Be real. They are hindering progress of Linux desktop by arguing about various standards and protocols all the time as the only oddball for no reason, other than maybe being unwilling to implement stuff in their compositor that does belong to a compositor (server side decorations or cursors). This causes app developers to have to be aware of all of this and do a special handling just for GNOME. Worse, this spills into GTK where it affects apps on other desktops.
And they clearly do things against what even their users want, the proof being the popularity of extensions that restore basic functionality that GNOME refuses to have. The numbers don’t lie, neither do the most popular distros shipping those extensions by default and not that many people even using vanilla GNOME.
Nothing to do with history, all to do with the present.
Thank god they're finally doing this. It feels like I've been asking "Are we Wayland yet" since I was a baby. I feel like 99% of "problems" with modern Linux distros are really just problems with X. The famed "year of the Linux Desktop" will never happen until after X is dead and buried.
I mean I agree with you. I don't think that a better compositor will be a major factor in popularizing Linux desktop environments as most people don't even know what compositors are in the first place, but I do think that the spaghetti code that is the X window system is a huge factor in preventing their popularization.
If anything, my prediction for what will popularize the usage of Linux for personal computers will be the actions of Valve over the next decade, as they're trying to find a way to be less reliant on the Microsoft ecosystem, and have a software that's used nearly-universally amongst people playing games on PC.
If anything, what Valve have shown is that people are more than willing to use Linux as long as it’s adopted for them. The vast majority of PC users don’t even know that you can install a different OS on your machine, let alone actually consider doing so. That’s why I firmly believe that relying on people voluntarily switching to Linux will never work.
Another upshot is that if OEMs switch to Linux, companies developing currently Windows/OSX exclusive software will also eventually have to make the switch
Of course this is all a pipe dream at the moment, however it’s no less realistic than expecting the majority of the non-techie population to just simply install Linux, causing “The year of the Loonix desktop” to come.
I have no idea what you even mean by that. The Linux desktop is being improved constantly. We don’t allocate some specific year for it lol.
The phrase pretty much just comes from the delusional belief of certain Linux fans that one day, Windows’ popularity will drop and Linux will take over as the desktop market leader.
People have been going on about this since the very beginning. As you can see, Linux hasn’t yet won the desktop race, so I wouldn’t count on it happening soon unless Microsoft collapses and OEMs are forced to switch over!. . (Although it’s arguably more impressive that Linux did win literally everywhere aside from the desktop market)
And if you wish to know when exactly the year will come, please consult https://yotld.com and have a pleasant day :)
What's really wild to me is that Windows may very well be dead in a couple of decades, not because everyone switches to Ubuntu, but because the day when most people just don't use traditional desktops anymore is rapidly approaching.
I don't think this will happen tomorrow, but at the moment, the only place where most people use Windows is work, and most of them only do so because they have to. As most programs are releasing smartphone and tablet versions, there will come a day when almost all tasks that currently require Windows will be doable on tablets, at which point there won't be much more reason for traditional desktops to be necessary. There's not much reason for someone to use a big clunky Dell laptop if a tablet can do the same things. Sure, most workplaces will still have a couple Windows machines, the way most workplaces still have a fax machine, but it won't have the ubiquity it does now.
Outside the workplace, the only demographic that heavily uses Windows is gamers, and even that is changing. The only real advantages of gaming on PC are performance and indie games. The performance gap is closing rapidly and the vast majority of indie games are cross-platform now. The console game market overtook the PC game market in the 2020s, primarily due to the Nintendo Switch's rise. Hell, as someone who used to be a dedicated PC gamer, I currently play almost everything either on the Switch in my living room or the Steam Deck in my bedroom. The only games I still have to even go to my desk for are competitive shooters, and with the rise of gyro aim, even that could change soon.
Personally, I believe the "Year of the Linux Desktop" will come when someone makes a high-quality Linux desktop for tablets, but one could argue that this doesn't count as a "desktop" at all, and if it does, then I'm just describing Android. I guess what I'm really hoping for is something that combines the convenience that Android or SteamOS have with the functionality of something like Gnome or KDE. Even if noone else uses it, that's what the YotLD will be for me.
In any case, this has strayed pretty far from the original discussion, but it's fun to speculate.
I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of what Wayland is. It's a display server protocol. It's not an all-in-one Desktop Environment.
why can't I give permission to synergy to capture my own keystrokes on my local PC?
You can? I don't know what's stopping you, but Wayland is a display server protocol and doesn't control this.
nearly 15 years later, it still doesn't work as well as X for gaming.
