This is the best summary I could come up with:
Red Hat’s Olivier Fourdan just announced the stable release of XWayland 24.1 as the newest feature release for this X.Org Server code allowing X11 clients to work within the confines of Wayland compositors.
XWayland 24.1 brings explicit sync support that’s long been in the works throughout the stack.
The explicit sync support brings the most noticeable improvements for those using the NVIDIA proprietary Linux graphics driver with the R555 beta driver due out imminently with that driver-side support.
Also of NVIDIA relevance in XWayland 24.1 is removing the EGLStream back-end now that NVIDIA has finally been supporting GBM across their recent driver versions.
XWayland 24.1 also ships a number of rootful improvements including HiDPI and fractional scaling for the rootful mode, among other improvements.
The brief XWayland 24.1 release announcement can be found on the Xorg mailing list.
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X11 is a mess. Wayland is a mess.
With that name we won’t get anywhere! I propose we abandon x12land and start a new standard, w12!
If it would be a standard intented for Unix ideology and not business requirements of X11 (35+ years is a long time) or Wayland (RedHat is one company with its own interests, sometimes contradicting, say, mine as a Unix user), then it could work well.
X11 paradigm I like more than that of Wayland, but it could use some clearly incompatible changes.
How, exactly, is Wayland a mess? It has a good legacy window compatibility layer and is solving a lot of problems X11 had. Seems perfectly alright to me.
what does “rootfull” mean?
You need to wander through links a bit to find it but https://ofourdan.blogspot.com/2023/10/xwayland-rootful-part1.html talks about the rootful and the recent changes.
XWayland normally runs x11 apps seamlessly (more or less) in Wayland
XWayland rootful spawns a window which is like a virtual monitor running a full x11 session inside it. You spawn apps inside of the window using the DISPLAY variable
Still, the Xwayland window is missing a title bar that would allow for moving the window around.
This is because Wayland does not decorate its surfaces, this is left to the Wayland client themselves to add window decorations (also known as client side decorations, or CSD for short).
This however would add a lot of complexity to Xwayland (which is primarily an Xserver, not a full fledged Wayland application). Thankfully, there is libdecor which can fence Xwayland from that complexity and provide window decorations for us.
This seems… ridiculous. Windows and MacOS developers don’t worry about creating decorations. And they don’t worry about that “adding a lot of complexity”. Even with X11 you get decorations from the WM without any work. I know I don’t understand the glory that is the Wayland architecture and that a bunch of folks will now angrily tell me all the numerous ways in which I’m not only wrong but but also stupid but… It just seems weird is all.
Honestly I feel like it doesn’t really matter either way, it adds a little complexity for the people maintaining qt and gtk and things like that, but most actual application developers aren’t interacting directly with the display server so it doesn’t make much difference for them
I think that the reason for all the weirdness in wayland is because they are considering more usecases than just desktop with taskbar and window title bars with _ [ ] X buttons. Think signage, mobile interfaces, kiosks, and other weird non-traditional interfaces. Its why absolute window positioning is dumb the way it is too.
I though only GNOME cared about having client-side decorations? Probably why any GNOME app I have has an annoying toolbar when I’m using a tiling window manager.
I cannot wait until this lands in most distros. So much of the Wayland noise will go away.
Hopefully in Arch already
It is in testing:
https://archlinux.org/packages/?sort=&q=xwayland&maintainer=&flagged=
