Wayland starting to work

Posted Jan 29, 2026 19:02 UTC (Thu) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
In reply to: Wayland starting to work by linuxrocks123
Parent article: Xfwl4: the roadmap for a Xfce Wayland compositor

I'm also fine with X11 and see no need for Wayland, and chafe at some of its restrictions like not letting apps position their windows.

Unfortunately, that's not what most people think. And with Xorg essentially being unmaintained seeing as most (or all?) of the Xorg developers have switched to being Wayland developers, I don't think apps can "put their foot down" unless they are willing to maintain Xorg and X11 back-ends for toolkits like Gtk and Qt. That would take far more developers than just one paid developer to work on a Wayland compositor for XFCE.

It's too bad that we're in this situation, but reality is reality and we IMO cannot stop the eventual death of X11. Wayback and 12to11 might help for a while, but I don't see them as long-term solutions.

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Wayland starting to work

Posted Jan 29, 2026 20:31 UTC (Thu) by linuxrocks123 (subscriber, #34648) [Link] (4 responses)

I don't think anyone needs to maintain XOrg, because Wayback is intended to prevent needing XOrg. I see no reason that Wayback should need significant maintenance or would become non-viable in the future.

Wayland starting to work

Posted Feb 3, 2026 22:07 UTC (Tue) by jmalcolm (subscriber, #8876) [Link] (3 responses)

> I don't think anyone needs to maintain XOrg, because Wayback is intended to prevent needing XOrg

Well, Wayback is just the bare minimum Wayland compositor required to run Xwayland. So Wayback is only useful as long as Xwayland exists. Wayback itself should be very simple to maintain for sure. Xwayland is not that hard to maintain as long as X11 stops evolving which is of course why the Wayland devs do not want X11 to evolve.

The thing is, two-thirds of the Xorg code is shared with Xwayland (almost all the Xwayland code is in Xorg). And this is the provides all the features other than hardware support. So, maintaining Xwayland (eg. security and toolchain compatibility) is effectively maintaining Xorg as well. And the only way to keep Xwayland stable is to keep Xorg stable too (to stop adding features to it)

So, yes, Wayback should provide a way to continue using X11 window managers for a very long time. But it also means almost by definition the complete stagnation of X11.

In contrast, the Xlibre project (not endorsing it) intends to keep evolving the Xorg codebase with the view that X11 remains the future of the Linux desktop. If evolving X11 means breaking things, they will do so. Clearly the Xorg folks and the Xlibre folks have a very different vision for the future. You do not need to invent conspiricy theories to understand why they could not work within the same repository. The missions are incompatible.

Perhaps the most interesting project is Phoenix. It also sees X11 as the future of the Linux desktop but does not see the Xorg codebase as the right way to get there. They are also going to break things but, as much as possible, what they are going to break is compatibility with ancient applications that nobody uses. They have even talked about the possbility of supporting Wayland applications. The project may go nowhere but it seems active at the moment. It is an interesting one to watch.

Wayland starting to work

Posted Feb 3, 2026 22:41 UTC (Tue) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> In contrast, the Xlibre project (not endorsing it) intends to keep evolving the Xorg codebase with the view that X11 remains the future of the Linux desktop. If evolving X11 means breaking things, they will do so.

Except for the minor point that not "breaking things" is the entire point of sticking with X11 in the first place.

If Xlibre (or Phoenix) introduces something genuinely "new" then they have to get application, toolkit, driver writers, *and* other Xserver [1] buy-in for it to be of any real use... which is going to be a very tall order these days.

[1] Notably including Xorg, which thanks to XWayland is where most desktop users are (or soon will be) found these days.

Wayland starting to work

Posted Feb 13, 2026 8:40 UTC (Fri) by daenzer (subscriber, #7050) [Link] (1 responses)

> Xwayland is not that hard to maintain as long as X11 stops evolving which is of course why the Wayland devs do not want X11 to evolve.

It might not be your intention, but this can be read as "Wayland devs are trying to prevent X11 from evolving", which isn't true. They're simply not interested in evolving X themselves. Those who are would need to step up and do it.

> And the only way to keep Xwayland stable is to keep Xorg stable too (to stop adding features to it)

That's not true. Features can be added to Xorg without hurting Xwayland (and vice versa).

> So, yes, Wayback should provide a way to continue using X11 window managers for a very long time. But it also means almost by definition the complete stagnation of X11.

I don't agree that's a valid conclusion.

Wayland starting to work

Posted Feb 13, 2026 22:05 UTC (Fri) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

While the OP may have cause and effect reversed the fact that Xorg/X11 is and has been stagnating, and is unlikely to see a surge of development adding new features in the foreseeable future. There doesn't seem to be a lot of demand for it, people who prefer X11 don't want it to change, people who want change are working with Wayland.

Wayland starting to work

Posted Jan 30, 2026 19:25 UTC (Fri) by anton (subscriber, #25547) [Link] (6 responses)

Unfortunately, that's not what most people think.

I think that most people don't think about these issues at all.

we IMO cannot stop the eventual death of X11.

