As much as I love Wayland, they really should keep support for those who have to use X11.
By the time GTK5 appears, a vanishingly small percentage of Linux users will need X11.
I run Wayland on 2009 hardware now.
As toolkits abandon X11, it is going to pressure other operating systems to move to Wayland as well.
FreeBSD is already moving. Even Haiku has Wayland support. So we are talking about the smaller BSDs and the Solaris derivatives. Or ancient operating systems on original hardware I guess. In which case, they can run the older apps which is likely all they can run anyway.
Worst, worst case, you can run Wayland on x11. If there is something you absolutely need, I guess you can run Wayland apps on x11 that way.
Hopefully Wayland does sort everything out before it releases
I just hope Wayland has its accessibility shit together before then. There are people that still need to use X11 for their accessibility needs.
last time I checked, blind users could not even install any mainstream distro anymore, because they all switched to wayland, and that broke screen readers in the installer.
Yeah. I'm sad to say that, about a year ago, I switched back to macOS because it handles accessibility waaaaay better. And I don't even use screen readers. It sounds like their situation is even worse :/
I just need the ability to easily zoom in and out using Super+scroll up/down (without causing performance issues or visual jank) and trackpad gestures that aren't extremely limited. Granted, both of these things may be more of a DE thing, but wherever the issue lies, I would like them fixed.
KDE let's you do that first one, though it's ctrl+super. It's one of my favourite lesser known features.
linux developers only care about shit they themselves care about, powertripping and some stupid principles they made up, not about making a usable environment for everyone
I disagree with this characterization of Linux devs. They're just people. I'm sure there are some shitheads out there, but I don't think it's anymore the case than with any other sample of software devs.
I think the more likely reason that accessibility technology is an afterthought in Linux is because it's an afterthought in pretty much all software, which is a bad thing, but I haven't seen them be elitist about accessibility.
Some of the problem really is just that Linux graphical capabilities have been challenging enough enough that doing some of the extra demanding things that various access capabilities require weren't possible until recently (and some of them still aren't possible).
It's elitism as per usual, i daily drive Linux for 9 years already and always point this out, if we want the year of Linux truly come, then elitism must be stopped as majority of people won't come to Linux if it's inconvenient to them and majority of people not a techy guys, Linux guys want people to like Linux but don't want Linux to BECOME likeable to majority and want it to persist as elite subculture, that's the MAIN paradox of Linux community and all other problems like systemd vs other init, x11 vs Wayland, tiling wm vs full DE, distro wars, all stem from this same reason, Linux users wanna FEEL elite but want mass adoption and mass recognition of Linux while it's not yet accessible to everyone or even becoming less accessible like in this case we're discussing
of course it's 'elitism' and not just a bunch of people volunteering to code shit that's interesting/relevant for them.
To provide 'non-elitist' desktop experience people need to sit down and fix bug backlog for hardware that's nowhere around them, prioritize features that are relevant to users (even if they are absolutely ass to work on) and etc, etc, etc. You know how it's called? A job.
X11 versus Wayland isn't some kind of holy war; Wayland was specifically designed as a successor protocol to the largely cobbled-together X and is objectively superior to it in most ways outside of accessibility.
It's so superior that they finally added color in 2024!
Unless I'm mistaken, X has never had proper color management support in the first place.
Right, as I've and many people here said, wayland is still not FULLY completed for AVERAGE user and said average user is not going to code patches, he just going to walk away from wayland and from Linux, and this is pushing the year of desktop Linux farther and farther from us
When is the last time you tried a Wayland DE? I can't speak to them all, but Plasma for one has been in really good shape for basically everything a typical user might want to do with it for around a year now.
Fr, accessibility is def important and they’re not giving it enough attention
GTK 4 released 9 years after GTK 3, so it'll be quite some time before GTK 5. If Wayland doesn't have better accessibility than X11 at that point it'd be time to give up on it as a project, and maybe desktop Linux as a whole.
GTK+4 was released? When??
I've been compiling GTK+3 3.2x, the latest stable version about ten years ago and always wonder will they ever advance the major version. Years of installing XFCE4 and stuff and I always saw them pulling GTK+3 as a dependency. Never seen GTK+ marked 4 though.
To be fair I haven't visited their official website for a while though.
A lot of the non-GNOME GTK desktops have elected to stick with GTK3. They even maintain a suite of applications (Xapps) that many of them share.
GTK 4 and higher are increasingly GNOME only (not that you cannot run them elsewhere—they just won’t fit in).
GTK 4 was released in 2020, they also dropped the plus from the name in 2019. GTK 4 is a big update and would be a pretty massive amount of work to switch to. I don't know when, if ever, XFCE will switch to it.
Yup, considering they deprecated so many functions and removed them I'd imagine switching would be really hard.
Even while writing my new projects in gtk4 (tiny projects) I run into problems of many solutions no longer working because the functions are removed without any replacements.
Also I've found some games that work fine in Wine under X11 and not in Wayland
I really wish Wayland was more fleshed out & stable before all of this happened. Color management isn’t even yet finalized & putting accurate colors on the screen is like the most important part.
I really wish Arcan were further along.
It actually was merged just few days ago, I mean the color management protocol
We live in a wild world where people feel so confident about the wayland snake oil that they only added color in 2024!
til about arcan. how is it better than wayland?
Arcan is a cool idea but you mostly hear about it from people complaining that Wayland is not ready. Of course, Wayland is already used by more than half of Linux users and Arcan does not really exist yet.
i was more curious about the technical side of it
I'm using a 49" monitor and dividing it up in virtual X11 monitors/screens for flexibility. Running a tiling window manager with lots of virtual desktops, but with fullscreen support separate monitors are still needed. Wayland are still missing the support for dividing up the display, which is probably the last thing keeping me on X11.
The lack of proper tablet support in wayland prevents me from being excited for this. I wish there was more news on that front.
You mean like Wacom tablets? I’m curious to know what’s missing. I’ve been using one of those XP Pen tablets on GNOME and Wayland without much issue. I’m using it for writing more than drawing though.
I mean, my issue is that most buttons on my huion are still non bindable, and some graphical interfaces cannot be interacted with in mouse mode and only register as touch. Lastly, occasionally programs completely ignore pen sensitivity, such as blender.
This experience was when I was last on gnome. I've been on budgie for a while as a result of needing a tablet for my hobbies.
The future is now old man. KDE next.
It's a shame because my 11yo laptop runs beautifully on X11 but terribly on Wayland with KDE. I hope the issues with Wayland optimization work out on my laptop before I'm forced to switch
Wayland runs great on the four 10+ year old machines that I have tried it on. Oldest is 2009.
wayland
wayland
wayland
I s2g im gonna become one of those psychos who runs the oldest Debian that still gets security updates behind a pfsense with whitelisting.
You already said Debian. The rest is redundant.
Please forgive me, as a Debian user I’m prone to senior moments and will soon have my driving license legally revoked.
Let's just hope XFCE can finish the transition before then. If not, I am not looking forward to having to shop for a new DE.
XFCE is still using GTK 3, why would they care what Gnome does with GTK 5? Nobody but Gnome is even using GTK 4.
Will QT 7 Do the same?
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