X Windowing System is used in XWayland still.
X11Xorg is no longer needed. RIPX11Xorg, you served us well.Edit: Thanks to the note in the comments. I obvously meant Xorg is no longer needed, which is the widely used implementation of X11 protocol. This always confuses the hell out of me.
With Wayland, programs still can’t restore their window position or size. It sure would be nice if they could get basic functionality working.
Wayland is still incomplete, but that is besides the point I was making. X is still not dead, even living within XWayland, within Wayland. X11 is just one implementation of the X Protocol and XWayland is a new implementation.
Wayland itself is functional and working, just not 100% compatible to X11. The same could be said about X11, it would be nice if they could get some basic functionality working right; but they can’t, and that is why we need to replace it with something more modern and better. I think Wayland is working on a solution for restoring window position and size.
When X was created, there was no compatibility needed. Wayland on the other hand is in a different position, where it needs to innovate, make it more secure and keep as much as possible compatibility to X11, DEs and window managers. It’s just unfair to just say Wayland would not have basic functionality working. It also depends on the desktop environments and GNOME is often to blame for.
It will never be compatible with X because they are different designs. X relies on a central program (server) that accepts commands from programs. It is also a mess as it was built during the 80s for 80s hardware. It was expanded over time but you can only stretch the arch so far.
Wayland doesn’t have a server. You desktop talks to the hardware and then the desktop accepts connections from apps.
GNOME catching a devious stray there for no reason
That does not seem to be a stray and yes there’s definitely reasons to take potshots at Gnome. They still don’t support server-side decorations. Everyone is absolutely fine with them not wanting to use them in their own apps, have them draw window decorations themselves, and every other DE lets gnome apps do exactly that, but Gnome is steadfastly and pointlessly refusing to draw decorations for apps which don’t want to draw their own decorations. It’d be like a hundred straight-forward lines of code for them.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to breakage you have to expect when running Gnome.
Of course apps can and do restore their window sizes. Don’t spread misinformation
Oh noooooooo not a single QOL feature
And Wayland accessibility is very bad.
How come?
No screen readers for one thing since they can’t access other windows. You’ll find that most accessibility features require access to other windows in some manner.
lol, Wayland can’t even start a desktop session on my machine, whereas X11 has worked without issues since 2009 (the last time I ever had to edit xorg.conf).
Sure sounds like X11 is the one who’s “dead” around here!
Dead in the sense of development.
I thought this was obvious. But I explained it for you, here you go.(Edit: I forgot to be nice. )X11 is being actively developed, last commit on xserver was 7 hours ago, and it will probably continue being worked on for a long time
We even disagree on what “dead development” means. :D ( Edit: To add a bit substance to my reply, minimal maintenance is not actively developed in my books. )
And almost all (if not all of it) is done by redhat engineers which will drop it when rhel 8 or 9 (whichever one still supports xorg) goes end of life.
It’s not dead there either, although I’d make the argument that X11 as a project is “mature” or “finalized”, it doesn’t really need hyperactive development like the tiktok children are used to.
(There are very good arguments that a new software stack was needed, but I’d expect the result to at least do something; ATM Wayland is little more than literally a “everyone else do my work for me” project)
I argue that X11 would have hyperactive development, if we did not have Wayland (or Mir, before it turned into a Wayland compositor). There are at least two major fields that do not work perfectly and cannot be changed by simple updates, it needs rewrite from ground up: a) advanced multi-monitor handling of different kind of monitors at the same time, b) security issues related to keyloggers, as apps are not isolated. Nobody want to touch the X11 code for more than simple maintenance, no one wants to rewrite major portions or add new features.
We just need Wayland, as you already noted there are very good arguments. A complete new base with modern code and people developing for modern times and hardware just makes sense. Think about it, do you really want to have X11 going forward the next decades? It’s like holding to hard drives and saying its okay, there are no problems, and writing off SSDs.
I argue that X11 would have hyperactive development, if we did not have Wayland
Wayland was started by the X developers because they were sick and tired of hysterical raisins. Noone else volunteered to take over X, either, wayland devs are thus still stuck with maintaining XWayland themselves. I’m sure that at least a portion of the people shouting “but X just needs some work” at least had a look at the codebase, but then noped out of it – and subsequently stopped whining about the switch to Wayland.
What’s been a bit disappointing is DEs getting on the wayland train so late. A lot of the kinks could have been worked out way earlier if they had given their 2ct of feedback right from the start, instead of waiting 10 years to even start thinking about migrating.
Think about it, do you really want to have X11 going forward the next decades?
If the alternative is a new system that literally does nothing? Sure!
Want to present a menu for windows? Wayland: “lol, do it yourself”.
Want to position a window? Wayland: “lol, do it yourself”.
Want to remember that a window has a position? Wayland: “lol, do it yourself”.
Want to add a global keyboard shortcut? Wayland: “AAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!”
X11 may be old and whatever you want, but it works and it’s battle-tested. Wayland can’t even launch a full desktop session in my machine, which is even less than the failure Pulseaudio was back in its day and that’s saying something. And even if it did somehow launch, I probably would not be able to use anything serious like a media player or multiple workspaces on it.
If the alternative is a new system that literally does nothing? Sure!
You should read about Wayland. Doing nothing is absolutely wrong.
