Yes, and for fvwm with is close to/if not impossible. There was a tread in the fvwm mailing list talking about the move to Wayland.

Plus, from what I have read over the past few years, all articles confirm the difficultly of doing this on Wayland as opposed to X.

Maybe I don't know, I am not a dev - all I know is you have a non-DE in wayland available, sway and hyprland.

Not ratpoison, but I think you have similar WMs in wayland that act like DWM or whatever other non-niche keyboard-based WM that is out there, I just can't be bothered to work in them, it is not my preferred workflow.

I used fluxbox years ago, but it doesn't suite my tastes - as for other WM , I tried MWM - I like the motif look but yea I read the man pages for customizing it and well, fsck that.

Also as I stated my 10 yr old machine can seem to handle KDE5 just fine, I haven't seen any stuttering - or maybe I am just lucky. As I also stated and will reiterate again, I don't care what xorg has to offer in terms of muh network transparency and such - I just want a proper local hardware rendering system, and again I point you to the retrobytes video, or not but even you would know that xorg isn't initially designed for this... and again "its hard" , is a good excuse - otherwise why are even the devs of xorg the ones jumping over to wayland ?

The issue with Wayland is that X works. Replacing something that works is steeper climb because it has to be material better than the thing being replaced in most cases. Wayland at best does the subset of things X does that it implements in a way that might at best be described as 'just as well'.

It might be "technically" better in terms of few round trips the server etc, but in practice the hardware has speed up faster than the Wayland project has moved; so with the exception of gamers and people trying to hit stupid low power envelops - this is almost irrelevant as a far as a 'feature'

X even manages to be 'good enough' at games and video type work despite the inconsistent latency and added overhead for the most part, especially recently. I am with Hazel here when Wayland 'just works' and all my favorite gtk stuff just builds and works against it (maybe with a compat library or two to replace X11 stuff that get actually used by client apps from the past two decades) I'll happily switch. Until then Wayland is collection of packages that just take up space in case stuff is linked against them.

If ever there was a FOSS project that needs a corporate sponsor to hire/pay some developers to "just get'r'done" Wayland is it but its going to take a Red Hat or a Value to decide they just want to make X11 go away to make their own world simpler and to stabilize things enough the AMDs and Nvidias out there want to invest the time in first class driver support, to make that happen.

None of that is knock against Wayland or the people working on it. It is simply the reality that its always going to be easier to slap some patches on X11 to suit whatever kernel or compiler changes come down the pike then get Wayland ecosystem up to the same level of polish, and doing the former is going to continue to result in something that is well 'just fine'

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Xorg provides a client-server model in which clients from anywhere (that is authorized) can each display any window they please on one common monitor or set of monitors. Cut-and-paste of clipboards and selections between applications becomes easy and very useful. Emacs in particular exploits this with its concept of multiple frames per process, so that the same view of data can be presented on several different Xorg-controlled monitors (typically one built-in monitor on a laptop or mobile device and one central monitor). I have many machines all doing different but related things and this is invaluable for me.

I don't know wayland well enough to assert that , even with xwayland, this arrangement is impossible, but I'd be surprised and pleased if anyone can tell me that it either can do it or even ever will be able to do it, as (I have understood) it has a completely different model for the level at which it captures screen streams.

It would be great if someone more knowledgable could make a comprehensive comparison of features described in user terms.


That is the view of the developers/maintainers, and of course they know best. But what does "xorg is broken" mean? From the maintainer view, it means the code is complicated and sprawling and, even as modules, it is just too much for any one person to comprehend (maybe Adam Jackson, maybe Keith Packard , a few stalwart others ...). Which amounts to the same as "no longer maintainable" in practice. But for me and, I suspect, many users, it works just fine and is not "broken"; although there are outstanding bugs, they are very obscure , and without question xorg today delivers what is generally understood to be its main/original purpose and specification.

So -- yes, it is broken and no, it is not broken, and we need to take care to say more precisely what we mean when we talk about that.

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For the record, VNC (etc.) are not really a replacement for XWINDOWS over network (xclients) available within X.ORG but not in Wayland.

The xclients work over the network at a lower level of network connectivity. They are less secure, but far more efficient. It is network thin and fast, and specific to X applications. You might run an entire desktop over it, but that seems more than a little wonky. At one time that xclient support was IMPORTANT, but that has not been the norm for a long time! Anyone still using that kind of application is welcome to keep it working using X.ORG: which is not going anywhere!

Wayland is already better (when the desktop or window system support it) than X.Org for the average user. I use it a LOT. X.Org is better at supporting some legacy functions and old software, and I use a bit of that as well. I have NO problem switching back and forth.

I would LOVE it if there were a Wayland replacement for fluxbox! I suspect building one will be far easier than PORTING the old source, but then I have not tried. Yet. Right now I run fluxbox on X.Org and Plasma on Wayland more than anything else GUI. (I like screen with the screenie manager in terminal sessions almost as much as I like fluxbox!)

And here we get to an important point that has been lost here. Writing new software for Wayland should be FAR easier than writing the same software for X.Org! There are not the exceptions, special cases, booby traps, and preserved flaws from xwindows that had to be preserved into X.Org because so much DEPENDED on them. With Wayland we have a clean, new, consistent base upon which to build which should give us better, more efficient, faster applications that take less time and pain to develop!

It is not a choice of one or the other, we have BOTH! And that is a GOOD thing!

