GNOME may rule Ubuntu Resolute Raccoon, but X.org isn't roadkill yet

FEATURE: Ubuntu doesn't just mean GNOME – or Wayland. Alongside the default edition of Ubuntu 26.04 last week, editions with seven other desktops were released, five of which still offer X.org. Just under a fortnight ago, we covered the launch of Ubuntu 26.04. Ubuntu's default desktop is GNOME, and this version contains GNOME 50 …

[Anonymous Coward]

there's no place like GNOME

there's no place like GNOME

[that one in the corner]

Re: there's no place like GNOME

GNOME is so remote

GNOME is just emotion

Sticking in my throat

Let's go to XFCE[1]

GNOME is hard to swallow

GNOME is like a rock

GNOME is good clean living[2]

GNOME is... I forgot

Let's go to XFCE

[1] that's pronounced "X face" isn't it?

[2] no decorations, keep your windows clean

[Liam Proven]

Re: there's no place like GNOME

Lene Lovich. Nice. Approved.

I like the footnote about pronouncing Xfce, too.

Me, I think it should probably go back to XForms, like in 1996... Or at least FLTK, or "full tick" as I learned it was meant to be pronounced when I wrote a story on it.

https://www.theregister.com/software/2024/11/26/fltk-14-it-now-speaks-wayland-and-has-better-hidpi-support/315261

[LionelB]

Re: there's no place like GNOME

> Or at least FLTK, or "full tick" as I learned it was meant to be pronounced …

I recall using FLTK for GUI development at one point. It's a nice toolkit. Somehow I always heard it as Flitwick.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: there's no place like GNOME

XForms, FLTK, 1996... "An old woman is always uneasy when dry bones are mentioned..."

[JimmyPage]

I expect this comment will be deleted

But for the love of God can we have a "revert to previous layout" option for El Reg please ?

Or is the hope that preventing any user feedback will allow the money men to say "but no one has complained" ?

[Dan 55]

Re: I expect this comment will be deleted

In the finest tradition of El Reg style changes, nobody will like it.

But please, can the boxes be lined up horizontally so we can not like it a little less?

[Liam Proven]

Re: I expect this comment will be deleted

> But for the love of God can we have a "revert to previous layout" option for El Reg please ?

Great things are afoot. Big. Huge.

The relevant people are working on it, very hard. Do not be afraid.

In other words, yeah, we know, we're on it.

[keithpeter]

Re: I expect this comment will be deleted

Something funny going on with the screenshots in the article: some pixels being cropped top and bottom?

E.G. Gnome flashback has lost its top and bottom panels.

If I open the image in a new tap and cut the url back to the webp? bit I can see a small thumbnail that has top/bottom panels.

(This is on a poor man's 1366x768 museum thinkpad)

[Liam Proven]

Re: I expect this comment will be deleted

> Something funny going on with the screenshots in the article: some pixels being cropped top and bottom?

>

> E.G. Gnome flashback has lost its top and bottom panels.

Yes, I saw that too, but it looks to me like it's now been fixed.

> (This is on a poor man's 1366x768 museum thinkpad)

I have and use a couple of those, too. :-)

But it was happening on my biggest (27") screen as well. Now, AFAICS, fixed.

[jake]

Re: I expect this comment will be deleted

More bigly and huger than has ever been seen before?

[Casca]

Re: I expect this comment will be deleted

Even more bigglier!

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: More bigly and huger than has ever been seen before?

Coz every one at El Reg HQ thinks we all have 27in 4K (or greater) monitors on our desks.

Before anyone slags me off, I was recently asked why I kept using my iPhone SE (v2) and a small Android thing, when everyone else had giant fondleslabs running IOS or Android.

My answer was that if the app works on that screen then it will work on all the others (with an exception for the Folding Screen things)

I can't afford any phone over £750. My desktop has a 24in,1200x1920 Dell monitor from around 2007 that works fine. One day, I might get around to getting a 4K screen.

[Taliesinawen]

Re: I expect this comment will be deleted

>> But for the love of God can we have a "revert to previous layout" option for El Reg please ?