X11 may be old and whatever you want, but it works and it’s battle-tested.
It doesn’t work. There are parts of X11 which are broken. And you reply to a reply where I already listed 2 huge points, which are not even the only ones. And you ignore that X11/Xorg code is totally spaghetti, huge and has lot of old code that not everyone understands, because it has ton of workarounds to make it somehow half baked working on modern times. Nobody wants to work on the code, doing more than basic maintenance. And you should think about the future too, not just about yesterday and today on your personal computer. Think bigger. X11 is just not enough anymore going forward, for the next coming decades.
Wayland can’t even launch a full desktop session in my machine, which is even less than the failure Pulseaudio was back in its day and that’s saying something.
Are you on Gnome? Did you install Wayland on top of a running X11 system and did not configure it correctly? X11 doesn’t work on my machine too, because everything is Wayland configured. So whats your point? Off course one is not a 100% replacement. There will be changes, and both are incomplete and are not working 100% perfectly. The point of Wayland is not being 100% compatible with the setup you have for Xorg/X11. There are things like reading from keyboard on any application that is running is a security risk in X11. Wayland prevents that. Which in turn means that some programs (even important ones) won’t work. And they are working on a solution.
I switched to Wayland just end of last year and one of the reasons is that X11 does not handle multiple monitors well, if they have different sizes and refreshrates, especially if you add G-Sync and probably FreeSync on the other monitor. X11 is broken at that front.
Where’s my upstream explicit sync lads
Should all be in place. Even nvidia driver support. It’s one of the rare cases where I actually support nvidia on a technical level, that is, having explicit sync is good. I can also understand that they didn’t feel like implementing proper implicit sync (hence all the tearing etc) when it’s a technically inferior solution.
OTOH, they shouldn’t have bloody waited until now to get this through. Had they not ignored wayland for a literal decade this all could’ve been resolved before it became an issue for end-users.
Openbox here kek
Straight Outta Compton.
I have a feeling I will be on i3 for many many years given all the issues that I’ve had with sway.
Have you tried hyprland
Yes, I spent a while reading the documentation on how to pin workspaces to certain monitors only for hyprland to tell me that it is deprecated.
Also an issue I noticed is that you can’t move floating windows between displays with the move left/right commands, move left/right moves the floating window to the left or right of the display and no more, meaning that the window gets stuck at the border of the display and doesn’t move more.
Also I couldn’t figure out how to make hyperland run several commands in a row with one keybind, or how to filter windows with expressions, something that I do a lot on my i3config .
And my biggest issue, and this one seems to be with wayland in general is that it seems that it is impossible to set my displays to extended more, that is turn the 3 displays that I have into a single display which I use with some games.
i3 isn’t perfect either, I actually had to fork it and apply a patch that fixes and issue that I have that hasn’t been merged yet either.
I will list all my issues with sway anyway, hopefully somebody out there notices it and fixes them:
https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/8000
https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/8001
https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/8002
https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/8191
And all these bugs are the result of less than 2 days in total of use of sway, there is likely more that I haven’t run into.
I also had an issue that affected xfce4 apps, but that issue ended up being a
dbus-brokerissue that only happens on wayland for some reason lolI have workspaces pinned to monitors in Hyprland and have none of the problems you mentioned. I use odd numbers for left screen and even numbers for right.
Edit: just took a look and can’t find mention of the depreciation; where did you read that?
hyperland itself told me that, I have a terrible picture (I didn’t setup screenshots lol) of it: https://imgur.com/a/fWwmt1e
This was right before yuzu closed down btw.
and have none of the problems you mentioned.
You can move floating windows between displays with the move left/right commands? (not the move to workspace commands).
edit: Found a related issue https://github.com/hyprwm/hyprland-wiki/issues/242
That’s just the way you write the rules being deprecated, not the functionality.
There is move left/right within a workspace, move to specific workspace and then move to next/previous workspace (from memory using e+1 as the workspace name in the command but might be misremembering). Admittedly this isn’t exactly the same as what you want; I replied from my mobile and checked when I went back to my desk. I usually use meta/shift/[num] to send to a specific workspace though as I make heavy use of them.
That’s just the way you write the rules being deprecated, not the functionality.
I didn’t say that it is impossible to do it, just that after I read the documentation it told me that.
Something that I couldn’t even find in the documentation was how to do several actions with one keybind, on i3 each action is separated by a comma and you can assign variables to them, for example:
$BIND $MOD+$SHFT+Mod2+KP_1 $MVTO $WS1, $WS1, $WDUNST "$WS1"Which means:
bindsym Mod4+Shift+Mod2+KP_1 move container to WorkSpace "1", WorkSpace "1", --no-startup-id dunstify -r 33 -t 600 "$WS1"In english that is move the focused window to workspace 1, focus workspace 1 and send a notification of the current workspace (the last one is for some visual feedback).
### Multiple binds to one key [](https://wiki.hyprland.org/Configuring/Binds/#multiple-binds-to-one-key) You can trigger multiple actions with one keybind by assigning multiple binds to one combination, e.g.: # to switch between windows in a floating workspace bind = SUPER,Tab,cyclenext, # change focus to another window bind = SUPER,Tab,bringactivetotop, # bring it to the top The keybinds will be executed in the order they were created. (top to bottom)