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Interesting... I have just found that the web page has better contrast with Slackware 15.0 than 14.2...

regards Henrik

The term 'good enough' though imo can be a double edged sword - it borders in mediocrity; and there is somethings I don't want it to be just 'good enough' , filesystems are one of them. I don't want a filesystem to be made and to be told , oh well its good enough in the state thats it is in...I'm not risking my data over 'good enough'. This can apply to display. Good enough doesn't cut it anymore, otherwise the point is moot and wayland wouldn't exist.


Ok but thats still implies a local , not over-the-network, and wayland purposefully did not add over-the-network-awareness because it happened to be a major security issue overall.



Ok, but again the code has been hammered and mashed so much that perhaps the original form of xorg is no longer there - which is fine I guess - but it seems you can only add extension after extension, hence why some devs say it is no longer tenable, and for today's purpose - either a re-write or a new implementation is needed. Again it seems the latter, since x.org's site shows the last update was about what, 2013?

I just don't need network-aware-anything. Thats so far the only selling point I keep hearing about xorg over wayland, and wayland again disregarded this due to xwindows being insecure initially with this sort of design.

Me as the humble average user never needed what xorg provides. I have two linux systems, on a laptop running Mint now and Slackware desktop - I can only count with one finger that I even needed to ssh into it, but not even needed to run an xwindows over the network. Wayland ditches this approaches for a local hardware level, and thats fine by me. Should I need to see the desktop over the network, then I got VNC or RDP; done and done.

Well whoever maintains fluxbox is up to them... again so far, we only got the DE's on board, and just a few WMs like sway and hyprland.

Right now we have both; but again xorg itself is in maintenence mode there are no further features being added - may as well be like Solaris - it is not dead but no new anything will be added. Again I never used xwindows as intended - over-the-network , and it has been shaped to to work locally, but if there were no issues we wouldn't be talking about wayland. I just want local hardware video acceleration and support, and yea technically xorg does that - but as even you stated we need clean slate. I am only as old as X, so that means I am not a UNIX vet , and I only started using Linux 20 years ago; so to me it is no loss if we lose a network-awareness display..

Does this all means wayland cannot presently support fluxbox, window-maker, fvwm, mwm and the like ? (but only via a vnc session ?).

xorg&legacy then.

Since red-hat removed twm circa 2017 they at least kept mwm, not been happy here. Thankfully Slackware is there to help.

Yes, but I heard rumors Openbox is being ported to Wayland. But I never checked it out. I am not sure what you mean by a "vnc session".

RHEL had no choice with mwm, it is bundled with Motif

As of right now, X11 is the BEST display server available. It's not a matter of "good enough" and it's not even about networking. On a single monitor desktop system X beats all wayland compositors.

Nobody is trying to say that X is going to live forever. All anyone wants to point out is that if you want to replace something that works, have the common sense to make sure that the replacement is functionally equivalent. But this concept appears to whoosh right over your head.


People like you have this fixation on attacking the quality of the code and saying that it needs to die because it's no longer working. You go after people like me because I'm not a dev but you know what dude, I'm a support technician. I'm the one who gets the phone call when shit breaks. You people keep acting like users are spamming tech support lines complaining about how hard and broken X is. And yes, I spent 5 years supporting end users on *buntu based systems so I'm bringing real facts to the table.

If you don't like the X codebase, get yourself an account with the freedesktop.org repo and start developing for wayland. Sitting your ass on LQ trying to convince people that X is out of date isn't going to make a difference. At the end of the day I'm not helping maintain X any more than you are helping to develop wayland.

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I am not the only one who attacked the code base, there are instances of those who get their hands dirty with the codebase saying this; and all this is banter. While it is not going to help in development in anyway; those who attacked the code base already are working on wayland - i.e. some devs that worked on xorg are now on wayland.

Timing trials on and testing on my laptops do not support that statement! Can you point to any benchmarks or testing that indicates that current Wayland (1.22.00 is inferior to current X.Org (21.1.10) when running Plasma?

I am seeing pages like https://www.phoronix.com/review/ubuntu-2104-gaming and https://linuxcool.net/en/reviews/lap...han-with-xorg/ which is not very current but still pretty accurate.

In general, from wha tI could find, Wayland seems to preform about the same as X.Org: slightly faster at some things and slightly slower on others. IT uses less space, less power, and contributes to longer life and lower temperatures. The differences are slightly greater running Plasma than on Gnome. I recall articles indicating more of a difference and more things that did not work two years ago and more, but nothing from technical testing recently. If you found more or different indications I would love to read them.

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For a memory refresh and perhaps a bit of a wake up call consider what code from 1984 when X was introduced has lasted until 2024. 40 years in PC Time is essentially an eternity. In 1984 Intel CPUs ran 16bit, addressing 1MB RAM, at 5 MegaHertz clock speed, running DOS 3. The very best computer monitors were EGA, having just that year superceded CGA, on the ISA bus at 8 bits, at 16 colors and with a maximum of 192 KB IF you had a specialty graphics card that supported it to max out under 800x600 resolution (most were still max 640x480 in 1984). This is the level of technology around which X was developed.

That X even works at all 40 years later is damned near a miracle. That it works so well is basically code sorcery.

Why should I worry if X development slows down until Wayland can replace everything X does? Development of LILO for example all but ceased years ago yet it is still in common use because it just works and thanks to a minor tweak with eLILO will continue to work even if and when BIOS/UEFI manufacturers all drop legacy MBR support. I will probably be "obsolete" before X is.

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Perhaps, but difference between ELILO and xorg is for the time being at least xorg is receiving security updates; is ELILO or even LILO receiving that?

You must be new here!

Welcome to free software, where the baby gets thrown out with the bathwater.

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