GNOME is dropping its X11 session support in the upcoming version 49—here's what this means for the X11 users.
  • mycodesucks@lemmy.world
    275·
    1 year ago

    It means some of your old software will stop working and if you file a bug report they’ll tell you to contact the developers who either haven’t touched it in two decades or have since died.

    • TimLovesTech@badatbeing.socialEnglish
      281·
      1 year ago

      They are essentially doing the same as KDE, whose statement was linked in the article.

      KDE

      For now, the Plasma X11 session remains in maintenance mode. That means critical issues—like login failures or major regressions—will still be addressed. However, minor bugs are unlikely to get fixes unless funded, and new X11-specific features are off the table entirely.

      VS

      Gnome

      First things first: Xorg isn’t being abandoned outright. It remains maintained and is receiving necessary security patches and bug fixes. However, active development has effectively halted, with most of its original contributors now focused on Wayland.

      Edit - added Gnome quote effectively saying the same thing.

    • kamstrup@programming.dev
      269·
      1 year ago

      For someone who has not used Gnome in 14+ years you sure seem to know a lot about it…

      X11 has effectively already been deprecated for years, seeing little to no development on it. No one should be surprised.

      And still, there are SEVERAL Long Term Support distros out there that will support X11 for the coming years. Please stop pretending that stuff will start breaking. It will not.

      • Limonene@lemmy.world
        163·
        1 year ago

        X11 has effectively already been deprecated for years, seeing little to no development on it. No one should be surprised.

        X11 is complete.

        Wayland is incomplete, and is missing essential features like accessibility and automation (ydotool will never have half the features xdotool has).

          • kernelle@0d.gs
            71·
            1 year ago

            They each fuck with my window arrangement on virtual desktops when rebooting in their own special way. I’ve switched to Wayland but x11 did feel more polished.

        • mycodesucks@lemmy.world
          86·
          1 year ago

          Haven’t you heard? In 2025 software isn’t ALLOWED to be complete. If you’re not constantly playing a cat and mouse game with someone’s pet ideological crusade in your dependencies, you’re an irrelevant dinosaur and can’t possibly be a critical or functional part of anybody’s workflow.

        • kamstrup@programming.dev
          11·
          1 year ago

          X11 is “complete” in the sense that we have followed it to the end of the road. X11 has a series of well documented fundamental problems that does not make it suitable for a modern OS. I will not belabor them here (except to note that security in particulat in X11, is exceptionally weak for modern standars). These issues are unfixable because they are built into core assumptions and behaviours of all legacy apps.

          At some point there has to be a switch. There simply is not manpower to maintain 2 separate windowing systems. I am sure we would all want there to be an army of devs working on these things on maintain the 2 stacks. But that is not the timeline we live in. The number of devs working on these things is very low.

          Was it too early? I don’t know. There will never be 1-1 feature parity with 30 years of legacy apps. I honestly believe that fixing things like a11y are gonna be much more tenable with only a single windowing system.

            • TimLovesTech@badatbeing.socialEnglish
              5·
              1 year ago

              A KDE developer made a blog post on the 21st talking about X11 stats on KDE and the numbers show the majority are already on Wayland.

              At this point in time, our telemetry says that a majority of Plasma users are already using the Wayland session. Currently 73% of Plasma 6 users who have turned on telemetry are using the Wayland session, and a little over 60% of all telemetry-activating users (including Plasma 5 users) are on Wayland.

  • A_norny_mousse@feddit.org
    101·
    1 year ago

    Obvious opining happening in the comments.

    I still run X.org, because so far I had no reason to change. I don’t like GNOME’s power over GTK and therefore most Linux GUI software. I don’t like GNOME’s disregard for backward compatibility.

    But the fact remains: unless I go out of my way to avoid such software, the switch to wayland is now on my horizon.

    Thanks for reporting this.