Hacker News Reader

Comment by const_cast | Hacker News Reader

Sure, which are completely solved by Xwayland. If your app doesn't work under Wayland, then fine. Lots of apps don't because they're old and volatile to develop. But X11 apps work completely seamlessly under Wayland. Every major desktop right now is running many X11 apps under Wayland.

View on HN

I am a Kicad user, not just a random speculator. The problems are not solved by XWayland. For example, Kicad uses different windows to represent different views of the circuit and circuit board and warps the cursor according to the view you are looking at. XWayland doesn't solve this, because it only allows warping within a single window. I know there is new warping code coming out, but I don't know if it will ever get into the LTS OS we use at my work.

The obvious right choice if you're on an LTS OS where Wayland isn't in a good enough shape is to continue using X11 sessions. Very few things are dropping support for X11 right now, and on an LTS OS you presumably would be insulated from that. Obviously you can't benefit from anything Wayland improves on, but I suspect that's not a huge problem.

I'd guess an LTS release x years from now would be a different story. Even next year possibly, based on the pace things are going lately.

> Obviously you can't benefit from anything Wayland improves on, but I suspect that's not a huge problem.

Indeed, that's not a problem at all, because there are zero such things I care about. The problem is that a lot of distros and DE's are dropping support for X even though Wayland still isn't viable at all for so many people, and LTS isn't forever.

That seems like a solved problem though. LTS distros will drop X11 when the Wayland session is viable for most people, which is very nearly true, but ultimately not. When it does happen, it really shouldn't come as a sudden surprise.

You're always free to step up and support continued X development. Nobody else wants to, because the code is truly terrible, and that's been the main driver for distributions dropping support.

> Very few things are dropping support for X11 right now

GNOME 49 will drop X11 sessions completely. That in turn means that the default editions of Ubuntu 25.10 and Fedora 43 drop X11 session support.

https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/12/ubuntu_2510_to_drop_x...

Arch will presumably pick up GNOME 49 as soon as it's released, and so GNOME on Arch will also drop X11 session support this (northern hemisphere) autumn.

I know that most Ubuntu users run LTS versions, but still, those are probably the 3 most widely-used Linux distros in the Western world, and as such, I think the statement that "very few" things is false where it applies to Linux distros.

When I said that, I meant applications and UI toolkits are not dropping X11 support. Non-LTS OSes will definitely be dropping X11 support pretty soon, since yes, KDE and GNOME are both throwing in the towel. To me the timeline seems about right for that too.

It's such an incredibly niche use case, but nevertheless, I will retract my statement.

99.99% of stuff should work under XWayland.

> Sure, which are completely solved by Xwayland.

Sadly, they are not.

KiCad kicked this press release out because RedHat broke mutter which broke XWayland which caused a whole bunch of us to file bugs against KiCad (and other applications) that were the fault of Wayland.

This caused a whole bunch of application developers to have to waste a bunch of time running down a bug that made it completely obvious that RedHat does ZERO testing of whether their changes break anything in the XWayland space.

That's not the fault of Wayland, it's a GNOME problem. Wayland being just a protocol has the annoying effect that you get DE-specific bugs. It also means that after switching DEs, you might escape some GNOME-specific bugs.

I've been happily using KiCad under XWayland on Sway, I've had no complaints from relatives about the stability of KDE under Wayland, and I hear Hyprland is nice too.

> That's not the fault of Wayland, it's a GNOME problem.

You know what ... you're right. Since I'm on an atomic desktop, I shouldn't keep putting up with the abuse.

Thanks. I rebased from Silverblue to Kinoite. We'll see how that goes over time.

Update since can't edit:

Nope. Sadly. Instant dialog box focus problems from kwin_wayland.

I switched to kwin_x11 (which KDE doesn't want you to use) and the problems all go away.

Xwayland has been slow and buggy in my experience. It's very far from seamless. I know one user who stuck with Gnome for decades (he was an "I don't care just get draw the stuff on the screen" kind of guy) until libreoffice became unusable because of the Wayland transition and actually switched back to FVWM over it.

> Sure, which are completely solved by Xwayland.

Does Xwayland support running firefox on a remote server and opening it on my local wayland machine ?

I'm hoping the answer is yes, because every single time I've tried in the last few years, it failed and it's most definitely NOT a niche feature of X11 for me: I use it all the time.

I think overall it's a niche feature, and I'm honestly not sure if XWayland allows X forwarding. I know it preserves pretty much all X behavior, including grabbing attention from other windows and such if you give it permission. I don't know how the implementation, specifically, works. Like if each application is under it's own X screen.

But, I think if you really rely on X forwarding you should keep using X. The last time I used X forwarding the performance was significantly worse than newer protocols like RDP. X is a very chatty protocol, which performs poorly on a lot of networks.

The performance is worse but the seamlessness of just using SSH to launch a remote app on the local display is incredibly useful when working on headless servers over LAN. Drastically more useful than having to start an entire windowed X11rdp session to run one app for five minutes

> I think overall it's a niche feature

See my comments about Wayland team not listening to their users. It is probably a niche feature FOR THEM.

Now, I most certainly agree that X over network is horribly inefficient.

However:

    1. RDP is a freaking mess on Linux. It may be much better at the protocol level, but all the clients are horrible, and it misbehaves horribly across WANs and/or firewalls. And setting the whole fucking thing up is certainly *way* harder than typing the casual one-liner "export DISPLAY=<ip>:0; firefox&"

    2. There is therefore no alternative to X11-over-the-net, and in this 21st century world of everything-in-the-browser enshitification, having to use X11 over the network is something I hit and absolutely rely on about once a week when configuring remote servers.

I think the answer is waypipe: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Waypipe

Reply on news.ycombinator.com