[SOLVED] What is your view on major distros dropping X11 and requiring Wayland?

athenian200 · 2024-01-18 12:47:41

Hi, I'm new to this forum and I mostly stopped by to ask a random question that has very little to do with Devuan or the SystemD/SysVInit controversy, at least it doesn't have much to do with it directly.

I've heard that major distros like Red Hat and Debian are due to push Wayland on people and remove the option of using X11 as an alternative at some point in the near future. What most people are currently assuming is that X11 is pretty much going to be totally dead and unsupported by 2032, at the same time RHEL 9 goes EOL, and that that's the deadline for everyone to get off X11 and go to Wayland.

So my question is... does the Devuan community see the fact that X11 is being taken away as an option on major distros as a negative thing for Linux users? I was complaining to someone that I wouldn't care so much about them using Wayland as long as they didn't force me to use it. I started thinking about the concept of "init freedom" that you guys are known to talk about sometimes, and thinking that I kind of wanted something similar, but with choosing between X11 and Wayland instead of choosing which init system I want to use.

I guess while I am here, it's also worth asking... do you think major distros forcing Wayland on users will be as bad for Linux as forcing SystemD on users in the past was, and would you tend to see this as one example of a broader pattern of major distros banding together and collectively pushing new standards on people, refusing to give them much choice about whether they want to adopt them or not?

quickfur · 2024-01-18 14:37:30

I for one am not looking forward to switching to Wayland. From what I've been reading online, it's a crapshoot. Well I could be wrong since I've never actually tried it yet, but I'm certainly not a fan of people shoving it down my throat when they haven't yet convinced me why it's superior (I don't think it is).

golinux · 2024-01-18 16:09:51

Welcome to the forum athenian200!

This forum's search function pulls up many mentions of wayland.

Here is the thread dedicated to that discussion.

Camtaf · 2024-01-18 17:38:54

Not a fan of messing with things that work - systemd, pulseaudio, & now wayland just weren't needed, let alone having them 'forced' on us!

zephyr · 2024-01-18 19:09:51

Camtaf wrote: Not a fan of messing with things that work - systemd, pulseaudio, & now wayland just weren't needed, let alone having them 'forced' on us!

Exactly, whatever happened to NOT fixing what's NOT broken!

I'm still having issues with clipit, replaced by Diodon and laced with zeitgeist.

cheers

zephyr

Last edited by zephyr (2024-01-18 19:12:11)

ralph.ronnquist · 2024-01-18 20:53:54

It looks to me that the general commercial drive is to make Linux a platform for "Apps", probably so that middlemen can own the distribution channels and siphon money of both developers and end users. The wayland protocol would form part of that as a way of isolating "Apps" from each other rather than providing the well integrated computing platform that was/is one of the drivers behind X11.

Altoid · 2024-01-18 22:21:59

Hello:

... having issues with clipit, replaced by Diodon and laced with zeitgeist.

If I were you, I'd get rid of that zeitgeist crap ASAP.

There was a lot written about it in late 2022.
But after that, nothing else.

One day, it will be too late to say anything much.

Best,

A.

zephyr · 2024-01-18 23:40:42

Altoid wrote: There was a lot written about it in late 2022.
But after that, nothing else.

It's been dragged onto the forum a few times, I won't use it. It is a harvester of info from I understand.

Does anyone have a good sub, or alternate. I liked clipit because of size, and simplicity.

cheers

zephyr

zephyr · 2024-01-18 23:51:43

ralph.ronnquist wrote: It looks to me that the general commercial drive is to make Linux a platform for "Apps", probably so that middlemen can own the distribution channels and siphon money of both developers and end users.

Linus Torvalds said he had no problem for a developer making a profit from their endeavors. Already there are a few distros and won't mention names. My observation and use suggest only a part of that distribution works. Better to be small, than a monster with a kitchen sink thrown in. Trying to provide everything for everyone is quite a task. I will continue keeping Crowz as small as possible and be fun. The approach for a well-designed proprietary distro may not be around yet, but think LMDE is close.

