this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2023
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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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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Wayland is much better in the long term. People work on it every day and improve it, while X11 gets less and less supported plus X11 is carrying deprecated junk from the last decades

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The appeal to "X11 is too complicated, Wayland is much simpler" ain't holding much meat when we are 15 years into the project and it's still not done. As it turns out, a lot of that "junk" in X11 is rather useful and cutting out the junk in Wayland just made it unusable. The work to reimplement the missing functionality has been eating up a lot of years.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

That is true that Wayland has cost a lot of time already, much longer than anticipated. Still, Wayland has the organic growth. X11 is declining and will go eventually.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

There's a reason every single X11 dev decided it would be better to start from scratch than to continue developing X, it's just fundamentally broken in ways that can't be fixed, and very few devs were interested in doing the work to make wayland happen until recently, the growth has been massive for development.