It depends on whether their reasons for "absolutely having to have X11" hinge on actual compatibility with e.g. old binaries or wanting full remoting without streaming pixels.

This project would satisfy people who really actually want Wayland, but were upset by transitional pains or interactions they had around it and want to stick with X11 just-cause while getting some similar benefits. This arguably does describe some people but not sure it's a whole lot in the long run.

But who knows, maybe this could also make an easier to maintain XWayland some day, or a nice basis for implementing more esoteric X11 bits down the road vs. the older Xorg codebase.

Until Wayland actually has an accesibility story, X is really the only choice. Don't think most grassroots projects will have that.

I’m not sure this satisfies X11 needs without remote display capability.

Long term if x11 starts having issues then probably https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayback/wayback will be it

The people who absolutely have to have X11 like myself usually have reasons. It sounds like currently a lot of those reasons for using X11 would prevent using this X server. Like reliable non-fragmented and widely supported screenreader protocol. Or the ability to do keyboard and mouse sharing.

>Applications will be isolated from each other by default and can only interact with other applications either through a GUI prompt asking for permission, such as with screen recorders, where it will only be allowed to record the window specified or by explicitly giving the application permission before launched (such as a window manager or external compositor).

My rpi dashboards are gonna love it

People who want to use X11 are likely to be the same people using older software and hardware, which this doesn't support.

I consider Wayland's choices reasonable as well. I.e. I it's not surprising that a reasonable attempt to clean up X ends up looking similar to Wayland, just in a slightly different place on the xy graph that has backwards compat and cleanup as its axis.

It's a great name but way overused. I guess everything these days rose from ashes of past failures. Sector is highly competitive.

I don’t think the problem was with “phoenix”.

It was Project Phoenix (resurrection of the Netscape browser). This resulted in the Firebird browser (Firebird and Thunderbird). But Firebird was an existing database that objected to the name. So, we got Firefox instead.

At least that is how I remember it.

It was always an option, but "just" needed someone to dedicate all their time to it and pull in a group of long term maintainers. The real question is what will happen with the project in 2 years and will it be stable for day to day use.

I thought this too and originally thought that’s what Wayland was going to do but it went off and did its own thing.

I’m all for an X12.

Ads in the start menu, forced screenshotting of all your activity, and AI integration in every aspect of the desktop experience.

> If you took people who absolutely never tried any computing, and gave them macos, windows, and for example Plasma, they would NOT consider windows or macos to be ready for the desktop.

There's some truth to this. I've been installing fresh Windows 11s on family computers this holiday season, and good lord is it difficult to use.

The number of tweaks I had to configure to prevent actively hostile programs from ravaging disk read/writes (HDD pain), freezing and crashing, or invasive popups was absurd.

> You can perhaps install various weird third party things, but it does not come with it by default.

A Window Manager and Window Server don't come by default with Linux... It's always an install-time option on the major distros.

> even in the early 2000s, windows was so hilariously crappy that you had to make floppy disks to even get to install the thing.

Windows in the early 2000s installed just fine without a floppy directly from CD or PXE booting.

As someone who came from Windows, and has used Linux as my primary OS for 15 years, and MacOS here and there (cos work provided laptop), I can tell you that Linux was not ready for prime time 15 years ago. Today, I feel it is, but definitely not 15 years ago.

15 years back people were given Windows macOS and Linux and people voted which OS were ready for the Desktop and which were not. The only BS is your inflammatory contribution to this topic.

> windows and macos cant even do proper window managing for a start

Well they certainly manage them better than x11 and wayland. What a fucking nuts thing to say. Are you rms?

I can’t tell if this is satire.

Accessibility is apparently a big problem with wayland. E.g., the most popular / ?only? app that supports hardware eye trackers on Linux does not work with wayland, and states that it likely never will as wayland does not provide what it needs to add support (it is also the most popular app for voice/noise control). Even basic things like screen readers are apparently still an issue with wayland. Without a strong accessibility story, systems running wayland would have been banned at my last employer (a college).

Personally, I have a 3200x2400 e-ink monitor that has a bezel that covers the outer few columns of pixels. I use a custom modeline to exclude those columns from use. And, a fractional scaling of .603x.5 on this now 3184x2400 monitor to get 1920x1200 effective resolution. Zero idea how to accomplish this with wayland-- I do not think it is possible, but if anyone knows a way, I am all ears.

I ran into, at least, ten issues without solutions/work-arounds (like the issue with my monitor) when I tried to switch this year, after getting a new laptop. Reverted to a functional, and productively familiar, setup with X.

Headless remote desktop, at least for KDE, is very much not possible today as far as I can tell. It's the last thing I miss from Xorg.

Autoclickers and screen macros on Wayland are all janky

Which one? The Gnome Wayland, the KDE Wayland, the xroots wayland, Weston, or one of the others? Each one is an independent implementation of a Wayland compositor, with a differing, incompatible set of extensions.

X11 was a single, pretty janky implementation. Wayland is the worst of both worlds -- it's cleaned up a little, but it's still kinda janky. In exchange for a little bit of cleanup, mainly around bitmap fonts, it's no longer a unified protocol.

And to top it off -- it kept the worst part of the X11 protocol, the XKB extension, but got rid of input handling entirely, which means that every platform needs to reach for platform specific code to implement reading from the mouse and keyboard.

Yay.

This is the worst argument ever. The choices in the Linux community is what's made it the best OS in the world today.

> The choices in the Linux ecosystem lead to unnecessary fragmentation and development/packaging nightmares.

You cannot possibly use this as an argument in Wayland's favor. X11 sucked because it baked everything, including multiple outdated kitchen sinks, into a single Xorg monolith. Wayland sucks because it factors out everything, including really important features, into optional extensions, ensuring that anything more interesting than "draw pixels to a window" will always be different on every single compositor.

The *original* X11 should die, but the modern Linux GUI stack has long abandoned most of its features anyway. X11 was already reduced to a bit-blitter protocol long before Wayland.

So, in theory, we can embrace a rather-minimal X11 implementation that can run the modern UI, including some desktop features missing in Wayland.

Is this why back in the day sometimes a Linux distro would have a multi-monitor setup where each monitor was an actual different desktop cube for example. There was a time when each window for an Nvidia graphics card in that type of configuration could not be moved from one screen to another, etc.

If the goal was to reduce latency, wouldn’t you want the desktop compositor out of the way when vsync is on?

(tangent)

This is true, although entertainingly, the "server" part has always been easily confused.

In X11, the "server" runs on your local machine, and the "client" frequently runs on a remote system.

It talks about trimming 'legacy' features and specifically says they are omitting 'font-related' operations. That obviously means no useful core X11 application will work (unless you count xlogo and xeyes). Whether the XRender glyph cache mechanism is included is unclear. It also says only DRI is *currently* supported, but maybe that's incidental?

Yeah but wayback doesn't lend itself to the "omg my x11 I could neverrrrr :huff-emoji: :huff-emoji:" hysteria.

That's all this comes down to. Every single fucking last thread about Wayland on HN is this way. Every fucking last one. Tall about the vocal minority. Just absurdity.

You have accessibility complaints and don't care about the coordinated efforts across toolkits to make a material improvement? Okay. But every single god damn other issue is a distro issue and people on HN insisting their Linux trial 10 years ago is still authoritative today. Fucking ridiculous.

Early contributor to sway and cosmic, most of the Wayland complaints you read are handwave-y bullshit, idk what else to say.