Crowz is no where perfect, it's stays in a constant state of polishing. Perhaps being a little rough around the edges are perhaps appreciated.

cheers

zephyr

quickfur · 2024-01-18 23:52:36

Came across this thread on the XScreenSaver website:

https://www.jwz.org/blog/2021/05/xscree … enanigans/

Favorite quote:

In case anyone is under any misconceptions here, XScreenSaver will never be rewritten as a Wayland program, so that's not what I'm asking. The day that Linux systems foot-gun themselves to the extent that they stop supporting screen-saving using the X11 protocol is the day that XScreenSaver stops supporting Linux. It will then run "only" on macOS, iOS and Android.
"Truly this is the year of the Linux desktop."
So good luck with that.

Essentially, the only way you're going to get a screensaver on Wayland is if your compositor implements it. Because the core Wayland protocol is so crippled that it does not support even basic functionality such as this, so every compositor has to implement their own, incompatible version of it. Gone will be the days when people get to choose which screensaver they'd like to use, you'll be tied down to whatever your compositor provides. And I'm betting even your compositor will be decided for you because no sane person is going to implement a desktop for umpteen compositors at the same time; eventually they will just choose one that gives them the most functionality missing from the core Wayland protocol, and that will be the only choice left. If you want another compositor you'll have to junk the entire desktop altogether, along with all its apps that are gratuitously incompatible with other compositors (unless they are so basic that they can get away only with the core Wayland protocol).

So the desktop-integration folk are moving towards the situation where nothing is customizable anymore, and the only way to use anything at all is to use it the way they have benevolently chosen for you beforehand. IOW, might as well go back to Windows. At least on Windows the integration experience will actually be better, if that's the kind of thing you're after.

Me, I'm staying right here on Devuan with X11, XScreenSaver, and ratpoison (which will never become the majority choice, and I'm happy with that). The entire reason I abandoned Windows back in the 90's and never looked back is because I'm sick and tired of vendors making decisions for me that I cannot change. The computer is supposed to be a tool to help me work effectively in the workflow I've chosen; it's not supposed to become my master, or a tool for others to force their choices upon me.

Altoid · 2024-01-19 01:05:57

It is a harvester of info from I understand.

An huge understatement.
See https://web.archive.org/web/20090418021 … eZeitgeist

And that bit is from back in 2009, imagine where it is now ... 8^°

Mark my words: sooner than later we will see zeitgeist code merged into systemd.

Best,

A.

quickfur · 2024-01-19 01:22:34

Under Long Term Goals:

Integration with other computers and mobile devices.

That's just... wow. Just imagine the day when, for the sake of "convenience" and "integration", this nasty piece of work starts connecting to your IoT devices and collecting data from them -- from your refridgerator to your internet-enabled toaster oven, your security cameras, (y'know, so that your computer can "help you remember what you had for breakfast" and offer to make the same thing tomorrow by sending a command to your toaster) and sending them to some anonymous server somewhere out in the anonymous internet. And suddenly, some dude in a basement halfway across the world knows what you ate for breakfast and what color pyjamas you wore last night. As well as your list of contacts and who you last texted.

How does anyone in their right mind not scream bloody murder at this piece of nastiness??!

Altoid · 2024-01-19 01:57:13

Hello:

How does anyone in their right mind not scream bloody murder ...

Well ...
This thread could go on for weeks on end with the hows/whys/etcs.
No sense doing that.

The very ugly truth is that most people these days are basically stupid/ignorant dickheads that think IoTs, internet enabled toasters/washing machines/refrigerators/TVs, automated lightbulbs, intelligent [whatevers], internet enabled baby cams and doorbells, cars and snoop-phones with incorporated AI and crap like that are oh! soooo convenient.

