Wayland starting to work

Posted Feb 3, 2026 22:24 UTC (Tue) by jmalcolm (subscriber, #8876)
In reply to: Wayland starting to work by anton
Parent article: Xfwl4: the roadmap for a Xfce Wayland compositor

> 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.

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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. ;)