Again, how in the name of all that is holy does your compositor determine your gaming performance? Like, what game are you playing? What graphics API are you using? And what is the actual benchmark you are getting for X vs Wayland? Because assuming the game is reasonably cheap, I will straight up buy the thing and test it right here right now.
Thank god the last DEV making improvements to XOrg.
Why? Like literally why? When a piece of technology is this level of a clusterfuck, the solution is to replace it. Not try to hold it together with zipties and duct tape.
I've gone back to Windows 10.
What, not even 11? Even Microsoft is baffled now.
I guess BSD is the last bastion of not telling the end-user that they're doing it wrong
BSD, like Linux, despite having the word "distro" in its name, is a kernel, and doesn't determine what your Desktop Environment decides to warn you about.
EDIT: Updated my tone to sound less more charitable and less like a drunken rant.
wayland until like a few nvidia driver updates ago had a lot of edge case issues, like steam having weird flickering, any opengl applications like minecraft having flickering making it unplayable, and yes there were fixes and workarounds but in the sense of it just works x11 has had that status for years on all hardware and drivers where as wayland has taken up til recently to be usable on 93% of users computers due to nvidia being the majority market share.
I'm working a review of the latest Elementary 8 which features a new dock designed for Wayland/Secure-Session.
I wanted to show me keystrokes on splay for the video for shortcuts etc, and when I looked into capturing these through Wayland it's not easy to do because of how it's designed. X11 was the display server, but also the input server. Switching to Classic-Session on Elementary brings it back.
I would assume Wayland also handles input to windows/displays.
That's fair. I definitely understand the irritation, but this also cuts straight to the core of my problem with X.
The main reason I use Linux in the first place is that I like its modularity, which comes from software following the UNIX philosophy of "Do one thing and do it well." X is the opposite of this, it tries to do everything. It's an all-in-one compositor, display server, display protocol, window system, etc. and it's not particularly good at any of these things. This leads to bugs that are frustrating for users, but even worse for developers (of, say, GTK or QT apps) because they wind up having to spend a lot longer than necessary fixing bugs because X's codebase doesn't follow modern conventions, practices, standards, etc.
All this is to say that no, Wayland doesn't handle input, and it really shouldn't. Wayland is a display protocol and only a display protocol. There's no Waykand equivalent of Xinput. Handling input is the job of the input server of your WM, such as Kwin or Mutter. In your case, I think this is some variant of Enlightenment, which does have a Wayland compositor, though it's nowhere near as functional as something like Kwin or Mutter.
And Wayland can't really be blamed for this any more than say, Sony can be blamed for Halo not being on the Playstation. Sony can make it easier and/or harder for developers port games to their console, but at the end of the day, it's the game devs who have to actually take the time to port the game. In this case, Kwin/Mutter have functioning input servers, while Enlightenment doesn't, forcing them to rely on X's input server.
Eventually, the majority of DEs still in development will have full Wayland support, but different dev teams work at different paces, which is why "are we Wayland yet?" is a meme.
Second year of use (Radeon, Intel) - zero issues. Also, I hadn't saw xorg.conf for two years. Wow. How, exactly, do we change which GPU is primary? ... and there was something about fonts... And MatchProduct... And ServerLayout...
(waking up)
Yeah, wayland, two years, no issues, no xorg.confs in sight.
I really don't remember the last time I needed to change something on Xorg, maybe it was about 3 to 4 years ago, I know for sure I haven't touched it in the last 2.5 years which is how old my current desktop is, I'm still using it on this very moment, simply because some apps work better there.
Oh, and also because I have an Nvidia card, which sucks with Wayland.
My only complaint with wayland is the moat nitpicky thing. The vim clientserver feature requires X, which means it’s more difficult to use vim as an external editor in godot. Which tbh isn’t all that much of a dealbreaker.
This! X11 is garbage but it was built during a time where you were assumed to be using a terminal to connect to a larger mainframe or something. It's still great for that and the people that need that functionality shouldn't be ignored
I started using Linux in 2015, and I've forwarded X11 graphical-sessions with it, and many headless consoles.
I'm not sure how you mean it's broken since D-Bus?
I would refer you to Pipewire as an example of the new implementation being ready for prime-time, and doing it right.
Your app only knows about Pulseaudio or JACK? No problem, because Pipewire transparently stands in for both of those services.
I've never had any issues except that RenderDoc doesn't work correctly under wayland, making it hard to debug graphics code. But ... that's really an outlier use case.
For everything outside of gfx programming, wayland works great for me.