Unbelievable.
But that is where we are at in 2024 and it will only get worse.
Much worse.

We are only seeing the tip of the crapberg.

Best,

A.

golinux · 2024-01-19 02:05:00

@quickfur . . . This is a good lead in to one of Dyne's projects that might interest you and others on this forum. They were on this years ago!

Dowse :: local area network rabdomancy

"Dowse is a RPi application that functions as a transparent proxy for home network privacy and visualizes network traffic real-time."

https://archive.org/details/github.com- … 9_14-06-19

My personal solutions are no mobile devices, no wifi, no microwave, OTA TV (and very little of it), yada yada . . .

quickfur · 2024-01-19 02:27:17

I am extremely skeptical of IoT devices. Like, why does my fridge of all things need an internet connection?! Or my baby cam. These things can be made to work for your convenience without connecting to the *entire internet*. That's just totally ridiculous. Whatever happened to one device doing one thing well, instead of a Frankenstein monster disguised as a toaster running a never-updated OS full of security flaws that for whatever reason needs the *internet* in order to apply heat to a piece of bread?! 🤦

But yeah, most people are like ooooh so cool! My baby cam can download my latest FB post and insert my baby's photo automatically! Drool, lolz! And sadly it's not just common users who don't know better. Programmers and techie types who *ought* to know better are also drooling over the latest greatest bleeding edge, and jumping on the next great systemd bandwagon just cuz it's new, and as we all know new = k00l and old = bad. So we end up with ridiculous things like web apps that require 2GB of memory on a 4GHz 8-core processor running at the same crawling speed as a 16-bit native app used to run 20 years ago with 64K memory on a 4Hz single core processor. This, we call "progress". 🤷

quickfur · 2024-01-19 02:32:36

P.S., If I had my way at all, any IoT devices that end up in my home contrary to my wishes would be confined to a local network physically disconnected from the internet.

Alas, these days they probably come with a built-in WiFi chip configured to ride on whatever nearest clueless newbie-run open WiFi network it can find. 🤦 Y'know, just so they can phone home and provide "crucial" data to improve user experience. Oy.

golinux · 2024-01-19 03:08:05

Alas, these days they probably come with a built-in WiFi chip configured to ride on whatever nearest clueless newbie-run open WiFi network it can find.

I hear you . . . Thankfully, I am under a metal roof and most folks who visit cannot get a signal inside my house! My very own Faraday cage!! Just dumb luck, not planned . . .

Dowse allows you to turn stuff off! Give it a try!!

athenian200 · 2024-01-19 03:53:33

Good to hear that a lot of people here are skeptical of Wayland being pushed and see it as a bad direction.

quickfur wrote:

Me, I'm staying right here on Devuan with X11, XScreenSaver, and ratpoison (which will never become the majority choice, and I'm happy with that). The entire reason I abandoned Windows back in the 90's and never looked back is because I'm sick and tired of vendors making decisions for me that I cannot change. The computer is supposed to be a tool to help me work effectively in the workflow I've chosen; it's not supposed to become my master, or a tool for others to force their choices upon me.

I totally get that feeling, I don't like having new workflows like those in modern GNOME forced on me. It's like... if I have to deal with being limited to GTK3 (or worse, GTK4!) as a minimum requirement, I might just as well use Windows 11 with all those rounded corners and ugly touch-based UI.

The thing is, anyone trying to keep X11 around in a Debian fork if Debian drops it would have their work cut out for them. We would be pretty much talking about taking on maintenance of packages for window managers like IceWM, older toolkits like Motif, XScreenSaver packages, etc. The amount of code/packages that people would have to put work into trying to keep around would be absolutely massive. That means maintaining basically an entire X11 stack independently of a large project like Debian, trying to revert various instances of ripping out X11 integration in various packages that are capable of supporting it, etc. It would be a pretty big task.