> Great things are afoot. Big. Huge ..

Yea, what have you done to the fonts :o

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: I expect this comment will be deleted

> Great things are afoot. Big. Huge.

/home/anonco/Documents/things-she-never-said

[Gene Cash]

Re: I expect this comment will be deleted

Eh, it took me a while to find the comments link, and the font is too big, but it's not that bad.

[coredump]

Re: I expect this comment will be deleted

Trying to read articles with this new format is cumbersome. As someone elsewhere remarked, the article text occupies only approximately 1/3 of the middle of the window, meaning we now have to scroll so much more to get through it.

It's almost as if someone composed the article on a phone screen with hard <cr> and no flow or something.

And yeah, the comments link/button is hard to spot.

[chololennon]

Re: I expect this comment will be deleted

> But for the love of God can we have a "revert to previous layout" option for El Reg please ?

In my case I cannot access the comment section when I am on a mobile phone (android/chrome/opera). The buttons (top and bottom) are missing :-(

[williamyf]

Re: I expect this comment will be deleted

Also, https://www.theregister.com/Week redirects to the archives now.

That was a way to have a streamlined version of the reg for mobile. Please bring it back. Or something similar

[Taliesinawen]

Re: I expect this comment will be deleted

> That was a way to have a streamlined version of the reg for mobile. Please bring it back. Or something similar

Can't the website detect desktop or mobile and feed a different CSS file to each?

[williamyf]

Re: I expect this comment will be deleted

¡NO! ¡For the love of all that is holy! ¡NO!

¡Do not give them ideas!

https://xkcd.com/869/

[Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck]

Personally I rather like the MATE desktop with Debian; who needs all that useless cruft and spam that you get with Ubuntu? Not to mention all the "extras" that screw things up - like this IGNORANT decision to shovel Wayland down everyone's throats despite it's poor performance and incompatability problems.

[ICL1900-G3]

Debian really takes some beating. I cannot fathom why it is considered difficult.

[Liam Proven]

> I cannot fathom why it is considered difficult.

*shrug* You do you.

Debian is usually quite a _lot_ more work -- and since the components are already old at launch, by a year or so later, they're ancient.

It comes with an old ESR, when most people want a current browser. Most of us need proprietary freeware like Ferdium, Slack, maybe Teams or Whatsapp or something, Signal and so on. For most people that probably means installing Flatpak and then having 2 update mechanisms -- and of course vast app footprints.

If someone's kit needs special drivers, they have to work out what and find them and install them. Ubuntu provides tools to work out what drivers a given PC needs and install them, rather than the DIY approach.

I do use it, but mainly in server type roles (and there the absence of ZFS becomes a pain).

Debian is the IKEA flatpak of distros: some assembly required, and may have rough edges if you lack skills in that department.

Ubuntu is as close as PCs get to Mac-style "just works".

[coredump]

Back when I was still supporting mostly CentOS and other Red Hat-flavored things, and hadn't that much experience with Debian outside of the occasional SPARC station before then, I asked some folks who were enamored with it about this Ubuntu thing.

After the old joke about "Ubuntu is a word which means 'can't figure out Debian'", they slightly more seriously opined that Debian is for sysadmins and their servers, Ubuntu is for regular[1] people.

It's a bit of a simplistic take even back then, but I wouldn't argue with it much.

Nowdays Debian's strategic directions trouble me more than the rough edges I've long ago gotten used to, such that if I'm going to install an OS which requires a bit more work to configure, I'll just use FreeBSD. Which has been my favorite for much longer anyway. Things like ZFS make the decision that much easier.

[1] I didn't perceive the implication that I wasn't "regular people" as an insult at the time.

[blu3b3rry]

I didn't find Debian XFCE really gave me any advantages over Xubuntu when running on my ancient HP Core2Duo laptop.

Both seem to consume a similar amount of resources at idle, but Xubuntu required far less setup.

System upgrades to new versions are also very straightforward compared to Debian, no need to edit any config files. Reminds me that I should check if 26.04 is now available as an upgrade......

I don't like the way Ubuntu defaults to Snaps for stuff like web browsers, but in my experience at least they seem to better run on older hardware compared to Flatpaks.