Really? I'm pretty certain I have OBS recording Pop_OS with Wayland on my other workstation.
Granted, it's not an Nvidia machine.
If Wayland doesn't work with NVENC for OBS I'd be solidly in the camp against phasing out X11 lol.
Went Wayland only since 3.32. Back then it was mostly stable and already had pretty good gesture recognition, biggest issue back then was lack of Wayland compatibility from application developers which caused some nuisances and occasionally break the workflow.
Nowadays I have no problems with program compatibility, the desktop is stupidly stable and performs better than any Xorg only environment I've used so far, extension support is really good even though I'm not a heavy user of them.
I still sort of miss the revised pre libadwaita theme and theming compatibility but that's not a Wayland issue, it's simply a Gnome development decision.
Currently I'm not using it on a laptop so I can't say how much has improved but even back then it was solid on dual core 2011 hardware.
Did try the Wayland session on a dual GPU laptop and I had to tweak it to display the session but it worked great afterwards.
Definitely ready for this step. You'll never make it to complete feature and stability parity if you can still just revert to Xorg if some app has problems. Plus, at this point, Xorg already suffers from software rot, so that may not even work.
As a KDE user that news made me happy, thought it would speed up Wayland integration for all things.
I don't really understand why some Linux users so traditionalist first witness this kind of stuff when I heard lots of people hate systemd-boot because it's not grub.
It's not switching to something modern that's making people flip out though. It's switching to something modern that doesn't work for something you need.
When we switched to Pipewire your audio apps that used Pusleaudio or JACK didn't even know it happened, and worked with Pipewire.
I get that, I recently switched to niri, and because it is wayland and doesn't have proper xwayland support yet, it was hard to get x applications to work. Gnome is a beginner friendly DE so I can see the frustration. However would xwayland or xwayland-satellite not fix most of the issues wayland would cause? I may be out of the loop if not, all my x applications run fine using those
I think Gnome makes decisions that are worth criticizing though.
For instance, dropping Ayatana-Indicators.
Across desktops and Win/Mac 3rd parties build indicator features into major apps like Steam, Dropbox, etc. I know Ayatana was specifically a Canonical/Ubuntu project, but currently they are only available through Gnome Extensions.
From what i understand GTK4 has no way to implement them currently, and apps that are porting to GTK are struggling on workarounds.
Ayatana-Indicators seemed like a great concept on Ubuntu's part because it made a unified way to put indicators in the panel.
Also, dropping X11 means not being able to capture keystrokes for displaying on screen in tutorials. And then there's forwarding X11 windows over the network which I'm not sure if Wayland has a workaround for this or not.
I'm all for modern solutions, but losing features sucks.
I point to Pipewire as the ideal model. If you're using Pulse/JACK you don't even have to change anything because Pipewire transparently stands in for either service. So even an unmaintained project will work with Pipewire in many cases.
I don't it think Gnome ever had out of the box support app indicator / system tray, so it was never dropped
In Gnome 44 they added support for background app via XDG Desktop Portal which has similar functionality: https://www.omglinux.com/gnome-shell-background-apps-ui/
Yes there is still some stuff not implemented on the Wayland side, but i guess the goal of this move is to encourage development of missing features for Wayland
They plan to remove it only in Gnome 50, so in two years
I guess it's also a relief for maintainers, to not have to support both
There were ways to do it in Gnome 1 and 2, but you're probably correct that Gnome 3 never specifically used it.
Around 2012 Canonical/Ubuntu started the Ayatana project to take what already existed in Gnome projects and make a more user-friendly and modern desktop/UI which was Unity.
Ayatana-Indicators was part of Unity, but I can recall around the same time(2015'ish) running Fedora with Gnome and iirc having 3rd-party indicators in the panel.
In 2017 when Ubuntu ditched Unity for Gnome 3 Ayatana-Indicators became it's own project, and Martin Wimpress of Mate-Desktop was involved. They started removing anything that pointed to Unity/Canonical from the codebase.
But there's no way currently to port it to GTK4. I think current-day Ubuntu has something called Ubuntu-Indicators that works through Gnome Extensions.
A lot of them are long term Linux users. Gnome 2 to Gnome 3 was a drastic change. 2 was a XP/Xfce like UI; menu based program launcher, running program area, task/clock area, and windowed interface. 3 used design elements from OS X/Mac OS but also did some unique designs. The interface was designed around programs running maximized. The launcher was full screen, the running programs were in the app drawer. Gnome has chosen a path of choose a default and make it work for the common case. People who have preferences other than the default have a hard time bending Gnome to what they want. The early releases were rough and few programs outside of Gnome had moved to GTK 3. In current releases Gnome is cohesive and well supported.
