Gnome Mutter Now "completely Drops the Whole X11 Back End"
Postedabout 2 months agoActiveabout 2 months ago
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GNOME's Mutter is dropping X11 backend support, sparking debate among users about the readiness and implications of Wayland adoption.
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“Openness, customisation and freedom of choice are great—unless you are offering a software that doesn’t behave exactly like we want it to, then it should not exist as option for anyone, ever.”
Openness, customisation and freedom of choice are great—unless you are offering a software that absolutely refuses to allow customization and freedom of choice, and actively attempts to impose its limitations on the rest of the ecosystem[0], in which case you will get pushback.
[0] My favorite example is https://trac.transmissionbt.com/ticket/3685#no1
Even in the link you posted, they're talking about GNOME, not GTK.
That, and things like primarily designing the interface for a touch screen, despite PC touch screens not really taking off. Very out of touch.
That was actually an absolute godsend using the Pinephone, and IMO laid the groundwork for the Librem 5 (and modern Linux-on-Mobile interfaces) to take root. I do not believe PostmarketOS would be doing as well as it is if they didn't have apps that play nicely with touch.
You don't use it, and you don't appreciate it, and that's fine. I'd say it most defintitely has a place though, without even touching on the chicken-and-egg bit about touchscreen / mobile Linux not taking off vs Gnome pushing for touchscreen / adaptability before it goes mainstream
Though if you insist on click-targets that are exclusively for the mouse, I've found most KDE apps less mobile-optimized. The elderly and mobile users can appreciate larger touch-targets, and you can avoid GTK, which seems like a perfect compromise
But, you still couldn't resist complaining about the UI implementations, which sounds more like complaints about GNOME apps and GNOME Shell. Who cares if you think that GNOME Shell looks like it accommodates touch screens? Firefox, for example, uses GTK and doesn't seem to look like a touch screen UI to me as I'm typing into this text box.
Firefox has definitely been affected by this. The hamburger button is a touch paradigm which makes no sense on a large desktop screen with a mouse and keyboard-control scheme. It only serves to add more clicks to every interaction. Likewise the reduction of the scrollbar to a scroll indicator.
I was sad when Gnome 2 became Gnome 3 because I really liked Gnome 2 and Gnome 3 was broken. Then I moved on, but where ever I went insanity from the Gnome project kept leaking and making UIs worse.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40568184
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40568042
This Xfce dev says that GTK4 is less capable than GTK3, and they feel that GTK5 will continue in that direction. They also acknowledge certain things in the first comment:
> [0] Full disclosure: I'm an Xfce developer, and have been disappointed with the direction GTK has been taking for some time. I don't begrudge them their prerogative to do what they need/want to achieve their own goals with the toolkit they've built and maintain. But it really is making life more difficult for me.
>
> [1] Part of the argument is that Wayland doesn't natively support things like cross-process embedding, so a cross-platform toolkit shouldn't have these types of widgets (the classic problem of only being able to support the lowest common denominator). But a) you can absolutely build something like that for Wayland (something I've been working on, though it requires tens of thousands of lines of code to do), and b) with other changes, it's incredibly difficult and possibly impossible to even implement the XEMBED protocol on GTK4, for people who do only care about X11.
If the GNOME guys took out stuff from GTK4 or 5 for bad reasons, then I don't like that, either. Which is basically exactly what I said. However, it sounds like some of these changes would be hard to do and maintain well, such as cross-process embedding. Perhaps the GNOME devs made a decision to focus their surely limited resources toward things they think will be long-lasting. And, perhaps, by their estimation, trying to support Wayland and X11 by adding (and maintaining) tens of thousands of lines of code would be a big burden--especially if they believe that X11 is not going to be super-relevant in the near future. I don't agree with that estimation, and I assume that it'll be a very long time before X11 isn't necessary anymore, but so be it.
All that said, it still has nothing to do with Mutter, which is why I replied to the comment that I did. Because GTK, and Mutter, and GNOME Shell, and GNOME apps, and non-GNOME GTK apps, are all different things, and this post was about Mutter.
The 2 paragraphs you quoted did not represent the 10 you did not.
An Xfce developer saying they can't recommend GTK for new projects outside the GNOME umbrella had information your comment did not. It was not basically exactly what you said.
That's when and why I decided to point out that there are different kinds of software projects, and they have different goals and priorities. It's like the old "library vs. application" code: libraries are generic and reusable, and should be written as such, whereas applications are specific and focused.
I brought up GTK simply as an example of a "library project", for which critique of its reusability is warranted, as a counter-example to Mutter, which is an application. Complaining about Mutter's effect on "the ecosystem" is silly. It wouldn't make any less sense to complain about XTerm's effect on the ecosystem by it not supporting Wayland. Anybody in their right mind would just say "So, use one of the other 10,000 terminal emulators in Wayland instead of XTerm"--and rightly so. But, because Mutter is a GNOME project, and GTK is also a GNOME project, I think that people lose focus on what they're talking about.
