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Hector Martin

Please, please stop using Xorg with Asahi Linux.

It's all but unmaintained, broken in fundamental ways that cannot be fixed, unsuited to modern display hardware (like these machines), and we absolutely do not have the bandwidth to spend time on it.

We strive for a quality desktop on Apple Silicon machines, but we have to pick and choose our battles very carefully, because we can't single-handedly fix all the problems in the entire Linux desktop ecosystem. Yes, some Xorg things might work better on other platforms. That doesn't mean Xorg isn't broken, it means those platforms have spent years working around Xorg's failings. We don't have the time for that. Distributions and major desktop environments are already dropping Xorg support. It's pointless to try to support it well today on a new platform.

XWayland will continue to be supported for legacy client apps, and we do plan to spend time on optimizing the XWayland experience. But for anything that goes beyond "displaying windows" (compositors, IMEs, input management, desktop environments, etc.), please use native Wayland applications, since XWayland will never integrate properly for those things (by design).

Yes, not every random app and feature you use on Xorg will have a Wayland equivalent. Deal with it. The major players in desktop Linux have decided it's time to move on from Xorg, and if you want to go against the tide you're on your own.

We do expect Xorg to continue to function for the bare essentials (i.e. showing a working desktop), but that's it. We won't be working on any features or non-desktop-breaking bugs beyond that.

The only reason we shipped Xorg by default is that Wayland compositors were slower with software rendering. The reverse is true now that we have GPU drivers, and we will be switching all default-Xorg-KDE users to default-Wayland in an update (along with promoting the GPU drivers to the default builds) really soon. At that point Xorg will be relegated to SDDM, and once a native Wayland release of that finally happens, we won't be shipping any usage of the X server any more.

7 comments
Markus Werle

@marcan slightly off-topic: I am trying to run a Wayland desktop (Ubuntu-22.04 LTS) in a Podman or Docker container, but this fails. Any pointer to helpful resources?

Hector Martin

@markuswerle No idea, sorry, I don't use docker. Containers generally do not expose direct access to GPU/display hardware by default, as far as I know.

Arvid E. Picciani

@marcan thats unfortunate because wayland will never work for legacy humans like me who prefer keyboard input

Hector Martin

@aep ... what? That makes no sense, what does keyboard input have to do with anything?

Arvid E. Picciani

@marcan there's a whole ecosystem of keyboard focused stuff that doesnt exist with wayland. i'm not sure if can ever exist because wayland requires integrating all the components rather than providing a stable api for mixing different components.

Ewen McNeill

@marcan in case it helps: even RedHat (in RHEL 9 release notes) explicitly state that Xorg is deprecated and will be removed in a future major RHEL release.

Linux on the desktop has clearly settled on Wayland (and XWayland as a protocol bridge) as the way forward. AFAICT this has basically been the position for ~5 years: all the desktop support work has been going into Wayland.

“Native X11” is pretty much retreocomputing at this point :-)

access.redhat.com/documentatio

@marcan in case it helps: even RedHat (in RHEL 9 release notes) explicitly state that Xorg is deprecated and will be removed in a future major RHEL release.

Linux on the desktop has clearly settled on Wayland (and XWayland as a protocol bridge) as the way forward. AFAICT this has basically been the position for ~5 years: all the desktop support work has been going into Wayland.

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