Long live Xorg, I mean Xlibre

> Xorg proper is now reverting a lot of their changes

They're returning to a previous state which they believe possessed positive characteristics absent from contemporary? Somebody should come up with a word for that.

Can you explain how xorg developers removing a lot of their own code and calling it "bad" because they get mad at someone makes you think that xorg is professional and makes the fork look bad? I am only able to see it the opposite way, that is, xorg developers have no idea wtf are they doing.

I mean them deleting their own code only proves their own incompetence not Enrico's.

[dead]

> The main dev, apart from being a reactionary nutjob

Irrelevant. Please stay on topic and refrain from personal attacks.

> created enough bugs and compatibility breaks that Xorg proper is now reverting a lot of their changes

You'd expect that the changes would've been reverted sooner if that was all there was to it, no? How come they're suddenly a problem?

The main devs, apart from being reactionary nutjobs, created enough bugs and compatibility breaks in Xorg proper by reverting a lot of X11Libre changes.[0] I guess we will see if this project survives for longer than a few months.

[0] https://www.phoronix.com/news/X.Org-Server-Lots-Of-Reverts

This is true with more "modern" setups. I tried rustdesk with Wayland. It somewhat works, but you have to be present at the "remote" PC to click a button allowing the sharing.

I periodically retry Wayland, and it does seem to be improving, albeit slowly. There are a few significant things that just aren't there, but mostly it feels like death by a thousand paper-cuts. I can't dock toolbars; I can't use xdotools; screenshares are flaky; I can't click and drag to upload to browsers.

I could live with Wayland, but the experience is still superior (for my use-cases) with X11.

KDE and Gnome each have their own Wayland compatible RDP servers. It's annoying it's not as convenient as older X vnc servers, but it's not impossible.

For wlroots systems there's wayvnc.

Does Waypipe solve this problem?

https://github.com/rustdesk/rustdesk/issues/56

AMD has great open source drivers that work wonderfully everywhere. Even their old hardware keeps getting amazing upgrades & enhancements, a decade+ latter!

Word on the street is Nvidia is doing a much much better job, for a year or so now. But, like, you are using a GPU that sway used to make you type "--i-wont-buy-an-nvidia-gpu-again" and now makes you type --unsupported-gpu to use.

It's not Wayland's fault if your video card can't do the pretty same sensible reasonable kernel calls asked of it without crashing. I realize that you might not really care about the distinction, I sympathize highly that it just sucks, and no one in open source likes this (Google image search "Linus Torvalds Nvidia"; 2025 only a bit better than 2012 if your bug report here really true I guess). But fault & culpability matters, and Wayland does way way way less special magic & is way more straightforward with how it handles the display subsystem than X, which half ignores the kernel & has its own absurd driver subsystems and mountains of jank overlapping extensions to do what kernels and GPUs just do these days. GPUs have it easy under Wayland!

At least in the past, this was an nvidia issue (not respecting the kernel). But I do understand the user issue here: X works, Wayland does not.

People needing software that actually works?

I'm sorry, but this is just complete nonsense. You can't just paint with a mega-broad brush just because there's one (or a few) unpleasant people in some demographic. You can do that for any demographic: Canadians, Vietnamese, people over 1.80m, people under 1.80m, people exactly 1.80m, etc.

I just got better things to do than rewrite code from one working display system to ... another working display system. That's it.

It's no coincidence that every single thread about wayland eventually devolves into an "(((IBM))) are trying to control us" fest

I couldn't be not against Wayland in those dark times when some distributions would make it as the default, at which time the flagship Wayland DE was using XWayland for its own panels. Which made a shitshow of a blurry mess on a HiDPI screen.

I couldn't be not against Wayland when in half of the applications I used clipboard wasn't working properly.

I couldn't be not against Wayland when screen sharing would either use X11 or not work at all.

I couldn't be not against Wayland when most of the complexity shifted from X server to compositors and toolkits, and it both diluted responsibility for the gnarliest bugs (go guess if it's the compositor or the toolkit! Added fun when it's the boundary of both!) and made it possible to write GNOME-only, or KDE-only, or wlroots-only software that won't work on another compositor because it needs a private implementation of an obscure protocol.

I couldn't be not against Wayland when your window manager breaking would bring your whole session down, complete with the breakage happening a lot.

