Wayland starting to work

Posted Jan 30, 2026 19:25 UTC (Fri) by anton (subscriber, #25547)
In reply to: Wayland starting to work by dskoll
Parent article: Xfwl4: the roadmap for a Xfce Wayland compositor

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 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. ;)