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.
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
Gnome to fade away into obscurity
All applications/libraries/toolkits expand to ensure Wayland support
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
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.
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)
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.
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
Yes and no…
Yes be aware of, especially around the present quirks of Wayland since it’s needed to provide informative feedback to users who find themselves in trouble
No with regards to what gnome are (potentially) going todo. Why? This is still a long way off. Xorg was suppose to be deprecated like 5 years ago yet here we are still recieving patches.
Yes a PR was issues to start the process of dropping xorg from gnome BUT it isn’t dropped and there is alot more still to extract. These components can still be external ASSUMING gtk still offers xorg support. Then you have distros that might keep aspects around (remember redhat/centos kept a standard logger around even when systemd was deployed).
When a clear release of when gnome is removing xorg is the time to keep an eye on what distros are doing. Remember, kicad supports Ubuntu, Fedora and Debian.
Fedora40 and gtk5 is what the OP should be concerned with since fedora40 are planning on dropping X11 and that is released next year
Does KiCad need a DE? I mean you don’t need a DE to run X11 applications.
Edit: No it doesn’t. It needs a Xserver with a windows manager. Without a windows manager, it still can be used but you can’t (easily) switch between different KiCad windows).
Yea, I wouldn’t advise Arch Linux for anyone looking to just use their PC…out of the box…without it breaking randomly one week after the first month because some fresh bleeding edge package got updated after the weekly goat slaughter.
You can suggest your preferences, but others may have different choices. Linux users tend to use what suits them best, and recommendations may not hold much sway.
Your suggestion is problematic because it involves two recommendations instead of just one. Why would you need or use two operating systems? To put it mildly, this is far from ideal.
Now, the real question is: will Kicad see improvements for Wayland support, or is Xwayland also a valid option for smooth operation?
One thing to avoid at all costs is tailoring Kicad solely to Windows users. Otherwise, it might be wiser to explore alternative CAD software, as there are several emerging options.
Lately, Kicad seems to have been diverting time and effort towards less critical features like font integration and a new library system, rather than enhancing complex board layouts, offering more customization options for net classes across different layers, or improving differential pair routing and multi-track routing.
Depends on whether or not Wayland decides to support applications like KiCad that require some control over the mouse pointer, dockable tool windows, etc. This isn’t up to KiCad (or wxWidgets). If Wayland doesn’t add support, KiCad will remain supported and fully functional on X11, Windows, and macOS.
My experience has been quite different – been running it on multiple machines for many years with almost no problems. I have two associates who also run Arch for years with a similar experience.
We recently did a podcast on Arch Linux:
But to each his/her own – I’m certainly not trying to force anything on anyone, just relating my experiences and what works for me. Arch now has an installer that makes it much easier to install without being a Linux expert, though the manual install process is pretty smooth, and learning a little about your OS works is usually not a bad thing. If you search on a random Linux topic, you will often end up at the Arch Wiki – the documentation is very good.
I frankly see very little practical difference between X11 and Wayland. I run X11 on my main workstation and Wayland on my notebook/secondary workstation. For what I do, I don’t see any difference. I do KiCad mostly on my workstation, and I do fire up KiCad on my Wayland machine to look at stuff occasionally. Switching between x11/wayland on login is painless and makes no practical difference, so if I needed X11 for a while, I would switch for however it took to get the job done without really impacting anything else.
The reason I like Arch is that it gives the flexibility to run whatever I need (Gnome, KDE, XFCE, …) and it does all this pretty well.
For better or worse, Wayland is likely the future on Linux, so somehow things will need to adapt. Progress forward typically requires some pain. As GPUs and graphics stacks become more advanced, we will have to use more advanced technology to leverage this. Is it ideal during the transition? Certainly not, but things will move forward, so we need to figure out how to make the best of it during the transition. My point with all this is I have a practical way to keep using Linux during this transition instead of being forced into Windows. I like that!