[coredump]

I dunno. I had a weird/unexplained experience with Ubuntu some time ago on a small Atom server for the lab, that made me wonder if Ubuntu has gotten worse than Debian for old+small gear.

This was a headless server so no window managers etc., the thing was only meant to run DNS, NTP, DHCP and similar network services. I hadn't used Ubuntu for a while so I thought I'd give it a go again. The install went fine, most of the Debian procedures we use in this environment for config and setup were unsurprisingly applicable to Ubuntu, so that part was simple enough.

But once we deployed it, the little server behaved as if it was always under load -- never an idle CPU, and the system even "felt" laggy (admittedly unscientific). I watched it for a couple days, did the usual routine of turning off unnecessary stuff (which was already pretty minimal for the OS install here), etc. This was a backup server so not really critical and I didn't spend a lot of effort trying to figure it out, but I was annoyed at not seeing an obvious culprit.

After reading a few posts I tried disabling the Snap stuff on a whim, we weren't using it anyway, but it didn't seem to matter.

Eventually I tired of the experiment and re-installed with the contemporary Debian, same config and setup otherwise, and the improvement was immediately noticeable. It ran that way until the old hardware eventually died. Go figure.

[LionelB]

> Debian is the IKEA flatpak of distros …

Wondering what that makes Arch, Gentoo …

> Ubuntu is as close as PCs get to Mac-style "just works".

I'd be more inclined to grant that accolade to Mint, but I guess YMMV.

[Liam Proven]

> Wondering what that makes Arch, Gentoo …

Hard to answer without resorting to parody. You know the kind, old ones like:

• Linux Airlines, you walk onto the tarmac and there's a pile of components.

• Linux birthday cake: flour, eggs, butter, milk, sugar; "some assembly required".

I _like_ assembling IKEA stuff. I find it fun, like a 3D puzzle but at the end, it's something you can use, unlike a jigsaw.

Whereas Arch et al are more like: right, you have wood, nails, glue; we are giving you tools and instructions; now get sawing and hammering. It's not a ready-made kit, easy for non-specialists to assemble; it's a pile of components and you're meant to build your own, learning and customising as you go.

With IKEA you get no choice of how it goes together: it's right or it's wrong.

With Gentoo, it's your choice of how it looks, what you make: bookcase or table or skateboard.

> I'd be more inclined to grant that accolade to Mint, but I guess YMMV.

Mint _is_ Ubuntu, with a different look and Flatpak in place of Snap.

So is Zorin. So is Pop OS, and Asmi, and Linux Lite.

But Ubuntu is not Debian. You may have to do some work to find a single file that is exactly the same, unmodified.

That is why there is an LMDE, and why there _can_ be.

Back to IKEA: I've owned a few Billy bookcases (and a _tonne_ of Ivar.)

I made a Billy into a CD rack because I had quite a lot of CDs. I bought a load more shelves and supporting pegs and installed them so close only CDs would fit. (There aren't enough holes, so some shelves ended up more widely-spaced. I used those for DVDs, of which I didn't have many.)

It was a 6' tall CD rack that held circa a thousand CDs & DVDs. It was mine, "designed" and built.

But you know what? It was still immediately recognisable as a Billy bookcase. I didn't re-engineer it. I just tweaked it.

Mint, Zorin, etc.: they are still recognisably Ubuntu LTS with a lot of cosmetic surgery.

[Anonymous Coward]

> I cannot fathom why it is considered difficult.

Because the wankers are in the habit of making breaking changes in the code of the software they ship without telling anyone.

Ditched the stupid thing decades ago after spending two days trying to work out why a redirect to /dev/UDP/localhost/6666 would not work on a Debian system. Turns out some moron decided that was not "pure" and patched it out.

Thankfully that was a few years before the big SSH fuck up, so I could watch smugly from a distance as people were busy regenerating their SSH keys.

[DrXym]

Wayland is a protocol, not an implementation. And if a particular implementation has a "performance problem", then which server are you talking about here? Both GNOME and KDE are implementations of the server side so one may have an issue and the other not. Thankfully both are removing X11 and the various thunks so any issues, assuming they still exist will be brought into focus and addressed.