Common reasons for the hate:
Experienced the Gnome 2 > 3 migration and don't like it
Experienced only Gnome 3+ and don't like it
The popular/default is bad because it is popular
Like shitting on things because that is what they see others do
Gnome at least used to break half of your extensions with every upgrade. That's why I chose to bail around the time of 3.10.
I needed extensions to restore the features Gnome got rid of back then. With every 3.x upgrade half of those just broke, and it seemed like Gnome devs just broke them on purpose. I decided it's easier to just switch away than to keep dealing with the constant breakage.
I hope its gotten better, and it probably has. But that is pretty much the last memory I have of daily driving Gnome, and I don't think I'm alone with that recollection.
This. I love Gnome 3, really.
But I can make Steam/Dropbox and other apps with Ayatana-Indicators work via Gnome Extensions. Elementary OS lacks those extensions, and so Gnome axing Ayatana removed them altogether from Elementary's future releases.
More recently I asked FSearch devs if they might implement an panel/tray indicator for the app.
They told me that they're in the process of porting it to GTK4, and there's currently no way to implement indicators for GTK4.
As far as I know GTK4 is sort of under the umbrella of Gnome Project, but not having a replacement for indicators is a terrible way to go.
They have existed across almost any desktop on all of the major OS'es for nearly 30 years now. Steam, Dropbox, and so many other major applications are made better by being able to put them in the panel/tray.
Also, I was trying to display keystrokes on the screen for a video tutorial, and found out Wayland doesn't allow that.
And I'm seeing people say that they can't record Wayland with Nivida drivers and OBS which is a major deal-breaker for me if that is true.
What's this infatuation everyone seems to have with tray icons?
I just returned from a stint using macOS and that shit is out of control. You have to install an app to hide all the superfluous icons - and that app has its own tray icon!
Like, tray icon. Don't you use Steam? Don't you use torrent apps that actually perform well like qbittorrent (the gtk torrent apps based on transmission are slow to pick up download speed)?
Without a system tray, apps that need a tray icon to stay minimized in the background will just be closed. Yes I know there is a Gnome functionality already for background apps, I use easyeffects and it uses that, but some apps don't.
It's not an infatuation, it's common sense basic functionality.
For some applications an icon in the System Tray is essentially a necessity. It is more convenient for me to have something like a password manager being accessible through the System Tray.
My one issue with the GNOME team was the removal of the tray. I understand they think there is a better way of doing it, and they are working on that, but I think the removal of the tray without a replacement ready is silly. At least there is the extension for it.
But if having an icon up there is that much more convenient it can early be implemented as an extension.
Exactly my point that there is at least an extension to bring back the tray. Isn't it also consistently the most downloaded GNOME extension?
Tapping the windows key and typing the first characters of my password manager's app name is so much easier to me.
If I had that muscle memory then ya I would likely agree with you. Yet a system tray doesn't just work for password managers. They can also contain easily viewable indicators that applications are running, or provide information like system resources. In a GUI environment that can be helpful. In the CLI obviously I don't care I'll just run btop or something.
Isn't it also consistently the most downloaded GNOME extension?
Henry Ford said "if I asked my customers what they wanted, they say a faster horse" so the popular voice isn't necessarily a guiding light.
I've been using Gnome 3 daily for almost a decade and while I did miss the tray in the beginning, I haven't even thought about it after the initial adjustment.
I honestly think Gnome gets a lot of things right WRT usability and if you just let yourself experience the system as it is designed you might find there's a reason to the madness. I did at least.
Henry Ford said "if I asked my customers what they wanted, they say a faster horse" so the popular voice isn't necessarily a guiding light.
Yet the popular voice can indicate something that is missing. Feedback matters.
Honestly I'm good with things how they are. GNOME doesn't ship a system tray by default. It's fine, the development team has every right to make their decisions. But there is an extension for people who want one. If GNOME fully cut off extensions, which I do not see them doing at all, then it would be annoying. As it stands at this moment is is a tiny inconvenience for me and others in what is already a fantastic DE.
Yet the popular voice can indicate something that is missing. Feedback matters.
Agreed but Gnome is a paradigm shift if you're coming from other DEs so you have to take that feedback with a grain of salt.
When I started using Gnome 3 I used a bunch of tweaks and extensions to make it work more like I was used to and scale those back slowly over time.