I did engage with you about GTK because it's interesting, but my point in bringing up GTK was specifically to say "Yeah, those complaints might make sense if we were talking about GTK, but since we're talking about Mutter, they do not." to the comment I replied to.
The article was not about Mutter exclusively. It explained Mutter dropping X11 made GNOME strictly focused on Wayland-based environments. And GNOME Shell would be tied to Mutter even if the article didn't mention it.
Mutter is a library. GNOME is not the only desktop environment which uses it. I don't know if the Pantheon developers wanted to drop X11. But Mutter dropping X11 imposes this limitation on Pantheon.
Your claim the Transmission discussion was not about GTK was incorrect by the way. The GNOME developer said they hadn't decided if GTK would deprecate GtkStatusIcon. The Transmission developer requested GTK make an abstraction. The last comments were a GNOME developer recommending Transmission change architecture so it could support GNOME and in his words whatever odd desktop people want to use after GTK deprecated GtkStatusIcon.
Libraries and applications are not separate inherently. Apple's application scripting architecture was a great strength when it was more supported for example.
That was precisely what drove me away from the project after many years.
I don't use the software anymore and, for the most part, no changes they make affect me, but Gonome 3 should be treated as an example of an awful way of driving change by burning bridges and hurting the community.
I haven't thought about this for many years now, but I would have expected RH to do better.
If someone is calling you a hater over a difference of opinion, they are just wrong. That said, if you’ve been on the other end of frequent attacks from haters, it’s understandable that you might be overly sensitive to it!
GNOME is much better these days than it was, but I feel like Linux did pay a price for the disruption -- between GNOME, Unity and all that mess, there was ~10 years where all the desktops that a new user was likely to encounter were just half baked solutions for a problem that most people couldn't entirely agree on.
Speaking mostly from personal experience, I don't know how the community at large is felling about it, but for me my reaction and experience has been the opposite. The more I come across haters, the less impact each one have on me, because I've seen it before, already know it not to be true, and don't have any needs to engage with any of it again. It's like the more it occurred, the more desensitized I got to it.
Being falsely accused of things you know to be untrue felt really difficult at first, but forcing myself to be more confident in me really helped to not let that get to me and be able to move past it easier.
More on topic, it's really easy to misjudge what is a "campaign" and what is someone feeling semi-strongly about something but writing really "convincingly" about it and what is someone just throwing a off-hand comment perhaps hastily formulated. We don't always know the intention, but we immediately jump to our first guess about the intention, but sometimes people are just casually pointing out stuff without actually having strong feelings about them.
> Mutter is a window manager initially designed and implemented for the X Window System, but then evolved to be a display server ("Wayland compositor"). It became the default window manager in GNOME 3,
Gnome alienated some developers around the time of GTK 3, and there have sometimes been regressions, and some opinionated unconventional design choices that everyone else was stuck with. (At the same time there was much positive benefits from the efforts.)
Even though I don't use the default Gnome desktop on most of my systems (I usually prefer XMonad or i3wm atop X11), I still end up using applications programs written to GTK and Gnome libraries.
Maybe this even harder push by Gnome on Wayland will drive even more effort into the alternative software, and continue to fuel the healthy competition that (for better or worst) the Linux desktop is stuck with.
I of course see people here and there on forums express discontent, but I don't think that demographic is big enough to drive both significant development and the adoption that makes development sustainable.
Wayland is only one of the many Gnome desktop feature and technical decisions that not everyone agrees with. Some decisions are regressions, and outright defective, for years and counting.
There's an awkward situation, in which the companies paying for the programmers effectively get to decide, and the governance doesn't necessarily reflect the user base. But, like "they who has the gold, makes the rules", they who does the work...
So the healthy competition comes in when someone someone can afford to spend time to build alternatives. Sometimes expending effort just to undo changes of someone else, on a fork.
For example, when Gnome decided to take the desktop behavior in their own creative direction, the Cinnamon project gave everyone back a more familiar and intuitive desktop, which continued to work with all the application programs that people had been using.
(Strangely, Cinnamon seems more an enterprise-desktop look&feel drop-in replacement than the default Gnome desktop. When I would've guessed Gnome corporate funders would've been focused on getting Linux desktop on corporate desktop as their first priority, and then second priority would be mobile. But I don't see the default Gnome desktop getting them either. Cinnamon, on the other hand, is immediately usable by any corporate worker who's used any Microsoft desktop since Windows 95.)
Already a decade ago, I commented on a news-for-nerds site like this one, “Well, GNOME makes choices we don’t like, but they are focused on the corporate-desktop market.” But then a GNOME developer replied to correct me: “That’s an old misconception, we are not mainly focused on the corporate desktop”. So who exactly they are designing for, remains a mystery to me.
