With the many issues I still have running a wayland session on NVidia I am really confused by these recent moves of various projects and distros dropping X11 support.
There will be enough people asking this as a joke, but I am very serious. Is it actually time to move on from X11 for everyone?
I have been using linux since a couple months after Linus put the first bits of code on an ftp. I have been mainlining it since 1999 and it has been my entire career since 2009.
I have been through all the iterations. The svsV’s, the runits, the systemd’s. And while I don’t enjoy a ton of change I did get over it for all of these and still feel ‘at home’.
But for wayland? I have never even tried. I just see everyone saying you are fucked if you have X or Y hardware, or if you require A or B legacy workflows.
Is NOW really the time for old codgers to give it a serious go?
wayland is the norm at this point. The distros still on X11 are mostly the slow moving ones, but I would say we are on the trailing end of adoption now overall.
Wayland is still lacking features, and due to its newness also lacking documentation and tools available for X11.
But those are looking like more of a specialty application for X11. The main painpoints are gone.The hardware (gpu) situation is fine to my knowledge, drivers have caught up. 10+ year old Nvidia cards (like a gtx 780) may need nouveau, but not sure if even that is still the case.
Some workflow stuff is just now appearing (like restoring the window positions when a program restarts) or still missing (like some custom input scripting functionality), this also impacts accessibility.
As an example I used to have a script that would input ctrl+pgup/pgdn into the window under my cursor without changing focus, so I could change pages the same way I can scroll in unfocused windows. That was done with some x tools for setting focus and sending keyinputs. It’s possible to input keys with root permission under wayland, but changing focus from a script is not possible to my knowledge.This is all important stuff, but something most people won’t run into, and many more (like me) will accept as a tradeoff for the many advantages of wayland. Doubtless the protocol side will eventually implement apis for all of those missing features, and the tools making use of them will become widely known same as X11 used to be.
That is one heck of a reply. Thank you kindly for your time.
I had a look around and none of my weird little pocket scripts interact directly with X anymore.
And it looks like an easy decision to reverse with just a session swap, so why not.
Thanks for the push.
I’m not sure for all use cases, I can confidently say that if you depend on networking features of X or something like xrdp (Like me lol) then that’s going to be a solid NO
But if not, then maybe?
Oh good. It’s probably a good time to start moving on.
Oh, is Wayland working now?
Yes
What about mir?
Mir was deorbited in 2001, you gotta let go.
Everyone but Canonical already dropped any support for Mir in early 2010’s
Mir wasn’t adopted and is now a Wayland compositor.
Wayland is a buggy mess, but folks get to choose what they prefer. That’s the point in not being windows.
