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.
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?
@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.
I think that could be solved with a XDG portal
@possiblylinux127 That would definitely be part of it, I assume. Does Wayland already track text rendering and its contents?
Because somehow text from any UI would need to be detected.
The actual implementation would be per desktop. The desktop draws to the screen and then the apps connect to the desktop. We already have a window capture XDG portal that is used by things like OBS. We could huild a simular portal for just text on the screen. We would just need some way of either recognizing text or even better some sort of image to text engine like what is in Firefox.
Are you saying to use an image to text engine just for what are text fields in applications? That sounds horribly inefficient…
XOrg is my daily driver for these reasons:
That being said, I have no fundamental opposition to Wayland, and will probably use it someday.
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.
@Furycd001@fosstodon.org
@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…
I totally expect one day a XFCE (Wayland) option will show up, I will click it, forget I did, and use it forever more.
https://wiki.xfce.org/releng/wayland_roadmap
@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…
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.
Proper screen sharing and xclicker is Why I occasionally switch back to X
Have you tried using ydotool or other wayland alternatives to xclicker? Last I used it, ydotool ran great.