* https://www.xquartz.org/releases/bare/XQuartz-2.8.6.html
Previously 2.8.5 was out in 2023:
* https://www.xquartz.org/releases/bare/XQuartz-2.8.5.html
There's a XQuartz 2.8.7 beta as well (xorg-server 26.1 rebase):
> OSI approved Yes
OTOH, RedHat seems happy to let X die.
I've been using Linux for around 2 decades. I am currently running Fedora 43/KDE Plasma ... and wait for it ... Xorg.
Why? Because it works. It works well!
Why don't I use Wayland? Because it breaks everything.
- Screensharing is just wonky and inconsistent across applications. It has gotten better in the last 2 years, but it's still quite wonky. And janky. And flobby. I **could** put effort into fixing this, but it already works in Xorg.
- I have a bunch of Xorg/xdotool scripts bound to hotkeys. Move, resize windows. If AppX is running and the window isn't shown, show it; otherwise, hide it. If AppX and AppY are both running and meta+y is pressed, then tile in a specific way, else do something different. These scripts are either ungodly difficult to rewrite to work in Wayland or just flat-out impossible in the name of "security".
- Easystroke. https://github.com/mmh0000/easystroke . Nothing like that exists on Wayland (that actually works). And I can not live without it after having it for 20 years.I'm all for people switching to wayland but there should be choice and xorg should not be neglected for ideological reasons.
You are free to spend your own time and resources doing the work, but you don't get to dictate how other people spend theirs.
Wayland is the complete opposite of modular; that's why the compositor has to handle everything. The claimed problem with X11 was it was too modular, easy for different clients to control various aspects of the environment, but perhaps too easy, lacking a security policy framework to limit client access. (Or at least a framework that was fully baked. Wayland ended put an end to such initiatives.)
The lack of modularity in Wayland has been widening the rift between the desktop environments. It's as-if KDE and GNOME each forked X11 and went their own ways.
Looks like there's no way you can avoid "conspiracy theorists" if you want to use X, including Xwayland, eh?
I'm not some anti-wayland zealot but you will pry xfce out of my cold dead hands.
Hard same. I'm using xfce on my laptop with mint xfce edition, and it's a breath of fresh air. Everything just works how you'd expect it to work, and it gets out of your way.
I tried sway a couple years ago and I lost count of the number of things I needed to go and find wayland specific workarounds for. I know things have gotten better since then, but I didn't see any benefit to switching and a whole lot of hassle.
Wayland is now about 18 years old. So, by Wayland standards, only 3 more years until it, too, will be obsolete and need to be replaced.
That day can't come soon enough. :D
Maybe the next one will actually be able to do the things I need a display system to do. Until then, at least we've still got X11. And Wayland has taught everyone all sorts of things about what not to do.
For the life of me, I'll never understand how wayland got traction with the community.
'Hey guys, we decided to implement a display server from scratch! We broke a ton of existing functionality and made a ton of low level stuff that X used to handle the responsibility of WM/DE devs!'
My theory about the motivation behind the extra security is that it's largely driven by corporations wanting to make desktop Linux less free and less open, and normalize proprietary software instead of open-source. Because profit. Proprietary software is inherently not trustworthy, so the execution environment needs extra security and restrictions, and must be generally less powerful to reduce the damage it can do. Essentially, proprietary software needs the same precautions as malware. So the corps needed to "androidify" desktop Linux. Hence the change from curated distro package repositories to corporate app stores, and the reason why there's so much money pushing to replace X11 with Wayland.
In an open-source ecosystem, users and developers are one and the same, or at least on the same "side", cooperating with each other to make tools which work as well as possible for everyone. Each big program tends to be a collaborative effort where a lot of people contribute to make things better for everyone. Things mostly "just work" and people can typically trust their computers not to do anything weird or hostile.
Very different than a proprietary commercial ecosystem, where users and developers have more of an adversarial relationship. Each program tends to be created in a closed silo by one person or a relatively small team, and is designed primarily to extract money from users, with all other concerns being secondary. It is very common for profit-driven developers to engage in deceptive practices, or do things the user doesn't want, like showing advertisements, collecting and selling data, sabotaging products from competitors, using the device as a node in a botnet or secret compute farm, forcing unwanted updates, microtransactions or subscription fees, etc. So nothing can be trusted, and the entire system needs extensive protections against every type of misbehavior imaginable... even if that means reducing the power and features available to the user.
I've really enjoyed the past few decades of living entirely in the open-source world, where those problems pretty much just don't exist. But with corps pushing the androidification of desktop Linux, I fear those days may be coming to an end.
Linux security inside a user's session is bad in general. It all started in the '90s from the principle that all installed software is FOSS, sources inspected, and compiled distro packages trusted.
- Permissions are per-user, not per-app. If I ever need permissions to something, every app I run gets the same permissions.
- No isolation for personal files. Any app running as me can read all of them. Bookmarks, firefox passwords, everything.
- No per-app firewall mechanisms. Any app can call home and send user's files, including those passwords.
- System events are broadcasted via dbus to any app wanting to listen to them.
Not a problem for obviously-correct changes of a couple of lines, but most PRs aren't like that.
Open source developers are not required to spend their time prioritizing your priorities. You just have to look to Xlibre to see that a lot of contributions are quite bad quality, and in a C codebase of Xorg's complexity and security profile it's not a small job to review things.
