I had to look up what "Gnome Mutter" is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutter_(software)
> 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.
fuel the healthy competition is a really positive spin on even more fragmentation. It's sad how Linux desktop eats itself.
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?).
I think "healthy competition" is the most productive way to look at it, given the situation.
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 think the GNOME/GTK devs alienated numerous devs. I tried to talk to ebassi but he censored me on reddit as a consequence. He does not like people speaking up against what the GTK devs do.
I have no hope for GTK. It is a GNOMEy toolkit now.
> 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.
> G(nome)T(ool)K(it). It always was.
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).
How many X11 holdouts are still around, really? I'm a curmudgeonly old man fond of old tech, but I have still had a Wayland-only setup since early 2020; once Sway was there as a good tiling window manager, and Emacs got its Wayland-ready pure-gtk branch, there was no need to look back.
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.
I'm personally open to Wayland, and able to move to it (and sometimes have, though once I had to back it out because it was breaking too much in a critical factory embedded appliance) (and XMonad works noticeably better for me than i3wm/Sway). But not everyone can move to it.
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.)
> When I would've guessed Gnome corporate funders would've been focused on getting Linux desktop on corporate desktop
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.
As a casual linux user with a 2in1 framework I feel very represented by Gnome's design choices, but I'll admit that I know I am nowhere close to representing most linux users. I do also really like it on the desktop too fwiw.
The differences started with the first Gnome startup. Even the two co-founders of HelixCode had differing goals for the platform, and even different visions for the basic nature of it.
> I'm a curmudgeonly old man fond of old tech, but I have still had a Wayland-only setup since early 2020
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. :-)
The trick is: If you use any sort of a11y tools, it's really hard to move to wayland. Things are improving, but it's slow going.
Or most remote desktop tools.
If you are on for example Mint, X11 is chosen for you and will probably be for a few years to come. There is an experimental Cinnamon Wayland session, though.
Which demographic do you evaluate? Because I am clearly among the xorg users. I don't even use systemd either.
For me at least, Emacs' pure GTK port isn't enough! You'll have to pry EXWM[0] from my cold, dead hands, so until Emacs can act as a Wayland compositor I'm staying on X. That and also Wayland still doesn't seem to support Hyper as an independent modifier.
The whole audio plugin field is on X11 for formats reason
SteamDeck's desktop mode was X11, last I checked.
Also their gamescope compositor makes the weird but reasonable-in-context choice of being a wayland (micro)compositor... that by default only uses Xwayland and doesn't expose a wayland socket to applications. AIUI this is because, at least to date, X was better for gaming in some way.
I still find Wayland to be buggier than X11.
it seems to have better display scaling which is useful when I switch between large monitor and laptop screen.
There are a few. There is still some software that has trouble with XWayland, which could hold back some users, and there are many who aren’t happy with the state of accessibility tools. But I don’t think this justifies the hatred towards it, as it’s not like these issues are unfixable. (Wayland now works better than X for me on all of my systems.)
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.
> How many X11 holdouts are still around, really?
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.
I don't use a compositor in XOrg.
> 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.
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.
> Example: people wanting to keep X11 alive have been literally banned from the freedesktop.org infrastructure
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.
> Poettering
He is Microsoft's mole.
In Poettering’s defence: his software worked/works.
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…
Probably a better reference.
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.
I have no idea about the affiliations of that dev and i have zero interest in defending/promoting or condemning his personal opinions.
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.
Except that he was kicked out for sending in patches that weren't working, failed the build tests and had obviously next actually been tested. Repeatedly. It reached AI slop level PRs and people got sick of it.
> Politics does not influence my choices in software (quality does).
Then why are you linking to a guy who has been making broken changes?
Xorg as a whole was much higher in quality when the push for broken wayland stuff started. You’re lagging.
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A decade of a their trademark hard line "you're holding it wrong" ethos will likely already have driven away what people might object to this sort of change.
Anti-Gnome people really need to get over it. We get it, just don't use their software.
I've never believed on that dichotomy: either you are happy with everything a project does, or you are a hater. Why?
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.
Just to add: well-founded criticism is not being a “hater”, nor is forking or leaving a project over irreconcilable disagreements. Being a hater is repeatedly publishing absurd screeds, attempting to organize smear campaigns to pressure devs, and using sock puppets to flood social media with negative comments in order to influence users. Sadly there are a few very loud haters in the FOSS community.
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!
> 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!
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.
I'd say GNOME and the community were both at fault. GNOME 3 was awful when it rolled out and the devs didn't really listen to the community at all (they didn't have to, but they probably should have taken more feedback). The community at the time was also absolutely toxic and I can't blame GNOME for tuning it all out.