Same goes for your "incompatibility". Wayland protocol has certainly had particular use cases that have fallen out of the mainstream that have had to be addressed. People moaned that Wayland didn't let apps take snapshots of the screen (for very obvious reasons) and then some messages were designed to allow it to be done securely. People moaned about apps not being allowed to use absolute positioning for windows (for very obvious reasons) and messages were designed to do to relative positioning instead. These are not insurmountable problems and certainly not a reason to use X11 longer than necessary.

Thankfully we're past the tipping point now. Doesn't stop anyone running XWayland if they want but it doesn't have to be powering the desktop itself.

[Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck]

Dude, ALL Wayland implementations use a frame buffer for the initial drawing that is then pushed to the display. That means you have a MINIMUM of a 50% performance loss in games. WITHOUT EXCEPTION.

[DrXym]

Sorry but that's bollocks. Here are some actual benchmarks performed on the same hardware on X11 and Wayland with capable GPU drivers, both through GNOME and KDE:

https://www.phoronix.com/review/ubuntu-2504-kde-gnome-way

https://www.phoronix.com/review/ubuntu-2504-x11-gaming

Wayland outperforms X11 on both GNOME / KDE and kills some other X11 only WMs.

Or what about Ubuntu 26 vs 25, have there been any improvements since then, this time testing with NVidia hardware:

https://www.phoronix.com/review/ubuntu-2604-nvidia-gaming

Yes, it's even better.

Did I mention that Valve's Steam Deck also uses Wayland? Or that games can support HDR, adaptive sync and other things because they're not bound by X11 or the way it syncs or renders.

What about this article describing the new elite standard in Linux gaming?

https://www.fosslinux.com/156596/the-gaming-standard-proton-10-wayland-and-hdr-on-linux.htm

So in summary. Wayland is a protocol. When it is implemented properly and supported by the drivers, it outperforms X11 and gaming will be the real beneficiary over time. Does it mean there aren't performance issues in some configurations? No, but they can be addressed. And again, Wayland is a protocol. Implementations of a protocol can be improved to address use cases.

And as an aside sometimes I feel like The Register forum is a haven for people to hate on change in Linux without understanding the reasons for change. This sort of bollocks comes up again and again. Can't wait for Ubuntu 27 where the holy trifecta of whining comes upon us - Wayland, Rust *and* systemd.

[coredump]

> The Register forum is a haven for people to hate on change in Linux without understanding the reasons for change.

Consider that perhaps those people do in fact understand the (stated) reasons for change... they simply disagree with them.

Horses for courses.

[DrXym]

On this website? Lol.

[Anonymous Coward]

> Consider that perhaps those people do in fact understand the (stated) reasons for change... they simply disagree with them

A few might do, but by and large, people usually don't want change because it means they have to adapt, which requires extra effort.

NB: this comment should in no way be taken as a Waylaid apology. It's not the idea of developing a replacement for X.11 that I resent, it's the arrogance and lack of maturity of those involved.

[Anonymous Coward]

> it's the arrogance and lack of maturity of those involved.

Not to mention the lack of compose key support.

[Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck]

Utter nonsense. Wayland may outperform an unaccelerated X-11 stack, but it delivers HALF the frame rates for every game I tried under it compared to the NVidia accelerated X-11 stack. Sorry that you've been deluded, but such is YOUR problem, not mine.

[DrXym]

I've just provided links showing GNOME and KDE with Wayland perform better than X11 on the same hardware including NVidia. I'm sure you could contrive some scenario with old drivers where that is not true but that wouldn't be the fault of a protocol.

[Liam Proven]

> I rather like the MATE desktop with Debian

This is part of why I wrote this article:

https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/01/09/debian-goes-retro-with-a-spatial-desktop-that-time-forgot/4284791

[mrmond]

And now Wayland is the default, because it's "better" even though things like screen recording and remote desktop don't work.

This is why I'm still with Mint, and hope they hold off using Wayland as long as possible.