As it is, the community got constantly browbeat with 'this is the future' and 'it's so much faster!' when recent benchmarks have proven that to be false.
You'll probably find it to be a not great experience, since almost all the people who spend their time actually working on graphics and GUIs in the Linux world prefer to work on Wayland. So X doesn't get much love these days (and you're not entitled to their efforts after all). But it's not like they erased all the old X code from existence.
I'm confused where I'm likely to be suffering. If I start using Wayland tomorrow would I even notice? Apart from having to switch DEs, of course.
A lot of the "existing functionality" that it broke has nothing to do with displays, it's stuff that got crammed into Xorg at some point whether it made sense or not.
I find it quite funny that many of the same people that rag on systemd and say it does too many things, are big fans of Xorg doing a bunch of things that "display server" probably should not be handling.
Even if Wayland was a "display server", it would still "remove existing functionality" if it meant that in any principled sense, because "display server" is only half of what Xorg does.
But sure, the transition was difficult and took a long time.
I, as an end user, do NOT care.
>A lot of the "existing functionality" that it broke has nothing to do with displays, it's stuff that got crammed into Xorg at some point whether it made sense or not.
I also don't care about ivory tower ideals of what is within the dominion of 'display' and what is not. The fact of the matter is their changes broke a ton of functionality, and instead of even trying to provide feature parity, they basically dumped all that responsibility onto the WM/DE devs.
I have no idea why the community didn't take one look at their proposal and flatly ignore them.
In other words, the Wayland people should perhaps have defined official protocol extensions early on to cover most of what X did, thus preventing all the initial interop issues when Gnome and KDE and Sway tried to reinvent them independently.
1. Add GBM to graphics drivers and start working it up the stack from the bottom, stopping at Xorg. That is, make rootful XWayland the standard Xorg before standalone even is a thing. This reduces maintenance work up front rather than belatedly.
2.a. Implement weston as a standalone compositor.
2.b. Actually make weston fully functional. Figure out everything needed to provide an actual working desktop environment with the features that users expect out of the box. Standardize all the protocols needed for at least a basic XFCE-ish environment rather than hoping someone else will do it.
3. Then, only after these things are done and working, announce to the world that wayland, a quiet project that has until now explicitly suggested nobody use it, is now the future of linux graphical systems and everyone should plan to migrate.
Can it do new things? Eh, probably not. Do I need it to do new things? Not really.
Sure Xwayland exists and mostly (not entirely) works, but that's a band-aid for what is essentially a "we broke it and don't care" approach.
For what it's worth Xorg is the display server, before that it was XFree86, there was also Xsgi and Xsun and for mac Xquartz, I even saw a neat project once where the Xserver was in javascript, I am trying to find it again but our modern search engines are a bit shit. The point being all of these can interoperate with one another.
Around computers it is difficult to find the correct unit of time to
measure progress. Some cathedrals took a century to complete. Can you
imagine the grandeur and scope of a program that would take as long?
-- Epigrams in Programming, ACM SIGPLAN Sept. 1982
Bailey: Wayland replaces Xorg
Motte: Wayland is just a protocol
> because "display server" is only half of what Xorg does.
Yes, that's a big part of the problem. X was build for I/O, Wayland was built for O and had to be dragged kicking and screaming into rudimentary I.
This is a huge part of what "user/dev hostile" means in my book; with Wayland, getting a working desktop always someone else's responsibility, all features have to be reimplemented across DEs endlessly (with often-incompatible variations, of course), and they all blame each other and program authors for bugs while the Wayland project refuses to even acknowledge basic features like desktop automation or screen recording.
> But sure, the transition was difficult and took a long time.
And this irks me too, people are convinced they're done but I still don't have xmacro. And flameshot is broken, while the alternatives suck. And support for everything depends on the DE now. And java.awt.Robot is broken with no replacement. And the clipboard randomly misses copies. And OBS screen recording is broken for me. And there's no support for display resolution scaling. And ssh -X is gone, while waypipe doesn't work all programs.
But hey, at least there's HDR now or something! It was definitely worth replacing a functioning stack for this. I'm so glad that Plasma 6.8 removes X support!
Corporate drive. Originally sponsored by Intel followed by IBM (RedHat) and the rest followed suit.
> Kristian Høgsberg, I work at Intel in the graphics team in the Open Source Technology Center. I'm the founder and maintainer of the Wayland project.
You either pitch or bring it with you. Demonstrate a tech demo and you're granted an engineer or two. It's how Amiga came to be, Steve Jobs with NeXT.
And it appears you can no longer link anything from reddit without being asked to login and they've now nuked old.reddit
If you have an account this thread has some very insightful comments. https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1m0ztn/how_is_waylan...
There were only a few people willing to work on an alternative, and they didn't have to take a vote, so they just did what they wanted. Corporations and projects adopted it because they wanted something different, and it was the only other option.
Now that we have AI, it will be much easier for genuine community alternatives to emerge, even if we have to battle over the legal ramifications. I for one am willing to go without "official support" to have software that doesn't suck.
AwesomeWM for me. I've essentially fused with it. Warts and all.
I can't imagine life without AwesomeWM.
Arcan is looking like a very promising successor to the X protocol and Xorg server. It's not there yet, but it gets closer year after year.