Gnome Mutter Now "Completely Drops the Whole X11 Back End"

https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNOME-Mutter-Drops-X11

by throwaway7489 • 9 months ago

40 72 9 months ago

A decade of a their trademark hard line "you're holding it wrong" ethos will likely already have driven away what people might object to this sort of change.

tokai• 9 months ago

Anti-Gnome people really need to get over it. We get it, just don't use their software.

philipallstar• 9 months ago

I think you misread that comment.

thisonetimeonly• 9 months ago

It’s just the way, innit? People love to (rightly) bump their chest and say Linux is great for how customisable and open it is, but then go bananas the moment one software decides to do something different.

“Openness, customisation and freedom of choice are great—unless you are offering a software that doesn’t behave exactly like we want it to, then it should not exist as option for anyone, ever.”

throwmeaway307• 9 months ago

until they suddenly drop the other not-their software. as they've done to X11

reidrac• 9 months ago

I've never believed on that dichotomy: either you are happy with everything a project does, or you are a hater. Why?

That was precisely what drove me away from the project after many years.

I don't use the software anymore and, for the most part, no changes they make affect me, but Gonome 3 should be treated as an example of an awful way of driving change by burning bridges and hurting the community.

I haven't thought about this for many years now, but I would have expected RH to do better.

ragnese5• 9 months ago

Probably yes. And, good. It's free software. I still use GNOME Shell, and the minute the make a change that I don't want to deal with, I'll change to something else. Easy as that.

neilv5• 9 months ago

I had to look up what "Gnome Mutter" is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutter_(software)

Mutter is a window manager initially designed and implemented for the X Window System, but then evolved to be a display server ("Wayland compositor"). It became the default window manager in GNOME 3,

Gnome alienated some developers around the time of GTK 3, and there have sometimes been regressions, and some opinionated unconventional design choices that everyone else was stuck with. (At the same time there was much positive benefits from the efforts.)

Even though I don't use the default Gnome desktop on most of my systems (I usually prefer XMonad or i3wm atop X11), I still end up using applications programs written to GTK and Gnome libraries.

Maybe this even harder push by Gnome on Wayland will drive even more effort into the alternative software, and continue to fuel the healthy competition that (for better or worst) the Linux desktop is stuck with.

HeinzStuckeIt2• 9 months ago

How many X11 holdouts are still around, really? I'm a curmudgeonly old man fond of old tech, but I have still had a Wayland-only setup since early 2020; once Sway was there as a good tiling window manager, and Emacs got its Wayland-ready pure-gtk branch, there was no need to look back.

I of course see people here and there on forums express discontent, but I don't think that demographic is big enough to drive both significant development and the adoption that makes development sustainable.

yjftsjthsd-h3• 9 months ago

The trick is: If you use any sort of a11y tools, it's really hard to move to wayland. Things are improving, but it's slow going.

phantasmish• 9 months ago

SteamDeck's desktop mode was X11, last I checked.

zahlman• 9 months ago

If you are on for example Mint, X11 is chosen for you and will probably be for a few years to come. There is an experimental Cinnamon Wayland session, though.

shevy-java4• 9 months ago

Which demographic do you evaluate? Because I am clearly among the xorg users. I don't even use systemd either.

graemep• 9 months ago

I still find Wayland to be buggier than X11.

it seems to have better display scaling which is useful when I switch between large monitor and laptop screen.

neilv5• 9 months ago

I'm personally open to Wayland, and able to move to it (and sometimes have, though once I had to back it out because it was breaking too much in a critical factory embedded appliance) (and XMonad works noticeably better for me than i3wm/Sway). But not everyone can move to it.

Wayland is only one of the many Gnome desktop feature and technical decisions that not everyone agrees with. Some decisions are regressions, and outright defective, for years and counting.

There's an awkward situation, in which the companies paying for the programmers effectively get to decide, and the governance doesn't necessarily reflect the user base. But, like "they who has the gold, makes the rules", they who does the work...

So the healthy competition comes in when someone someone can afford to spend time to build alternatives. Sometimes expending effort just to undo changes of someone else, on a fork.

For example, when Gnome decided to take the desktop behavior in their own creative direction, the Cinnamon project gave everyone back a more familiar and intuitive desktop, which continued to work with all the application programs that people had been using.

(Strangely, Cinnamon seems more an enterprise-desktop look&feel drop-in replacement than the default Gnome desktop. When I would've guessed Gnome corporate funders would've been focused on getting Linux desktop on corporate desktop as their first priority, and then second priority would be mobile. But I don't see the default Gnome desktop getting them either. Cinnamon, on the other hand, is immediately usable by any corporate worker who's used any Microsoft desktop since Windows 95.)

iamnothere4• 9 months ago

There are a few. There is still some software that has trouble with XWayland, which could hold back some users, and there are many who aren’t happy with the state of accessibility tools. But I don’t think this justifies the hatred towards it, as it’s not like these issues are unfixable. (Wayland now works better than X for me on all of my systems.)

It’s really disappointing how often disagreements in the open source world turn into religious wars. I think it’s because so many would rather yell and scream than contribute a single line of code. So much wasted energy.

invsblduck• 9 months ago

I'm a curmudgeonly old man fond of old tech, but I have still had a Wayland-only setup since early 2020

You must not be that curmudgeonly! I haven't tried Wayland yet, and so long as people are still arguing about it, I'm too afraid to even try it. :-)

p0nce• 9 months ago

The whole audio plugin field is on X11 for formats reason

pmarin• 9 months ago

I don't use a compositor in XOrg.

MarsIronPI• 9 months ago

For me at least, Emacs' pure GTK port isn't enough! You'll have to pry EXWM[0] from my cold, dead hands, so until Emacs can act as a Wayland compositor I'm staying on X. That and also Wayland still doesn't seem to support Hyper as an independent modifier.

