this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2024
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For those wanting to build a Wayland-only Linux desktop experience without carrying any aging X11 baggage, GNOME 47 will be able to optionally offer Wayland-only support without carrying X11/X.Org support. This Mutter merge request landed today that allows compiling Mutter with X11 support disabled. That landed today along with this GNOME Shell merge request for being able to disable X11 support too.

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[–] [email protected] 82 points 4 months ago

This is great news. Shipping X11 on a system that doesn’t need it is a big waste.

[–] [email protected] 54 points 4 months ago (2 children)

I love the fact that it's optional.

[–] [email protected] 36 points 4 months ago (8 children)

I wonder how long it'll be possible to build Gnome with Xorg support. If I had to guess I'd say there won't be any support within the next 3 years, because keeping future Gnome working with Xorg is work nobody wants to put in.

That said, Xwayland will likely keep being around for the foreseeable future.

Out of curiosity, do you use Xorg and if yes, what's keeping you from using Wayland?

[–] [email protected] 18 points 4 months ago (2 children)

XOrg is my daily driver for these reasons:

  1. I mostly use XFCE, which doesn't have Wayland yet
  2. last time I tried Wayland (long time ago now on Gnomr), it was buggy and didn't work
  3. I don't change my setups that much, so I haven't tried it since
  4. I don't need the features Wayland offers/XOrg covers my use cases
  5. Wayland drama

That being said, I have no fundamental opposition to Wayland, and will probably use it someday.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Those are all good reasons. XFCE aims to support Wayland with the next release, so if they choose to use an established compositor it shouldn't be too buggy.

With XFCE porting their apps over the setup shouldn't change much, unless you're using Xorg specific tools.

Over the last few years most features I'd expect from a windowing system were added to Wayland, so I expect the drama to cool down. (I don't even know what's still missing (except accessibility), with VRR, tearing, DRM leasing (VR), and global hotkeys being done. It's just apps like Discord that have to cave in under the pressure to fix their apps.)

Once everything works, there's no point talking about it.

@[email protected]

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I totally expect one day a XFCE (Wayland) option will show up, I will click it, forget I did, and use it forever more.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

@Chewy7324 @wer2 I'll happily use wayland once XFCE officially releases support. I'm sure there may be a few kinks to work out or whatever with the initial release, but that's to be expected....

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

@wer2 @Chewy7324 exactly the same here. I too daily drive XFCE, never really change my setup, and don't require anything special that wayland offers. My setup just works for the most part....

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 months ago (1 children)

@Chewy7324 @GolfNovemberUniform I'd say as soon as screen readers work properly under Wayland, they could drop X11 builds. But they should definitely not do it before fixing that.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (4 children)

I think that could be solved with a XDG portal

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago

I switched to Wayland after GNOME 46 release because it fixed the issues I had with it (artifacts and persistent display failures). Many people may still prefer X11 at least because of the lack of input latency on slow machines.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Not op but we do magic cookie shenanigans at work to run a graphic app as another user. I believe that's not a thing in Wayland.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Last I tried to do discord streaming, it only worked in xorg

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

You could use Xwayland video bridge or just use the discord web app in firefox

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

Not OP, but I use sunshine and moonlight for streaming my pc to various devices. Wayland forces me to use kms and I can't turn the monitors off while I'm doing it. Someone was working on a pipewire backend, so hopefully that goes somewhere.

GreenWithEnvy is also a nuisance on Wayland while Nvidia Settings Panel doesn't even work. I have a custom script just to control my fans on Wayland, but I'm eventually switching from Nvidia anyways, so it won't matter for much longer.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Proper screen sharing and xclicker is Why I occasionally switch back to X

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Have you tried using ydotool or other wayland alternatives to xclicker? Last I used it, ydotool ran great.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Xclicker is a GUI autoclicker. I heard of a command line tool for Wayland, but it didn't seem to exactly be an autoclicker, and I don't really like command line tools in general.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

Oh I absolutely get it. But I guess someone will eventually end up making a GUI for ydotool (or so I hope). Alternatively, there is this (Wayland support is WIP): https://github.com/RMPR/atbswp

When I say I get it, I mean there was a time I kept Xorg around only so I can use PyAutoGUI (I no longer need it but if I did, I'd have probably created wrapper scripts to allow PyAutoGUI to call grim instead of scrot when on Wayland, or something like that).

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago

Chances are at some point it will be removed as it requires valuable man hours to maintain. At some point it will be a massive hindrance. I don't think it will be removed for a while but it probably will be forgotten about.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I think X will still be around for a while but it makes no sense to use it with a full desktop like gnome. Gnome has its own stack so Wayland makes sense.

It will be cool to see desktops like Xfce4, Cinnamon and Mate get support.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

wouldnt Xfce have to rebrand though? lol

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Xfce4 is a name not a acronym. It used to be back in the day but it now uses GTK.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

yes, it is a name that is literally pronounced like "X face"

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago

I pronounce it x f c e

[–] [email protected] 14 points 4 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago (2 children)

KWin is just a composer though. Plasma as a desktop environment still relies on XWayland

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago
[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago
[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:


Last week the GNOME 47 development code saw Wayland DRM lease protocol support for enhancing VR headset handling and separately was also accent color support for GNOME Shell.

Adding to the recent slew of changes landing for GNOME 47, the GNOME Shell and Mutter code can now be successfully compiled -- optionally -- without any X11 support or requiring any X11 build dependencies.

For those wanting to build a Wayland-only Linux desktop experience without carrying any aging X11 baggage, GNOME 47 will be able to optionally offer Wayland-only support without carrying X11/X.Org support.

That landed today along with this GNOME Shell merge request for being able to disable X11 support too.

In turn this closes a two year old issue tracker over making X11 dependencies optional on GNOME.

GNOME 47 is shaping up to be a very exciting desktop update due for release in September and will be found with the likes of Fedora 41 and Ubuntu 24.10.


The original article contains 172 words, the summary contains 158 words. Saved 8%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

If only I wasn't such a moron with trying to navigate around Nvidia drivers and Optimus, this sounds fantastic.

I have yet to figure all of this out and get to a smooth and stable state.

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