[Neil Barnes]

Just for curious

Why would I choose Ubuntu Cinnamon over the Mint flavour? At least with Mint I get to keep - for the moment, at least - the X which is apparently essential for Kicad... which I use a lot.

[Liam Proven]

Re: Just for curious

> At least with Mint I get to keep - for the moment, at least - the X

You get to keep X11 with both. Cinnamon on both Mint and Ubuntu remains X11 by default.

Why is there an Ubuntu remix? Because Joshua Peisach wanted one.

I wrote about it when it went official:

https://www.theregister.com/software/2023/03/30/its-official-ubuntu-cinnamon-remix-has-been-voted-in/370213

He met all the terms to be an official remix -- Cinnamon is in the repos, it hit the release targets, and so on -- so now it's official.

Cinnamon is based on GNOME 3.x tech, and that does confer advantages as well as disadvantages. The GNOME 3 rendering model means that it can do fractional scaling. If you have a HiDPI screen, but maybe one that isn't _very_ high-res, you can set the scaling to 125% or 150% and it rescales smoothly to that size. MATE and Xfce can't easily do that. Xfce does it by changing the screen resolution, which works, but it means everything gets fuzzy.

The thing is that no matter how much you love MATE or something, if it's too small to read, you can't really use it. I don't own any such high-res kit here but the 2 newest laptops from SitPub both have fairly high-DPI screens. They are 4-5YO and non-scalable desktops are just about usable but make me squint a bit. They're much comfier at 110% or 125% but 150% is too big and at 200% everything gets clownishly giant.

Suddenly Cinnamon makes sense here: it's pretty customisable, but it also scales better.

And if the desktop has a global scaling factor then that applies to all compliant apps, as well.

It is possible to do this kind of thing with a calculator and some very editing of X.org config files, but it's a lot harder!

[Nate Amsden]

Re: Just for curious

I was wondering the same thing about Ubuntu Mate vs Mint Mate. I switched to Mint+Mate after Ubuntu 10.04 LTS went EOL (til that point I hadn't even heard of Mint but I hadn't looked into switching distros in eons). Wondering what the difference is, is there an advantage to one over the other, given that Mint is based on Ubuntu as well. For me I stuck to Mint because that is what I have been using since ~2012-ish, as far as I recall there was no Ubuntu-based Mate otherwise(at least not as easy to install maybe).

Currently on Mint 22 which has support til 2029, though I assume I can subscribe to Ubuntu pro and get core updates beyond that date(wouldn't include Mint stuff), and I already maintain the most security sensitive thing on the system manually(firefox ESR), so not depending on the distro for that anyway. I don't plan to make any changes before 2030, so not sure what the world will look like at that point.

My main sticking point has been my dependence on a two-decade old tool called brightside (last shipped with Ubuntu 16), which gives me virtual desktop edge flipping (move mouse to edge of desktop up/down/left/right and it changes to the adjacent desktop). Been a central part of my workflow since I first used AfterStep in 1999(switched to Ubuntu/Gnome around 2006 I think). I managed to compile it cleanly on both Mint 20 and 22, was super worried I wouldn't be able to get it working but I did(along with ~16 other dependencies), and it works flawlessly. I am sure that will not work in Wayland. I checked a few weeks ago for edge flipping on Gnome just with web searches and couldn't find anything more recent than ~2014 or so. Maybe it is available (or maybe it is in KDE) using a different term, not sure.

I had an exchange with someone who seemed super knowledgeable about Wayland on LinkedIn a month or so ago and they implied there was no such support for edge flipping in Wayland(yet anyway, maybe in the future).

So, for the most part I bury my head in the sand and hope I don't have to face that reality(same as I did for Mint 20/22 but that worked out OK, no changes required), changing workflows that I have had in place for 31 years (in 2030) is going to really be a terrible experience. If I have to switch to KDE or something to get this functionality I suppose that is doable. I haven't run KDE regularly since 1998 (I have screenshots running KDE snapshots, and beta builds, one of which showing my ncftp downloading kdebase-981003.tar.bz2 !), my screenshots starting 9/1999 are AfterStep.