You must not be that curmudgeonly! I haven't tried Wayland yet, and so long as people are still arguing about it, I'm too afraid to even try it. :-)
It’s really disappointing how often disagreements in the open source world turn into religious wars. I think it’s because so many would rather yell and scream than contribute a single line of code. So much wasted energy.
A lot. I have no idea how to start "Wayland" on Slackware. I use FVWM.
OTOH, i saw Wayland in Tails. It is slow and ugly as hell, window managent is nonexistent.
[0]: https://github.com/emacs-exwm/exwm
it seems to have better display scaling which is useful when I switch between large monitor and laptop screen.
Competition in this space has been everything except healthy. Wayland people have been essentially sabotaging X11 development.
Example: people wanting to keep X11 alive have been literally banned from the freedesktop.org infrastructure: https://linuxiac.com/xlibre-xserver-project-plans-revival-of...
> In a dramatic turn of events, Red Hat employees banned developer Enrico Weigelt from the freedesktop.org infrastructure. Weigelt’s account, repositories, tickets, and merge requests (more than 140) associated with the Xorg project were also abruptly deleted. As a result of these actions, in a message titled “History repeats: Redhat censored me on freedesktop.org,”.
(more in the link).
As somebody that has a functioning desktop environment (XFCE) and that doesn't bother much with new stuff, this is incredibly annoying, as the Wayland people have been breaking the linux desktop for everybody while pushing for incomplete alternatives (case in point: another comment to this same thread: wayland breaks accessibility: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45824341 - they should have first developed it AND THEN push for it but no, they had to push incomplete and non functional garbage down everybody's throat).
I'm not really against Wayland per se, I'm against the fascistoid appoach that wayland people had all along the way.
https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/12/the_price_of_software...
> fascistoid appoach that wayland people had all along the way
Ironic to promote a far right dev, and demonizing folks who are sick of his shit.
That being said: i will gladly run working software written from a far right developer rather than half-assed broken software written by a far-left developer. Politics does not influence my choices in software (quality does).
Anyway, the thing is: fascist behaviours aren’t an exclusive monopoly of far right people.
I still stand by my point that wayland people have had a fascistoid behaviour all along.
> Politics does not influence my choices in software (quality does).
Then why are you linking to a guy who has been making broken changes?
Yeah - that has been my experience with ebassi etc... too. Also prior to that with Poettering. These people seem on a mission, a crusade. Anyone not conforming to this will be ignored or isolated/banned.
It’s a big change but it wasn’t pushed at early stage: he had a working implementation. No fluff, no bs. After fedora first and rhel later, other distributions followed but nobody’s getting sabotaged or prevented from working on other init systems.
Don’t even get me started on gnome though, and their progressive dumbing down of gnome as a desktop environment…
He is Microsoft's mole.
GNOME is a perpetrator as well. I usually check the GNOME release notes (since I use GNOME on my NixOS laptop) and on a semi-regular basis there is a note that says: replaced app X by a completely new rewrite Y. And there is still no support for basic things like marking up/annotating a screenshot, even though the basic image viewer has been rewritten N times (anyone remember Electric Eyes?).
With the history of unclear alignment, it would be foolish for everyone to rely on Gnome.
But there's a ton of investment and value in that platform. (Much of it before Gnome even started, but now under the Gnome umbrella.)
So "competition" has been giving us alternatives.
Maybe ongoing competition will help keep pressure on Gnome, to be closer to aligned with the user bases.
I have no hope for GTK. It is a GNOMEy toolkit now.
G(nome)T(ool)K(it). It always was. It is a CADT program: every new version is a complete and incompatible implementation of the old version.
I believe it was the "Gimp Tool Kit" originally, and Wikipedia agrees:
> GTK (formerly GIMP ToolKit[3] and GTK+[4]) is a free open-source widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces (GUIs)[5]
Maybe the confusion is that it was sometimes called "GTK+" in the brand name originally (though most people just said "GTK" anyway, and that's what the code identifiers said).
Gimp (the photo/image editor) was already pretty sophisticated for years before Gnome was even started.
The first Gnome-branded library that I recall in the GTK space was Gnome Canvas.
The earlier commenter's point stands. Though my impression was that GTK was de facto taken over by Gnome around GTK 3 (though you could still write GUI apps without bringing in the fleet of Gnome desktop services).
… for you, surely. I’m sure there are some wayland users.
> autotype keepassxc passwords
What is that?
> remote desktop sessions
IIRC, gnome comes with an ootb RDP solution that, last I tried, worked as advertised. I’m not a big remote user though.
I believe they refer to KeePassXC's autofill feature, which autotypes credentials into other applications. I've never used this in X and won't use it on Wayland, as I prefer to keep all applications isolated.
I Ctrl-C to copy and then manually paste the password. Wayland is better for this method because I know the clipboard is cleared once I close KeePassXC.
That's not good.
(/s in this case, I'm actually all for dropping X11)