LXQt, the desktop environment that is to KDE what Xfce is to GNOME, has released version 2.1.0, and while the version number change seems average, it’s got a big ace up its sleeve: you can now run LXQt in a Wayland session, and they claim it works quite well, too, and it supports a wide variety of compositors.
Through its new component
lxqt-wayland-session, LXQt 2.1.0 supports 7 Wayland sessions (with Labwc, KWin, Wayfire, Hyprland, Sway, River and Niri), has two Wayland back-ends inlxqt-panel(one forkwin_waylandand the other general), and will add more later. All LXQt components that are not limited to X11 — i.e., most components — work fine on Wayland. The sessions are available in the new sectionWayland Settingsinside LXQt Session Settings. At least one supported Wayland compositor should be installed in addition tolxqt-wayland-sessionfor it to be used.There is still hard work to do, but all of the current LXQt Wayland sessions are quite usable; their differences are about what the supported Wayland compositors provide.
↫ LXQt 2.1.0 release announcement
This is great news for LXQt, as it ensures the desktop environment is ready to keep up with what modern Linux distributions provide. Crucially and in line with what we’ve come to expect from LXQt, X11 support is a core part of the project, and they even go so far as to say “the X11 session will be supported indefinitely”, which should set people preferring to stay on X11 at ease. I personally may have gleefully left X11 in the dustbin of history, but many among us haven’t, and it’s welcome to see LXQt’s clear promise here.
Many of the other improvements in this release are tied to Wayland, making sure the various components work and Wayland settings can be adjusted. On top of that, there’s the usual list of bug fixes and smaller changes, too.
> “the X11 session will be supported indefinitely”
Cool, so in a few years, they will stay on an old, unmaintained and insecure version of Qt indefinitely. I’m sure this promise just to please a few people stuck 3 decades ago is not going to bite them at all in the future.
“Unlimited amount of time” isn’t the only definition indefinite. It’s often used to describe a period of time that doesn’t have a defined end. I don’t believe Qt has a date set for ending X11 support, so LXQt supporting X11 as only long as Qt supports it is still indefinite
Not going to happen. Almost all commercial software with GUI uses Qt and runs on Linux _because_ of X11.
Same with distributions, any distribution that drops X11 support in applications (server is not important, few people use Xorg on hardware) is out. Currently the choice of Linux distributions is RHEL and SLES but if they were to drop the ball people will move out, just like they moved in 20 years ago. Very likely it won’t be necessary or a new company will take over the market
I do you are maing X11 more important than it really is. I moved to wayland and I have ZERO need for X11 anymore. There is no reason why desktop Linux can’t evolve to something other than X11.
Just look at Android. They are happy without it.
protomank,
ndrw is right. But it seems like you may be overlooking the distinction that ndrw was making about X11 applications specifically saying “server is not important, few people use Xorg on hardware”. Many users still need to run X software even after switching to wayland. Dropping X11 support altogether would not only break tons of software from the repos, but I also suspect the majority of games on steam, etc. I don’t think any distros are planning on dropping these dependencies any time soon.
Android are happy without wayland either. I don’t see why it would matter as it’s a different target.
It is a niche market but with enough money in it to make things happen. The only reason these ISVs haven’t come up with their own OS (actually they did, they constantly try to lure customers to their clouds) is because none of them covers the whole set of functionality needed and cusomers prefer independent distributions.
But, if it costed them $10M to develop such distribution that’s like an annual revenue from a small-medium customer.
Also, no bells and whistles here. Most people have just left RHEL 7 because it was EoL’d earlier this year.
You seem to have missed the memo that RHEL *is* dropping X11: https://www.phoronix.com/news/RHEL10-Removing-X.Org
js,
Where is the conflict? Here is the actual headline:
Here’s is ndrw’s quote .
Both of these are saying the same thing.
We have yet to see what it means in practice. Just removing Xorg server (what the article suggests) is perfectly fine. It is rarely needed, and if it was, it is easy to add.
Having said that, people are watching it very carefully. There is still time to replace RHEL if they want to exit the market, with many users having just switched from RHEL 7 TO 8.
Heck yeah! Good to see an additional Wayland desktop option that isn’t a minimal WM or some weird quirky tiling stuff. I still miss Xfce, but this might be a good stopgap.
Now if only the Xfce devs would prio having a Wayland session, even the most basic support…
I think ill say woth Xorg for a while longer until the video maximize/resore does not take so long in comparison in Wayland, Or when i get the same game speed FPS as in Xorg. Or when you can get 4k@120hz over HDMI on a modern AMD card in wayland without strange flickering, i know the latter is not waylands fault, but at least in Xorg i can disable EDID and use a displayport-tohdmi adapter and it works just fine.
Why does each and every desktop environment out there need to develop their own Wayland support? Some taking decades to offer initial support. Why is that a good idea and what are the benefits? All this desktop environments are so inherently different, that it’s impossible for most of them to use a common Wayland display server or better compositor? Such a rabbit hole this whole Wayland era turned out to be. Hopefully for a competitor to emerge that does a better job at it. Until then we are caught in this limbo, on how X11 and Xorg are the past, Wayland and all the fragmented mess a future. And nobody really calling this BS out.
This is all a part of the overall open source mantra that more choice is a good thing. Well, it might be a good thing in concept, but for desktops, it’s really not. If there were only a singular desktop, then there would be more of an opportunity to focus on just having a single compositor to focus on. However, when you allow multiple desktops, you open the door for multiple implementations for everything included in that. I firmly believe that if there were more developers capable of doing the work, there’d be substantially more display systems than there already are. I’m not making a case for either way being better than the other; I’m simply saying that once you open the door for more choice, it’s almost impossible to go back & limit that choice in specific areas.
No i don’t feel that is it. That is having more desktop environments actually is a good thing, i don’t see on how this could be disputed. The question hence remains if in the past we had X11 protocol and Xorg server, and all desktop environments could make a good use of it. Why do we now have Wayland protocol and gazillion of compositors. Considering a compositor is needed component to make a desktop environment work it would make much more sense to focus on a sole and general solution most desktop environments would use. Why was this not done as this is likely the biggest reason on why Wayland never really took off and is still considered as an experiment of colossal nature.
Because Wayland is deliberately underspecified. It is designed more for infotainment systems than desktops. For a long time, the only user of Wayland on desktop was Gnome3 – a monolith with very opinionated view at what a desktop should be. Conveniently, difficult features to implement (SSD, systray, multiple applications managing the desktop, docks etc) were all removed as undesirable. Now other desktops are trying to bring half of missing X11 functionality to Wayland but that process will take years to implement and forever to agree on a standards.
Why are then we still doing it? If it was set to replace 40 years old tech and it turned out it will take at least 40 years to do it? Are we waiting for Wayland proponents to retire first and after to invent something else for another generation to work on something for another 40 years? Or what. As for your reply i don’t feel that is correct, Wayland requiring for popular desktop paradigms to be retired in GNOME. AFAIK that shit was totally made up and enforced on GNOME side, by design, and they would do it on Xorg too. So i wouldn’t pin that whole mess on Wayland. But i do share the sentiment, some Wayland compositor oriented things are likely hard to implement. And here i really don’t understand on why this hard things must be implemented for gazillion of times. Is it due to nobody having what it takes to take responsibility to develop a standard Wayland compositor, that would be used as a part of default GNU/Linux stack for majority of desktop environments out there? Somehow the belief is still each project should instead do it for themself and and at any sign of slight troubles to fork and again create and maintain another variant? One variant for each programming language out there? What the heck are we doing and how to stop this madness ASAP?