[0] https://github.com/emacs-exwm/exwm

hulitu3• 9 months ago

How many X11 holdouts are still around, really?

A lot. I have no idea how to start "Wayland" on Slackware. I use FVWM.

OTOH, i saw Wayland in Tails. It is slow and ugly as hell, window managent is nonexistent.

znpy4• 9 months ago

Maybe this even harder push by Gnome on Wayland will drive even more effort into the alternative software, and continue to fuel the healthy competition that (for better or worst) the Linux desktop is stuck with.

Competition in this space has been everything except healthy. Wayland people have been essentially sabotaging X11 development.

Example: people wanting to keep X11 alive have been literally banned from the freedesktop.org infrastructure: https://linuxiac.com/xlibre-xserver-project-plans-revival-of...

In a dramatic turn of events, Red Hat employees banned developer Enrico Weigelt from the freedesktop.org infrastructure. Weigelt’s account, repositories, tickets, and merge requests (more than 140) associated with the Xorg project were also abruptly deleted. As a result of these actions, in a message titled “History repeats: Redhat censored me on freedesktop.org,”.

(more in the link).

As somebody that has a functioning desktop environment (XFCE) and that doesn't bother much with new stuff, this is incredibly annoying, as the Wayland people have been breaking the linux desktop for everybody while pushing for incomplete alternatives (case in point: another comment to this same thread: wayland breaks accessibility: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45824341 - they should have first developed it AND THEN push for it but no, they had to push incomplete and non functional garbage down everybody's throat).

I'm not really against Wayland per se, I'm against the fascistoid appoach that wayland people had all along the way.

happymellon2• 9 months ago

Probably a better reference.

https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/12/the_price_of_software...

fascistoid appoach that wayland people had all along the way

Ironic to promote a far right dev, and demonizing folks who are sick of his shit.

shevy-java4• 9 months ago

Example: people wanting to keep X11 alive have been literally banned from the freedesktop.org infrastructure

Yeah - that has been my experience with ebassi etc... too. Also prior to that with Poettering. These people seem on a mission, a crusade. Anyone not conforming to this will be ignored or isolated/banned.

microtonal• 9 months ago

fuel the healthy competition is a really positive spin on even more fragmentation. It's sad how Linux desktop eats itself.

GNOME is a perpetrator as well. I usually check the GNOME release notes (since I use GNOME on my NixOS laptop) and on a semi-regular basis there is a note that says: replaced app X by a completely new rewrite Y. And there is still no support for basic things like marking up/annotating a screenshot, even though the basic image viewer has been rewritten N times (anyone remember Electric Eyes?).

neilv5• 9 months ago

I think "healthy competition" is the most productive way to look at it, given the situation.

With the history of unclear alignment, it would be foolish for everyone to rely on Gnome.

But there's a ton of investment and value in that platform. (Much of it before Gnome even started, but now under the Gnome umbrella.)

So "competition" has been giving us alternatives.

Maybe ongoing competition will help keep pressure on Gnome, to be closer to aligned with the user bases.

shevy-java4• 9 months ago

I think the GNOME/GTK devs alienated numerous devs. I tried to talk to ebassi but he censored me on reddit as a consequence. He does not like people speaking up against what the GTK devs do.

I have no hope for GTK. It is a GNOMEy toolkit now.

hulitu3• 9 months ago

I have no hope for GTK. It is a GNOMEy toolkit now.

G(nome)T(ool)K(it). It always was. It is a CADT program: every new version is a complete and incompatible implementation of the old version.

lousken3• 9 months ago

Wayland is still years away from usable state. You still can't even autotype keepassxc passwords and there are still no good solutions for remote desktop sessions (at least I have not found any last time i checked)

bigyabai• 9 months ago

Those are fair criticisms, but neither one of them is a dealbreaker for any OS that I use on a regular basis. As such, most Wayland sessions are perfectly usable to me.

lousken3• 9 months ago

I am saying that, because it is a dealbreaker for me, as I have to login tens of times every day across different companies. Wish Yubikey and webauthn was implemented by everyone already

saturn_vk2• 9 months ago

Wayland is still years away from usable state

… for you, surely. I’m sure there are some wayland users.

autotype keepassxc passwords

What is that?

remote desktop sessions

IIRC, gnome comes with an ootb RDP solution that, last I tried, worked as advertised. I’m not a big remote user though.

throwaway7489• 9 months ago

What is that?

I believe they refer to KeePassXC's autofill feature, which autotypes credentials into other applications. I've never used this in X and won't use it on Wayland, as I prefer to keep all applications isolated.

I Ctrl-C to copy and then manually paste the password. Wayland is better for this method because I know the clipboard is cleared once I close KeePassXC.

sharts• 9 months ago

Perhap Claude, Gemini, and Codex will finally make things come along sooner than later

ranger_danger• 9 months ago

rustdesk supports wayland

shevy-java4• 9 months ago

The GNOME/GTK devs are on a mission - they fight down all xorg users.

That's not good.

saturn_vk2• 9 months ago

There are dozens of you. Dozens!

confirmmesenpai• 9 months ago

Hyper-V connects to a VM desktop using XRDP which uses X. Will that stuff still work? Can you still use gnome through XRDP?

pseudalopex5• 9 months ago

They expect you to use GNOME Remote Desktop instead I think.

chuckadams• 9 months ago

Being a GNOME thing, I imagine they'll eventually drop Wayland support too so as to not confuse users with options.

(/s in this case, I'm actually all for dropping X11)

stuaxo• 9 months ago

Really hoping window focus gets fixed, its been broken for me for about a year now, windows come up behind the one I'm using, end up typing into the wrong one etc.

Gnome Mutter Now "Completely Drops the Whole X11 Back End"

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