As much as I love Wayland, they really should keep support for those who have to use X11.
this post was submitted on 01 Feb 2025
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
The next laptop you'll buy will be obsolete and broken before you're forced to switch.
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.
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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.
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Oh no...
Anyways, another reason why to use Qt rather than GTK for your app.
You have to decide whether you want to be Linux app or GNOME app
Gnome is doing their famous "trust us, we know better" skit again. Always a crowd pleaser.
Will QT 7 Do the same?
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