That said, I was actually curious if anyone knows of a Linux distro that is planning to keep X11 around as an option even if the big three (Fedora/Debian/Arch) drop it. Like, I don't think there is one yet that has explicitly committed to keeping X11 around as an option for people that need it, but I could be mistaken.

quickfur · 2024-01-19 05:29:07

The way things are going right now, I'm afraid the day is soon coming when we will either have to give up X11 or maintain it ourselves. The majority of developers will likely move on to Wayland, or whatever the Next Big Thing is that comes after Wayland, and X11 will likely just be in bare minimal maintenance mode by the scant few who care enough to keep it going. The workload will be massive; I'm not sure how long we could keep it up for.

The more likely possibility is that Devuan will eventually have to adopt Wayland as well, as a matter of default once Debian switches wholesale to Wayland. We'd probably still keep the Xorg packages around, but they will hardly be maintained anymore.

Unless enough devs wake up and realize where all this is headed, and enough of them rise up to unite across whatever distro is left that still hasn't adopted Wayland by then, then maybe there might be enough manpower to breathe new life into X11.

Or perhaps it's time for X12... designed on the same principles as X11, and not going in the direction of Wayland.

golinux · 2024-01-19 07:08:36

@quickfur . . . X11 like usrmerge is outside the scope of Devuan's mission . . . unless you perhaps want to be that dev that swoops in and saves the day . . .

trinidad · 2024-01-19 11:38:19

The approach for a well-designed proprietary distro may not be around yet, but think LMDE is close

Any Linux distro that can provide a unique core system to build on and an OEM multiple use installer is saleable. (RHEL & SUSE EL) LMDE is mostly maintained for quality assurance of Mint's main Ubuntu based system. If Ubuntu goes proprietary expect it to go immutable as well, which would eliminate Ubuntu based distros.

TC

athenian200 · 2024-01-19 11:46:24

Yeah, what golinux said about X11 being outside the scope of Devuan's mission was pretty much what I assumed from the beginning, otherwise this thread wouldn't be in the Off-Topic section.

The thing about Devuan is... that as far as I know, it's designed to do exactly one thing. Provide a fork of Debian that does not include SystemD. And yes, that's a noble goal, and avoids too much scope creep. However, on the other side of the coin, that means that if the Debian project makes any other stupid decisions, like say dropping X11, then you're still stuck with negative consequences of those, because the mission of Devuan is solely to be Debian without systemd. And if the Debian project drops X11, that logically means Devuan will have to drop X11 as well, and therefore would mostly begin to appeal to people who only hated systemd because it goes against the Unix philosophy, perhaps rationalizing that Wayland is more modular and secure and thus follows the Unix philosophy better than Xorg, or something. But people who supported Devuan because they don't like broken workflows or loss of traditional ways of doing things more generally would unfortunately be out of luck if Debian breaks things for people in a way that technically has nothing to do with SystemD. After all, it is still possible to use Wayland without systemd, so Devuan would not have broken its promise to users if it dropped X11.

Those who want something like Debian but with X11 still included would, in theory, have to create their own "Dexian" or something, perhaps forking Debian again themselves to keep X11, taking inspiration and notes from Devuan, or perhaps even forking Devuan itself if they also want the new distro to lack SystemD. Still, I imagine this is a good place to get people talking about or thinking about such a goal, since I gather that a lot of people here are skeptical of the GNOME project, Freedesktop.org, and the Debian/Fedora direction and just aren't as much about the whole "tech go forward, deal with it" mentality that major distros have these days.

Still, I am kind of wondering if this goal may not even be achievable. It could be that this one is just too big and will touch too much stuff, and thus the "big wheels" who mostly want Linux to become a locked-down system focused on things like kiosk mode and touch UI will get their way on this one, because they're ripping too large a technology stack out from under people for anyone to maintain it on their own.

