Individual GNOME applications

Well, it is worth noting that GTK1 and GTK2 do not support Wayland.

Probably more than 50% of Linux desktops are Wayland now. It will probably by 80% or more by the end of 2026. When GTK5 ships in 2027 (guess) it will quickly push this number to 90% or more. If Wayland only apps or compositors (like COSMIC) become popular before then, we could hit those percentages sooner.

Of course, all this means is that GTK1 and GTK2 will require Xwayland to run. Xwayland is going to be with us for a long, long time. It is inconceivable that it will not be in RHEL11 for example which pushes it to 2040 at least. No doubt it will be around long, long after that.

I am genuinely curious though how many people will use Xwayland in the future. I have been assuming it would be all of us. However, more and more I am seeing signs that it may actually become fairly niche.

Even if you can run Xwayland, if it is not already installed, it may as well not exist for many users. Apps that need it will simply not run.

Already, we are seeing Wayland compositors appear that do not have Xwayland support. Niri does not as an example. And the Louvre Wayland compositor toolkit only supports Xwayland in rootful mode.

All the toolkits support Wayland now. This means GTK and Qt of course but even stuff like FLTK and wxWidgets. Newer toolkits like Iced are Wayland only as are emerging projects like Cosmoe (BeOS API on Wayland). You do not need to run Xwayland to run any of these apps.

Steam still requires Xwayland (for now) as do Java Swing apps (like JetBrains IDEs and BurpSuite). But it may not be long before 90% of the apps that 90% of users run are Wayland native. Will all those users continue to run an X server in the background that they never use? (Xwayland).

Are most users going to install Xwayland just to pay XBill or run one GTK2 app? Maybe. As I said, until recently I thought everybody would be running Xwayland for the next decade or two. Now I am not so sure.