I hear that there are problems with input protocols like "your toolkit has to implement several versions of the same thing and they all are half-arsed anyway", but living in the happy land of the Unicode's Basic Multilingual Plane, I know too little of this problem to have a say about it. But I'm somehow not surprised.

There is also this thing about Unix-like systems not being limited to Linux, and the story of Wayland elsewhere is way worse.

Most of the gnarliest points are now addressed, and Plasma got super stable around 5.26 onwards, however, I'm not really happy that we now have a triumvirate of Mutter, KWin, and wlroots, and that the bar for entry for new compositors is quite high. The fact that X11 allowed a proliferation of window managers is its advantage, not the other way around.

I'm wondering if someone gets to write a compositor that will be "engine, not policy" for Wayland, on top of which different desktop environments could be built. Like wlroots, but some steps further. It will probably have a year of glory, and then Wayland will be declared obsolete, crufty, insecure, legacy, and in dire need of being replaced with something lean and simple, and maybe written by an LLM. Good thing I'm going to be too old or too dead to give a shit by the time it happens.

> I understand that change can be challenging

It’s less about change and more about outright breakage. Wayland does not support me.

> You have a choice: acknowledge that Wayland is faster, more user-friendly, and more secure, or remain tied to technologies from the 1990s.

Wayland may be faster, it’s certainly more secure (in the same sense that a system embedded in a ton of concrete and dropped to the bottom of the ocean is more secure), but I’m not convinced that it’s more user friendly. It’s certainly not friendly to me, since it does not allow me to run my window manager of choice.

I’m not convinced that the technologies of the 1990s were necessarily all that bad, either. Yeah, there were some assumptions which turned out not to be the case in reality. And yeah, there is a ton of cruft. And yeah, no-one would design X11 the way it is today. But, you know what? X11, unlike Wayland, works for me.

I would love to use Wayland, honestly. That’s not a lie. But it doesn’t work. And from what I can see it doesn’t want to work.

That doesn’t really work. If there’s no longer a browser which supports X11, then I have to choose between browsing the web and having a usable desktop.

The problem is that the Wayland folks are trying to replace X11 rather than provide an easy upgrade path. They simply don’t care about anyone who uses a computer in any way outside of the ways they can be bothered to support. ‘It’s better!’ they cry, despite users telling them for well over a decade now that it’s not actually, because we cannot do the things we want.

And Wayland is being used as a form of lock-in. ‘GNOME uses Wayland now. Just drop support for that crufty old X11,’ they whisper. Never mind that plenty of folks don’t use GNOME and don’t want to use GNOME. Never mind that Wayland is still not fit for purpose.

It may be someday, and that would be great. I’d genuinely look forward to being able to move on from X11. But Wayland does not work for me, and as projects start to remove support for X11 they are removing support for me.

> If you like Xorg, use Xorg. If you like Wayland, use Wayland. If you're not happy about an issue, contribute to it.

The problem is that RedHat nee IBM are attempting to force everybody onto Wayland by dropping X11 support. They already tried once and the outcry was so huge that they had to back off saying they would try again next version.

This is kind of a rock and a hard place. The Wayland developers don't want to support X11 but neither does anybody else. Wayland is fundamentally broken in many ways down at the architectural level, but the sunk cost fallacy keeps them working on it.

Everybody forgets that Wayland predates Vulkan. A "real" replacement for X11/Wayland probably needs to restart from "Vulkan support is the base layer" and build up from there.

The fight is because:

1. freedesktop based on xorg is outdated and needs to be modernized to keep up with competing operating systems.

2. The Wayland movement is and has been run extremely poorly.

Both xorg and wayland are bad so it's easy for either side to point that out.

This is why I jumped to Wayland: laptop monitor and desktop monitor with different resolutions/scaling. Xorg choked, Wayland worked. That said, moving to Wayland broke a ton of other stuff in my otherwise peaceful workflow. I really do not like Wayland, but I need to be productive on my machine.

People have sworn up and down to me that the fractional scaling stuff is possible in X but I read probably 10 guides on how to do it and it never worked. Bummer.

XFCE solves this by using XRandR multipliers which can be applied per monitor, where the canvas is really big and is scaled however the target display needs it.

It's like macOS is doing it, by the way.

Change-averse people have no valid opinions/s