Maybe. Or you could listen to the story of Verilog as recounted at HOPL IV. The gist is that around the year 2000 Verilog seemed to be doomed, as VHDL was clearly winning; but as Verilog has some advantages that showed up especially in big projects, the rumours of its death were greatly exaggerated, and Verilog continued to be used, and eventually it became accepted that Verilog has a future. I expect either X11 or the compatibility layers (like Wayback) to live far longer than "most people" expect.

Wayland starting to work

Posted Jan 30, 2026 19:40 UTC (Fri) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link]

I hope you're right. The difference between X11/Wayland and Verilog/VHDL is that plenty of people still worked on Verilog and synthesis tools that used Verilog. AFAIK, almost nobody is working on X11 any more other than perhaps critical security bug fixes, and a fork by Enrico Weigelt that seems to have been made more out of spite than anything else.

Wayland starting to work

Posted Jan 30, 2026 20:04 UTC (Fri) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> and eventually it became accepted that Verilog has a future. I expect either X11 or the compatibility layers (like Wayback) to live far longer than "most people" expect.

The reason Verilog didn't die is ultimately because the numerous commercial entities that had a huge investment in verilog-based designs continued to invest real money in keeping that ecosystem alive and viable.

Keeping the X11 ecosystem alive will require a similar sort of ongoing investment *from those that want to keep it alive*.

(Note this investment has to compensate for the fact that nearly all of the developers that had been involved in the X11 ecosystem -- volunteer _and_ commercial alike -- have long since moved on to other things)

(See also: retrocomputing fetishists, rust on esoteric cpu architechures, etc)

Wayland starting to work

Posted Jan 31, 2026 13:24 UTC (Sat) by intelfx (subscriber, #130118) [Link]

> I think that most people don't think about these issues at all.

Most people might not think about these issues directly, but they definitely enjoy the benefits of having these issues thought about by someone else (which is what Wayland does, compared to X11).

When I (as a fictional layman) cannot watch an HDR video on Linux, or when I cannot plug my laptop into a monitor with a different PPI class and have my windows remain crisp when dragged from one monitor to another, or use VRR on said monitor, I don't think about X11 or Wayland — I just think "This sucks, give me an OS that's actually competent".

And when I install the next version of Linux (with Wayland) and all of this stuff begins to work, I think "Wow, this is actually good now, please keep doing what you're doing".

So no, people don't think about these issues. But they do notice when *their* issues get resolved.

Wayland starting to work

Posted Feb 3, 2026 22:24 UTC (Tue) by jmalcolm (subscriber, #8876) [Link] (2 responses)

> I think that most people don't think about these issues at all.

You are correct. And that is the problem for X11 fans. People will use the graphical environments they like and they will almost certainly stick with the default display server technology those environments choose for them.

That means that 18 months from now, the Linux users of KDE, GNOME, COSMIC, Budgie, Cinnamon, Hyprland, Sway, Niri, MangoWM, DWL, River, XFCE, Wayland Maker, and others will all be using Wayland. I susupect most MATE and LxQT users will as well. For Desktop Environments, what does that leave? Trinity and CDE? And while there are hundreds of X11 window managers, how many people will be using them? X11 may have five percent desktop Linux market share 24 months from now (or less).

This is not a bold prediction. We are over 50% Wayland now. Perhaps 70%. And the most popular environments are about to be not just Wayland by default but in fact Wayland only. And all the "cool" environments right now are Wayland too.

The question is, what will bring these people back to X11? Because somebody that starts on Wayland even today is going to expereince a lot of pain trying to switch to X11. Two years from now, Wayland will have many more features that X11 does not and as well as almost all the features that X11 does have. And the Wayland way will be the "normal" way.

Yes, Wayback will work. Even Xorg will still be working fine I expect. But the vast majority of people will see them only as a way of preserving legacy environments that nobody uses day-to-day. I would not be surprised if most people do not even use Xwayland in three years. What will they be using it for? GTK2 apps? Xfig?

Phoenix has the potential to prove me wrong. But I would not bet on it.

Wayland starting to work

Posted Feb 3, 2026 22:51 UTC (Tue) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> The question is, what will bring these people back to X11? Because somebody that starts on Wayland even today is going to experience a lot of pain trying to switch to X11.

....Including "The [modern] applications I was using don't work any longer". Of course, one can run a nested Wayland compositor under X to handle those things, but it's going to be at a significant feature+performance deficit due to the need to channel it all through X's limitations..

> I would not be surprised if most people do not even use Xwayland in three years. What will they be using it for? GTK2 apps? Xfig?

Everything I use on a daily basis is already Wayland-native (even good ol' emacs); of course there's a long tail of things I use less often.

Wayland starting to work

Posted Feb 4, 2026 11:22 UTC (Wed) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

Wayland Maker?

Oh... oh.. oh. Thank you for pointing that one out. Ran WindowMaker for many a year, but it became untenable once most of my time was on laptops - WindowMaker did not deal at all well with hot-plugging displays. Would love to have my beloved NeXTSTEP UI back. ;)