Responses to Coming changes in impending MX 25 release.

[Adrian]

And in the distant future, I'll have to learn about Wayland.

I've been using Linux for 20+ years and I know virtually nothing about Xorg. (I used to have to configure X11 conf file, but I forgot how to do that long time ago), the point is that these kind of things are transparent and user should not even need to learn about them.

[Nokkaelaein]

it's going to be a harder fought one than the init one was.... especially since politics got involved early on....

Heh, it's relative how "early on" you are talking about here :), good to remember Wayland is an older project than systemd.

[Nokkaelaein]

the point is that these kind of things are transparent and user should not even need to learn about them.

Indeed. Personally, as I've mentioned at some point in the past, I'll use the system that gets the job done. In other words, if the software that I need and which is used in production works transparently and without stress on some system (be it the init system in question, or the graphical server/compositor/backend/etc.) , I'll use that real-world working one instead of something that doesn't work as well, for my specific needs and projects.

[rambo919]

Heh, it's relative how "early on" you are talking about here :), good to remember Wayland is an older project than systemd.

It only really became a war once it was obvious corps started actively attempting to strangle xorg.... no one really knows why they chose silent violence but that doesn't really matter I guess.

If wayland was a complete viable total replacement... I doubt it would have mattered. Too many things just don't work on it though and the devs are oddly militant.

In 10 years it probably wont matter anymore either way but the rumors of the death of X11 are still wildly exaggerated.

2025 has been a wild year for random FOSS wars, I kinda wait in anticipation for whatever drama comes next

[dreamer]

It's great to see the live system being compatible with systemd. I'm no fan of systemd, but I'm tired of applications failing with SysV. It might not be common, but if you use AppImages, Flatpaks, (Snaps of course) and GitHub debs you will sooner or later encounter them. I accept systemd these days, because it works well.

Wayland is a different story. I wanted to try it with LXQt, but I can't get labwc or wayfire to work. Some of my apps don't seem Wayland ready, lightdm for example. I switched to sddm, but it doesn't work anyway. Then there is the whole Wayland fragmentation on the compositor side. Some of the LXQt components only support wlroots based compositors. They aim to support at least 7 different Wayland compositors so they have a lot of work to do. They will *never* abandon the X11 backend, but who knows what Qt devs will do.

Dedoimedo wrote at least 5 articles with Wayland benchmarks against X11 and it was less performant in KDE in desktop mode. Steam Deck still uses X11 by the way. I think there is still a lot of Wayland compositor optimization that needs to be done. You might not notice any difference on a powerful machine and for gaming (fullscreen) performance might be similar.

I don't care about the security aspect of Wayland. If you don't give an application Internet permission (using OpenSnitch for example) then the biggest attack vector is gone. And with Flatpaks/Flatseal you can go wild with all kinds of restrictions/permissions if you want to.

Xlibre devs promise Wayland parity (security, HDR etc.). We'll see if they can deliver. Per monitor fractional scaling is already possible on X11 I believe, but not implemented in KDE (I don't have dual monitors, but I think Cinnamon and XFCE support it on X11). That's why you see KDE users on Reddit claiming that per monitor fractional scaling is a Wayland feature. Same thing with fractional scaling in general. Real fractional scaling is always a toolkit feature.

But this discussion is like discussing which browser is the best. In the end it depends on the user.

[thinkpadx]

i have never said a negative thing about MX since i began using it with mx17. i enjoyed and had great luck running it as it was by default sysvinit. now i am a bit concerned and in a quandary as to what and how to proceed to get the mx25 to operate as close to the 23 version i am currently running. i have been an advocate for mx and i would hate to have to try and find and start all over again somewhere else or with another distro since MX has always blown me away! i do not know a lot of technical stuff - i just want it to work and feel as 'normal' as possible for my user-friendly experience. Dolphin has always been cool and honest and knowledgeable and hard working as well as the rest of the team... i just hope it all works out in the end. :-)

[AVLinux]

i have never said a negative thing about MX since i began using it with mx17. i enjoyed and had great luck running it as it was by default sysvinit. now i am a bit concerned and in a quandary as to what and how to proceed to get the mx25 to operate as close to the 23 version i am currently running. i have been an advocate for mx and i would hate to have to try and find and start all over again somewhere else or with another distro since MX has always blown me away! i do not know a lot of technical stuff - i just want it to work and feel as 'normal' as possible for my user-friendly experience. Dolphin has always been cool and honest and knowledgeable and hard working as well as the rest of the team... i just hope it all works out in the end. :-)

I think especially in the case of MX-25 XFCE4 there will be nothing even noticeably different, unless you have some strong opinions about init systems I think running it systemd-only will be invisible to the User, in fact many peripheral things like external apps and VPNs will just work without any interventions, in this way you won't even have to consciously change how it boots. If you have valid concerns about systemd then you will choose the sysvinit variant and it will also will work pretty much as MX's XFCE4 versions always have.. XFCE4 and Fluxbox aren't changing anything regarding Wayland, they will continue with X11 as always and will be supported for the duration of the Debian Stable release + the extended LTS support. People will be set for many years with MX-25, there is no wolf at the door..

[Adrian]

now i am a bit concerned and in a quandary as to what and how to proceed to get the mx25 to operate as close to the 23 version

What exactly are you concerned about? What is the use case in MX-23 that you want to replicate in MX-25? I don't think there's any reason to be concerned, everything that was working before should work in MX-25 if you are confused about which ISO to choose if you were using sysvinit (the default in MX-23) choose that ISO for MX-25 and you won't see a difference... so... what exactly is the worry about?

[Nokkaelaein]

i enjoyed and had great luck running it as it was by default sysvinit. now i am a bit concerned and in a quandary as to what and how to proceed to get the mx25 to operate as close to the 23 version i am currently running.

If you've been running MX with sysvinit all this time, and it's worked great, no need for systemd etc. etc, in all probability you will be using MX 25 exactly the same way, installing the sysv version and rocking on :).

Ninja'd. Twice :]

[thinkpadx]

my dumbness. i believe you 2 have reassured me that to choose the iso with xfve and sysvinit that it should work and run like i am used to. i am intelligent, and very old but not a techie command line geek unfortunately. i have never had an issue other than one or two things i had to resolve with the help of you people. that is my comfort zone. thank you. and yes i read all of DO's post/statement.

p.s. I know enough to be dangerous!!!