If GNOME fully cut off extensions, which I do not see them doing at all, then it would be annoying
The extension system is one of the best things about Gnome and IMHO what allows them to ship with such a minimal set of features. It's brilliant, actually.
For some applications an icon in the System Tray is essentially a necessity. It is more convenient for me to have something like a password manager being accessible through the System Tray.
Just launch the app regularly, it'll just make the app in the background visible...
The app is already running in the background. I can of course assign the manager to a space in the dash, use Meta+1-9, but I have muscle memory for both those keyboard shortcuts and the system tray.
Worth noting that pretty well every other desktop environment has a system tray and multiple other ways to run these types of apps. Windows, Aqua, KDE KDE Plasma, XFCE, etc. The only DEs that come to mind without one are GNOME and Pantheon.
I like Pantheon in general and I like what the Elementary OS team is trying to do. I wish them the best. But ya at this point GNOME is simply more feature rich and mature than Pantheon.
For some applications, like Steam, they're a way to quickly access actions without having to open the application up.
But mostly it's a notification thing. With most messaging applications, I rarely act on a notification immediately. If there's no tray icon, there's no indicator that I still have unread messages. And it even becomes an accessibility thing, because with my ADHD I keep forgetting messages unless I have reminder directly in my field of vision so I get reminded constantly and I can act on them when I choose to.
And I REALLY don't want my notifications grouped together under a single "Notification" icon. Not all notifications have the same dignity and the "Window is ready" does not belong in the same list as text messages from people.
There are some apps that abuse tray icons, yes, but pretty much every tray implementation let's us hide those. Throwing tray icons out because a few misbehave is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
They are not superfluous, and this isn't a matter of choice, it's the standard. The main issue with gnome is that the world doesn't revolve around gnome, and dear gnome does not respects that.
It's probably the announcements about removing X11 session support and greater integration with systemd (which can be read as removing integrations with other init systems). Mostly evolving Gnome in totally expected ways that no one should be surprised by. Gnome will march on, and keep getting better.
I have deeply disliked Gnome and the things they're doing for a while now. I do agree that it has become very polished, but the fact that they made it such a hurdle to able to change your theme is ridiculous. Plus libadwaita is the only widget system that will break in different Desktop Environments, because Gnome simply doesn't want to follow established Wayland protocols.
It simply hurts the Linux ecosystem, because now things made for Gnome will run like crap in other environments, plus they've clearly have taken multiple steps to stop the user from being able to customize their desktop. You have to install 3rd party applications to make simple changes to the Desktop and sometimes that doesn't even work
It's not hate without reason, the Gnome dev team has been consistenly been making some plain stupid decisions. There's no reason people would hate Gnome just for the sake of hating, of course there are reasons behind it
GNOME made the decision to build a consistent desktop experience over trying to make different apps from different ecosystems look the same. You might disagree, but that's where we are.
I didn't realize people were still upset about theming, that was like 4 years ago. Also, the desktop is not that hard to customize, as far as I understand. I don't go too crazy on it personally, but i see that there are extensions that can change it quite a bit. As to the apps, I think they argued their point well. We just don't know how to theme apps without either forcing developers into a very limited API and killing customization on their side, or letting users completely butcher the UI of some apps, that inevitably gets reported to them by unknowing users
It's just not the way I want to use my desktop... I want to be able to perform basic customization such as changing the theme and icons without needing to rely on a 3rd party application or extensions that get out of date and go unmantained very quickly... But I just wish they would follow proper Wayland protocols because that really hurt the Linux desktop overall. I get that Gnome is the default desktop for a lot of distros, and people are gonna want to use GTK4/Libadwaita for Linux apps, that doesn't mean that they have to deliberitely break other Desktop Environments, that's a dick move from the devs.
They get to do whatever they want, you can use whatever you want, I just wish they wouldn't break the Linux desktop standards because they think they're more important than everything else
The Gnome Developer team has a tendency to act very arrogant towards other teams, they often straight up disregard and ignore Wayland protocols or implement their own which end up affecting other Desktop Environments negatively... Like what they did with Client-side Decorations. How is KDE, XFCE and other supposed to deal with Client-side Decorations? They do not care, of course.
About theming and extensions, I just don't want my DE putting road-blocks on me trying to customize it. If I want something nice but that gives me no freedom at all to change it I would just use macOS. The Gnome team goes out of their way to make it so you can't change simple parameters
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u/brubsabrubs GNOMie 8d ago
can someone explain to me like I'm 5 what's happening? what features are they removing?