Gnome Mutter Now "Completely Drops the Whole X11 Back End"
40 comments
·November 5, 2025marginalia_nu
A decade of a their trademark hard line "you're holding it wrong" ethos will likely already have driven away what people might object to this sort of change.
tokai
Anti-Gnome people really need to get over it. We get it, just don't use their software.
reidrac
I've never believed on that dichotomy: either you are happy with everything a project does, or you are a hater. Why?
That was precisely what drove me away from the project after many years.
I don't use the software anymore and, for the most part, no changes they make affect me, but Gonome 3 should be treated as an example of an awful way of driving change by burning bridges and hurting the community.
I haven't thought about this for many years now, but I would have expected RH to do better.
iamnothere
Well-founded criticism is not being a “hater”, nor is forking or leaving a project over irreconcilable disagreements. Being a hater is repeatedly publishing absurd screeds, attempting to organize smear campaigns to pressure devs, and using sock puppets to flood social media with negative comments in order to influence users. Sadly there are a few very loud haters in the FOSS community.
If someone is calling you a hater over a difference of opinion, they are just wrong. That said, if you’ve been on the other end of frequent attacks from haters, it’s understandable that you might be overly sensitive to it!
throwmeaway307
until they suddenly drop the other not-their software. as they've done to X11
philipallstar
I think you misread that comment.
null
thisonetimeonly
It’s just the way, innit? People love to (rightly) bump their chest and say Linux is great for how customisable and open it is, but then go bananas the moment one software decides to do something different.
“Openness, customisation and freedom of choice are great—unless you are offering a software that doesn’t behave exactly like we want it to, then it should not exist as option for anyone, ever.”
yjftsjthsd-h
Yeah, no. Let me fix that:
Openness, customisation and freedom of choice are great—unless you are offering a software that absolutely refuses to allow customization and freedom of choice, and actively attempts to impose its limitations on the rest of the ecosystem[0], in which case you will get pushback.
[0] My favorite example is https://trac.transmissionbt.com/ticket/3685#no1
ragnese
Probably yes. And, good. It's free software. I still use GNOME Shell, and the minute the make a change that I don't want to deal with, I'll change to something else. Easy as that.
neilv
I had to look up what "Gnome Mutter" is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutter_(software)
> Mutter is a window manager initially designed and implemented for the X Window System, but then evolved to be a display server ("Wayland compositor"). It became the default window manager in GNOME 3,
Gnome alienated some developers around the time of GTK 3, and there have sometimes been regressions, and some opinionated unconventional design choices that everyone else was stuck with. (At the same time there was much positive benefits from the efforts.)
Even though I don't use the default Gnome desktop on most of my systems (I usually prefer XMonad or i3wm atop X11), I still end up using applications programs written to GTK and Gnome libraries.
Maybe this even harder push by Gnome on Wayland will drive even more effort into the alternative software, and continue to fuel the healthy competition that (for better or worst) the Linux desktop is stuck with.
microtonal
fuel the healthy competition is a really positive spin on even more fragmentation. It's sad how Linux desktop eats itself.
GNOME is a perpetrator as well. I usually check the GNOME release notes (since I use GNOME on my NixOS laptop) and on a semi-regular basis there is a note that says: replaced app X by a completely new rewrite Y. And there is still no support for basic things like marking up/annotating a screenshot, even though the basic image viewer has been rewritten N times (anyone remember Electric Eyes?).
shevy-java
I think the GNOME/GTK devs alienated numerous devs. I tried to talk to ebassi but he censored me on reddit as a consequence. He does not like people speaking up against what the GTK devs do.
I have no hope for GTK. It is a GNOMEy toolkit now.
HeinzStuckeIt
How many X11 holdouts are still around, really? I'm a curmudgeonly old man fond of old tech, but I have still had a Wayland-only setup since early 2020; once Sway was there as a good tiling window manager, and Emacs got its Wayland-ready pure-gtk branch, there was no need to look back.
I understand people here and there on forums express discontent, but I don't think that demographic is big enough to drive both significant development and the adoption that makes development sustainable.
invsblduck
> I'm a curmudgeonly old man fond of old tech, but I have still had a Wayland-only setup since early 2020
You must not be that curmudgeonly! I haven't tried Wayland yet, and so long as people are still arguing about it, I'm too afraid to even try it. :-)
yjftsjthsd-h
The trick is: If you use any sort of a11y tools, it's really hard to move to wayland. Things are improving, but it's slow going.
pseudalopex
Or most remote desktop tools.
neilv
I'm personally open to Wayland, and able to move to it (and sometimes have, though once I had to back it out because it was breaking too much in a critical factory embedded appliance) (and XMonad works noticeably better for me than i3wm/Sway). But not everyone can move to it.
Wayland is only one of the many Gnome desktop feature and technical decisions that not everyone agrees with. Some decisions are regressions, and outright defective, for years and counting.
There's an awkward situation, in which the companies paying for the programmers effectively get to decide, and the governance doesn't necessarily reflect the user base. But, like "they who has the gold, makes the rules", they who does the work...