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.
I can agree with this to an extent. Projects that grow to a certain level of importance start to face new problems around community relations and governance, and it isn’t always a smooth transition. Generally speaking I think GNOME is doing better with this now.
I don't see well found criticism in ops statement just blunt ragebait.
I was just adding to the comment I replied to. There’s a lot of grey area between hater and die-hard supporter but that often isn’t acknowledged in these flame wars.
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until they suddenly drop the other not-their software. as they've done to X11
I think you misread that comment.
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It’s just the way, innit? People love to (rightly) bump their chest and say Linux is great for how customisable and open it is, but then go bananas the moment one software decides to do something different.
“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.”
Yeah, no. Let me fix that:
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
There are multiple angles. As the stewards of GTK, they should, IMO, try to keep it flexible and customizable to whatever extent is manageable and reasonable. This post is about Mutter, which is a window manager, which should have very little to do with the app "ecosystem". They can, and should, do whatever the hell they want with Mutter, GNOME Shell, Nautilus/Files, etc.
Even in the link you posted, they're talking about GNOME, not GTK.
When I complain about Gnome driving away users with hostility, it's mainly their GTK stewardship I talk of.
That, and things like primarily designing the interface for a touch screen, despite PC touch screens not really taking off. Very out of touch.
> things like primarily designing the interface for a touch screen, despite PC touch screens not really taking off.
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
I really don't understand why we need to absolutely ruin desktop UIs in order to have mobile interfaces. For web UIs it may be argued as a necessary evil as designing multiple front-ends is expensive and reactive UIs can theoretically be made to exist and shown in small demos to be decent, but when designing desktop applications?
Having a framework that can be adaptable, like GTK, allows for padded, but IMO reasonably-sized touch targets. Designing an adaptive desktop app means the effort is only spent once, but can kickstart the virtuous cycle of "Mobile Linux is less trash than it used to be" -> More users are willing to use Mobile Linux -> More effort is spent making it less trash.
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
Point taken on GTK, and I can't really disagree since I haven't even poked at writing a GTK GUI in many years.
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.
The problem isn't that they accommodate touch screens, but that they do so at the expense of keyboard and mouse users, and then they push these changes to GTK in a way where keyboard-and-mouse interfaces become clunkier and GTK-developed UIs become very hard to integrate with other desktop environments.
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.
Would you like to read what an Xfce developer said about GTK stewardship?[1][2]
I read them, but I'm not sure what point you're trying to make, or why it's directed at my comment. I mean that genuinely.
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.
You raised GTK stewardship. I replied about GTK stewardship. Why raise GTK stewardship and complain replies are not about Mutter exclusively? Why raise GTK stewardship and dismiss it saying so be it?
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.
Unfortunately, the context starts getting lost as we get deeper into discussion threads like this, but originally, I brought up GTK stewardship because I felt that the top few comments in this thread started to conflate the various projects developed by the GNOME organization. The original HN post was about Mutter, and the first few comments in this reply chain were about software being customizable, etc. Those could've been about whether it's okay or not for Mutter to lose flexibility. But, the one I replied to started complaining about software "imposing limitations on the rest of the ecosystem".
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.
Probably yes. And, good. It's free software. I still use GNOME Shell, and the minute the make a change that I don't want to deal with, I'll change to something else. Easy as that.
Wayland is still years away from usable state. You still can't even autotype keepassxc passwords and there are still no good solutions for remote desktop sessions (at least I have not found any last time i checked)
> Wayland is still years away from usable state
… 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.
> What is that?
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.
Perhap Claude, Gemini, and Codex will finally make things come along sooner than later
Those are fair criticisms, but neither one of them is a dealbreaker for any OS that I use on a regular basis. As such, most Wayland sessions are perfectly usable to me.
I am saying that, because it is a dealbreaker for me, as I have to login tens of times every day across different companies. Wish Yubikey and webauthn was implemented by everyone already
Really hoping window focus gets fixed, its been broken for me for about a year now, windows come up behind the one I'm using, end up typing into the wrong one etc.
Hyper-V connects to a VM desktop using XRDP which uses X. Will that stuff still work? Can you still use gnome through XRDP?
They expect you to use GNOME Remote Desktop instead I think.
Being a GNOME thing, I imagine they'll eventually drop Wayland support too so as to not confuse users with options.
(/s in this case, I'm actually all for dropping X11)
The GNOME/GTK devs are on a mission - they fight down all xorg users.
That's not good.
There are dozens of you. Dozens!