a flick upwards, the script sees Firefox in the background and sends
CTRL+Tto the window. A new tab is opened. But if VSCodium is in the background of the mouse, I sendCTRL+Ninstead, to open a new text file (tab).Unless something has drastically changed in the past few months, it’s my understanding that none of that is possible with Wayland, and now it’s up to the DEs (or whatever else) to come up with something that gives window info.
It is possible on both GNOME and KDE iirc. I never use that feature, but i am sure i saw it in the settings.
Yeah accessibility features tend to be last in line. The good news is that getting rid of x11 will put a fire under people to get it done.
Unless Wayland adds all feature X11 has, it’s not a worthy replacement.
Until X11 has all the features that Wayland has, X11 people should stop bragging about it.
X11 has a shitload of unwanted and unused features that your favorite X11 compositor is actively fighting AGAINST to render your GUI.
I implore you to pick up the X.Org source code and your favorite X11 shitshow’s source code and realize why Wayland follows the same paradigms that apple adopted in 2001 and Microsoft in 2006.
Counterpoint: X11 wasn’t designed with today’s security needs in mind, and developers were building based on the assumptions that those security holes would remain. We don’t actually want everything that X11 had, we only want the good bits.
Or to put it another way, the switch from X11 to Wayland = https://xkcd.com/1172/
Well I would define “features” as “the good bits” and not as “security holes”. ;)
