On 23/09/2024 21:14, Alan Mackenzie wrote:
What on Earth is going on? I never asked for wayland, and I haven't received any news items about it in the last few weeks. I know little about this X substitute, but one thing's vitually certain; that installing it as emerge intended would lead to a lot of breakage.
Well, everything is slowly moving to Wayland, or X13 as they didn't call it. And while I don't understand the details, X Org is basically dead.
X comes in two halves, the front end (or server, they use the words the other way round to normal), which is still maintained. And the back end, or client, that drives the hardware - this bit is basically abandonware apart from the Wayland compositor or whatever it is.
So put pretty simply, Wayland is fast becoming - if it isn't already - a hard dependency of X11. But if you want to run X11 as your sole windowing system, that's no problem, just run it over Wayland.
What makes you think that enabling Wayland will cause breakage? It shouldn't really do anything much, other than allowing apps to access Wayland features if they want. Given that both KDE/Plasma, and Gnome, are moving to Wayland (and pretty much hide Wayland from you, just like they hide X), I would have thought disabling Wayland was actually MORE likely to cause breakage.
Not that your hardware/X combo is going to bitrot, but the apps you rely on might start relying on Wayland and won't be happy if they can't find it.
(I'm cursing Plasma 6, but that's not Wayland's fault. afaict it's having problems importing/updating the old Plasma 5 settings with the result it resets itself every time I log in :-(
Cheers, Wol
