Gnome is going to drop X11

Community
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Since gnome is going to drop X11… does Kicad fully support Wayland already?

Source:

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It mostly works, but some functions (mainly warping the cursor) are broken/disabled at the moment. See for example "Center and warp cursor on zoom" doesn't work properly on Wayland (#9785) · Issues · KiCad / KiCad Source Code / kicad · GitLab.

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I’d say Wayland is not yet ready for KiCad, there are numerous issues:

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And this is super important when working with the layout. I tried to design the board once without this feature and it is really bad.

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@dsa-t hope the Kicad team has the time and creativity to tackle these issues asap. :pray:

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Can’t you use KiCad in Xwayland?

(I wouldn’t use Wayland (yet) as it lacks crucial features X11 has, most notable for me is network transparency. I think it is stupid to drop X11 in favour of something that is less mature. But this are just my 2 cents.)

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On Xwayland, the cursor cannot be warped for infinite panning, because apparently the cursor cannot be hidden while in motion. And hiding the cursor is the hack to make the warping work at all in center on zoom cases.

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There may exist a hack to work around that limitaion, but no one wants to waste time on hacks.

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Wayland needs to fix their shit not KiCad.

Wayland is actively throwing out things from standard desktop environments that both Windows and macOS, which are our majority platforms do out of the box.

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just GNOME removing features… move along…
This isn’t a Kicad problem, this is a wx and gnome user problem.

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This is stupid. Now there are Windows and Microsoft bosses all over the place.

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That was funny dude.

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Doesn’t KiCad need wx?

I mean yes, it isn’t really a KiCad problem when some users and DE’s decide to use immature software when there is a better alternative. But i don’t see how wx and KiCad is in a different position.

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Yes.

But it’s also not a wx problem. Things like “docking windows” for the AUI we have are literally impossible under Wayland currently and it impacts basically every application including ones using frameworks like qt.

Calling Wayland immature is funny because most of it is the current individuals with influence on Wayland literally making it committee hell of opinions, many of them never seem to use a desktop environment. They’ve had 15 years to implement a desktop supporting base. There are open source projects that have written a full operating system from scratch + desktop environment in less time.

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Kicad uses wx. wx on Wayland isn’t ready, gnome are going to drop X11 support.

What part of this is kicad in control of?
The ONLY thing kicad can do is change toolboxes but that isnt going to happen, which means Kicad are dependant on wx improving compatibility AND then kicad will immediately inherit it OR have API calls they can use to ensure Wayland compatibility.

So again, what can kicad do …

Now GNOME being GNOME and removing X11 support will cause one of three things to occur

  1. Gnome to fade away into obscurity
  2. All applications/libraries/toolkits expand to ensure Wayland support
  3. Xwayland improves to close the holes in its support…

So again… What can kicad do.

Now GNOME fading away into obscurity would be a good thing as basically their perpetual removal of features is well embarrassing but well I have never really used gnome over the last 25 years of using Linux as it’s been: windowmaker → openbox → awesomeWM → sway (wayland).

All libraries updating to support Wayland… Well that is a given as Xorg is in maintenance and even that isn’t guaranteed but the WHEN is key. WX gets a major bump every 2 years so the earliest we will have full support is 2025 and we will be on Kicad v10 as the potential earliest that it will fully integrated

Xwayland is meant to be the bridge back to the legacy system and right now it is poor and i have a couple of applications that struggle to work properly (Matlab is one…). As you can see from the last paragraph Xwayland is going to be critical to manage legacy versions of Kicad and legacy applications. Now Kicad having issues today in a wayland session via Xwayland (which btw I don’t have) isn’t an issue with Kicad but an issue with Xwayland

So again… what can Kicad do?

  • They cannot stop GNOME dropping Xorg
  • They cannot speed up wayland support in wxwidgets
  • they cannot improve Xwayland
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I tend to forget which desktop I use on my Linux Mint box. It’s either XFCE or LXDE, but I do remember that X11 is a quite important part of Linux compatibility. I think I used Gnome 2 a bunch of years ago, but with the gnome 2 / 3 split I dropped gnome and started using a simpler desktop. For me a desktop is a vehicle to run programs, and not much more.

But I have noticed a general trend to remove configuration options from a lot of programs and I find that quite weird and annoying.

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to be clear, a big part of the issue is that Wayland just doesn’t make compatibility possible. So for some of the things that are broken, there is really not much wxWidgets team can do before/unless Wayland decides to add protocols for compatibility, and then those new protocols get implemented by the major Wayland compositors.

Actually we can, we work pretty closely with the wxWidgets team. But like I said above, the main problem is not that wxWidgets is slow to support Wayland, it is that Wayland support isn’t really feasible/possible because Wayland decided that it would be fine to just not support some things that are supported by X11/Windows/macOS. This is not a problem unique to KiCad or wxWidgets – it impacts all toolkits that support features that Wayland doesn’t (Qt, etc)

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Use a better DE or WM

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Wrong.

Qt has just as many issues as Wx with Wayland. This is because Wayland is incomplete beyond support for Terminal guis which is what wayland devs seem to only use.

Even today, dockable windows on QT w/ wayland are broken
https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-85927

Even one funny commit with a hack
https://code.qt.io/cgit/qt/qtbase.git/patch/?id=581c4bcb62a9d3cbb4c33df3f0f7a0a965225e74

Should the protocol not be available this doesn’t make things
actively worse as it will be similar broken as before.

Lol

Along with a long list of other issues.

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Which just goes to support my point that dependencies are what needs to be fixed AND Xwayland

If every single distro and DE dropped X11 today, what would kicad do ? This is what makes the OP question irrelevant.

I don’t think I would want to use a distro maintained by kicad that also maintained xorg and other toolkits and libs … As that is actually the only (rediculous) thing kicad could do… Or drop Linux support…

Redhat have tried this before… RH8 1st got released with only Wayland and EVERYTHING broke (I had to rebuild my SIM machine back to RH7…). Redhat did this with pushing pulseaudio… Gnome is redhat so just let them break their own stuff while everyone that is sane will use other things… If people want to keep using X their is bungie and other good DE because this is yet another stupid push by gnome that won’t actually stay for long