No high DPI for me, last year I upgraded from 1080p to 1440p and don't see a need to go any higher for my stuff. I recall the laptop I got a decade ago had a 4K screen and I had to run it in 1080 mode as so many important things didn't scale right. My newer laptop from 2023 came with a 1080 screen(which I was fine with), both Lenovo P-series.

Also worried that perhaps apps like Firefox drop X11 support at some point too, can't believe I didn't notice it till last month but I was surprised to actually notice that Firefox does not ship anything that is not Windows/Linux/Mac. I expected something like FreeBSD in there but no(am aware there is another way to get it, just not direct from Mozilla), given that there is a increased chance of losing X11 as well(certainly not before 2030 I imagine) vs other apps. I'm sure some folks could fork it(Palemoon) or something to keep it going but it wouldn't be easy.

[Liam Proven]

Re: Just for curious

> I am sure that will not work in Wayland.

I agree. I am 100% sure it won't, too.

I believe you have mentioned this before. For me it's a good example of the diversity of preferences Linux enables, as that sounds like a usability nightmare to me! :-)

There is a new MATE. Now, with Ubuntu 26.04, I think it is probably in Ubuntu's LTS repos. When Mint releases a version based on Ubuntu 26.04.1 -- planned to be in December -- I think you will get MATE 1.24 and support and updates until 2031 or so. That is probably your best hope right now.

> I was surprised to actually notice that Firefox does not ship anything that is not Windows/Linux/Mac

You mean _Mozilla_ does not ship. But yes, that is correct.

All the big 3 BSDs maintain their own versions of Firefox and you can get native packages from them. Mozilla does not just distribute binaries, it distributes source code -- unlike Google -- and so the BSDs maintain their own ports.

[Neil Barnes]

Re: Just for curious

Thanks for the reply, Liam. It looks like there's no reason not to stay with Mint for a while longer.

Time to slip Clem a few quid...

[jake]

"work habits may need to be adjusted"

Or perhaps choice of distribution needs to be adjusted.

There are plenty of ways to easily get an excellent desktop OS without GNOME or Wayland.

_{Without Redmond or Cupertino, for that matter.}

[Liam Proven]

Re: "work habits may need to be adjusted"

> Or perhaps choice of distribution needs to be adjusted.

>

> There are plenty of ways to easily get an excellent desktop OS without GNOME or Wayland.

Well, yes.

But part of what I wanted to do here was spell out clearly that you do not need to switch _distributions_ in order to avoid GNOME and Wayland if you do not want them. I do not want them myself.

Sadly, right now, I know of no distro that would suit my iMac well, because 1 of my twin 27" screens has 4x as many pixels as the other. All the desktops I like use X11 and X11 can't handle that well. Wayland does it fine, but there are no Wayland environments I actually like using... yet, anyway.

[Phil O'Sophical]

Seven different desktops to choose from?

And people still wonder why the year of Linux on the desktop isn't here yet...

I use it, but I've also used DECWindows, SunView, OpenWindows, CDE, Gnome, Amiga Workbench and many others, so I'm hardly a typical user. Expect an ordinary person-in-the-street to understand how to choose one? Forget it, MSWindows or Mac is already a difficult enough decision.

[keithpeter]

Re: Seven different desktops to choose from?

I would imagine that an ordinary person-in-the-street is going to start using a Linux install because it came with a computer (something like Endless OS on a line of low cost laptops) or because someone else (family member or friend) put it on a machine for them or possibly because school/employer gave them a device already set up.

Which ever way, the desktop environment will have been provided (perhaps tried out first).

[blu3b3rry]

Re: Seven different desktops to choose from?

In genuine honesty (and from my own experience of loaning my partner a laptop when they visit - and trust me, they aren't the most computer literate) Linux Mint Cinnamon is more or less instantly familiar to anyone that has used Windows in the past 25 years.

I'd argue that the learning curve on the GUI is less than switching from Win10 to Win11.

[Anonymous Coward]

> GNOME is a highly opinionated desktop.

You are being very diplomatic, sir.

> Some people like it

I met one of them. Still have to meet the other two.