What is the future of X.org if all the mainstream distros drop X11 for Wayland?
Retirement to the archives. The protocol is extremely dated and held together with duct tape. The maintainers are mostly also contributors to Wayland projects, where they are implementing features impossible with X11.
I question whether the people hollering that “X11 is held together with duct tape” have actually tried using X11 in the recent years. It’s surprisingly stable. You never have to fiddle with Xorg.conf anymore, it’s all automatic. The only parts where it really shits the bed, in my experience, is either if you’re trying some extremely non-standard setup like mixing and matching wildly different generations of graphics cards, or in cases of deliberate sabotage by gn*me devs like client-side decorations and shadows. I really wished that the X11 -> wayland transition would be just like the pulseaudio -> pipewire transition where a desperately broken system that was causing issues for users got replaced – in a matter of months – with a successor that was not only 100% compatible but offered cool new features on top of stability improvements. But this has just not been the case so far. Wayland has been “the future of the linux desktop” for nearly twenty years, and it’s still not quite there yet. X11 mostly just works, it isn’t abandoned, it’s finished. And what exactly are the new features we should be looking forward to in wayland? Isolation between clients is very cool I must confess, but did it really necessitate an entire protocol overhaul? QubesOS has had that feature working under X11 for over a decade. This guy on github managed to get it working with off-the-shelf X11 tunneling tools. Nevertheless, I’m still optimistic for wayland. The already existing backwards compatibility with X11 is impressive, and I think with enough work it might just be viable as the successor.
What is the future of X.org if all the mainstream distros drop X11 for Wayland?
Any other projects we should know about?
X11 is used in Xwayland
It is maintained by the same people and is on life support. It has been that way for a decade
Retirement to the archives. The protocol is extremely dated and held together with duct tape. The maintainers are mostly also contributors to Wayland projects, where they are implementing features impossible with X11.
I question whether the people hollering that “X11 is held together with duct tape” have actually tried using X11 in the recent years. It’s surprisingly stable. You never have to fiddle with Xorg.conf anymore, it’s all automatic. The only parts where it really shits the bed, in my experience, is either if you’re trying some extremely non-standard setup like mixing and matching wildly different generations of graphics cards, or in cases of deliberate sabotage by gn*me devs like client-side decorations and shadows. I really wished that the X11 -> wayland transition would be just like the pulseaudio -> pipewire transition where a desperately broken system that was causing issues for users got replaced – in a matter of months – with a successor that was not only 100% compatible but offered cool new features on top of stability improvements. But this has just not been the case so far. Wayland has been “the future of the linux desktop” for nearly twenty years, and it’s still not quite there yet. X11 mostly just works, it isn’t abandoned, it’s finished. And what exactly are the new features we should be looking forward to in wayland? Isolation between clients is very cool I must confess, but did it really necessitate an entire protocol overhaul? QubesOS has had that feature working under X11 for over a decade. This guy on github managed to get it working with off-the-shelf X11 tunneling tools. Nevertheless, I’m still optimistic for wayland. The already existing backwards compatibility with X11 is impressive, and I think with enough work it might just be viable as the successor.