So the healthy competition comes in when someone someone can afford to spend time to build alternatives. Sometimes expending effort just to undo changes of someone else, on a fork.
For example, when Gnome decided to take the desktop behavior in their own creative direction, the Cinnamon project gave everyone back a more familiar and intuitive desktop, which continued to work with all the application programs that people had been using.
(Strangely, Cinnamon seems more an enterprise-desktop look&feel drop-in replacement than the default Gnome desktop. When I would've guessed Gnome corporate funders would've been focused on getting Linux desktop on corporate desktop as their first priority, and then second priority would be mobile. But I don't see the default Gnome desktop getting them either. Cinnamon, on the other hand, is immediately usable by any corporate worker who's used any Microsoft desktop since Windows 95.)
pmarin
I don't use a compositor in XOrg.
zahlman
If you are on for example Mint, X11 is chosen for you and will probably be for a few years to come. There is an experimental Cinnamon Wayland session, though.
shevy-java
Which demographic do you evaluate? Because I am clearly among the xorg users. I don't even use systemd either.
p0nce
The whole audio plugin field is on X11 for formats reason
graemep
I still find Wayland to be buggier than X11.
it seems to have better display scaling which is useful when I switch between large monitor and laptop screen.
znpy
> Maybe this even harder push by Gnome on Wayland will drive even more effort into the alternative software, and continue to fuel the healthy competition that (for better or worst) the Linux desktop is stuck with.
Competition in this space has been everything except healthy. Wayland people have been essentially sabotaging X11 development.
Example: people wanting to keep X11 alive have been literally banned from the freedesktop.org infrastructure: https://linuxiac.com/xlibre-xserver-project-plans-revival-of...
> In a dramatic turn of events, Red Hat employees banned developer Enrico Weigelt from the freedesktop.org infrastructure. Weigelt’s account, repositories, tickets, and merge requests (more than 140) associated with the Xorg project were also abruptly deleted. As a result of these actions, in a message titled “History repeats: Redhat censored me on freedesktop.org,”.
(more in the link).
As somebody that has a functioning desktop environment (XFCE) and that doesn't bother much with new stuff, this is incredibly annoying, as the Wayland people have been breaking the linux desktop for everybody while pushing for incomplete alternatives (case in point: another comment to this same thread: wayland breaks accessibility: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45824341 - they should have first developed it AND THEN push for it but no, they had to push incomplete and non functional garbage down everybody's throat).
I'm not really against Wayland per se, I'm against the fascistoid appoach that wayland people had all along the way.
shevy-java
> Example: people wanting to keep X11 alive have been literally banned from the freedesktop.org infrastructure
Yeah - that has been my experience with ebassi etc... too. Also prior to that with Poettering. These people seem on a mission, a crusade. Anyone not conforming to this will be ignored or isolated/banned.
happymellon
Probably a better reference.
https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/12/the_price_of_software...
> fascistoid appoach that wayland people had all along the way
Ironic to promote a far right dev, and demonizing folks who are sick of his shit.
shevy-java
Interestingly this becomes increasingly common. See DHH suddenly promoting a "pure" society in the UK while supporting the Shopify CEO, who in turns supports Trump. Recently Shopify also pulled rank in the ruby ecosystem; as a consequence the ruby core team seized power over rubygems + butler and evicted all former devs at the same time. Before that they went for arbitrary 100.000 download limits (I told them I don't agree that they disallow me from pulling my own projects; they did not listen so I removed my account at once - github doesn't hijack my projects like rubygems.org under shopify/RubyCentral control) or wanted to have mandatory 2FA for everyone. This is a corporate take-over - both in the ruby-ecosystem as well as GTK/GNOME. KDE also is going that way - see the "donate now" daemon, as well as Nate after that pocketing money for himself only: https://jriddell.org/2025/09/14/adios-chicos-25-years-of-kde...
Nate's attempt to defuse this failed dramatically. People become more and more problematic in open source. Many open source projects are turned into personal money-pots for a few, or straight up corporate-controlled shills. I miss the oldschool days here. Those things rarely happened from 2000 to 2010. Now they are suddenly widespread.
Edit: And, DHH sitting on Shopify board and leveraging it for more top-down control at the same time. Watch how former shopify employees jump out of nowhere telling you "we have no such bias", which is hilarious. They never admit to having signed any NDA, for instance; they will simply ignore this question if you ask them.
lousken
Wayland is still years away from usable state. You still can't even autotype keepassxc passwords and there are still no good solutions for remote desktop sessions (at least I have not found any last time i checked)
confirmmesenpai
Hyper-V connects to a VM desktop using XRDP which uses X. Will that stuff still work? Can you still use gnome through XRDP?
pseudalopex
They expect you to use GNOME Remote Desktop instead I think.
shevy-java
The GNOME/GTK devs are on a mission - they fight down all xorg users.
That's not good.
Being a GNOME thing, I imagine they'll eventually drop Wayland support too so as to not confuse users with options.
(/s in this case, I'm actually all for dropping X11)