I mean, the problem with Xorg and Wayland is that the same people are maintaining both projects, which I would say is something of a conflict of interest. They choose to put Xorg in maintenance mode a long time ago, and created a timetable for replacing Xorg with Wayland. No one really resisted them on it or forked Xorg over the issue, which in their minds pretty much amounted to tacit acceptance of their plan. They played it out over enough years that resistance to Wayland largely became complacent and started thinking it would never happen, plus Wayland had time to mature enough that average users who never use anything but a web browser and a terminal on GNOME/KDE wouldn't notice the difference so much.

If you think about it, what they did is pretty much the textbook way of forcing unpopular changes over a long period of time used by big tech companies... announce them early, let people get angry and push back, set a really long phase-out period to the point that people forget you're doing it and maybe even think they've won for the moment, put the thing you're replacing into maintenance mode and fail to improve it significantly for a long time, and then cite the new features you added to the other thing as the reason why the old technology is being dropped, plus say that people had no excuse for complaining now because you already said you were doing it a decade ago, and it's not their fault you didn't take them seriously, etc. People aren't good at dealing with long-term problems that seem far away, and so all they have to do is extend the time horizon beyond most people's attention span, like say beyond 10 years in the future, and most of them will treat it like a thing that is never going to happen, being blindsided when it finally does.

Camtaf · 2024-01-19 13:06:19

Still, I imagine this is a good place to get people talking about or thinking about such a goal, since I gather that a lot of people here are skeptical of the GNOME project, Freedesktop.org, and the Debian/Fedora direction and just aren't as much about the whole "tech go forward, deal with it" mentality that major distros have these days.

As I've mentioned before, I'm looking seriously at BSD, (NetBSD & OpenBSD in particular), I'm not one for 'everything bar the kitchen sink' type distros, & the smaller distros will struggle to keep all these 'improvements' out....

golinux · 2024-01-19 16:08:26

@athenian200 . . . If a team of devs wanted to take on maintaining X11 that would make a lot of people at Devuan and elsewhere very happy. But this endless jawing about X11 (and usrmerge) is just hot air and solves nothing while eating up resources on dng, this forum and elsewhere. Nothing lasts forever and human stupidity and technology just accelerate that process. This should come as no surprise to anyone with working brain cells. All the squeaky protesting against the wind solves absolutely nothing.

We are all just digital cattle being herded into the digital abattoir . . .

swanson · 2024-01-19 20:59:05

If a team of devs wanted to take on maintaining X11 that would make a lot of people at Devuan and elsewhere very happy. But this endless jawing about X11 (and usrmerge) is just hot air and solves nothing while eating up resources on dng, this forum and elsewhere. Nothing lasts forever and human stupidity and technology just accelerate that process. This should come as no surprise to anyone with working brain cells. All the squeaky protesting against the wind solves absolutely nothing.
We are all just digital cattle being herded into the digital abattoir . . .

As well as this might be true, it is very pessimistic. There must be a solution and my hope is that enough people engage against Big Tech and work for the principle KISS. I'm no developer but I'll try and help out any way I can.

Cheer up! There must exist free thinking intelligent people here somewhere!

The officially official Devuan Forum!

#1 2024-01-18 12:47:41

[SOLVED] What is your view on major distros dropping X11 and requiring Wayland?

#2 2024-01-18 14:37:30

Re: [SOLVED] What is your view on major distros dropping X11 and requiring Wayland?

#3 2024-01-18 16:09:51

Re: [SOLVED] What is your view on major distros dropping X11 and requiring Wayland?

#4 2024-01-18 17:38:54

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#5 2024-01-18 19:09:51

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#6 2024-01-18 20:53:54

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#8 2024-01-18 23:40:42

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#9 2024-01-18 23:51:43

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#21 2024-01-19 11:38:19

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#22 2024-01-19 11:46:24

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#23 2024-01-19 13:06:19

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#24 2024-01-19 16:08:26

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#25 2024-01-19 20:59:05

Re: [SOLVED] What is your view on major distros dropping X11 and requiring Wayland?

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