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I doubt it I really, truly suspect Wayland is the future We have had like one hundred X11 replacements between 1990 and now, and at least half a dozen have ca

I doubt it I really, truly suspect Wayland is the future We have had like one hundred X11 replacements between 1990 and now, and at least half a dozen have caught on with the open source community What makes Wayland different is that it has attracted multiple vendors supporting it. Most notably IBM/Redhat, Intel, AMD, and, to a lesser extent, nVidia. I am posting this message from an X11 environment, because I need X11 for a lot of things, home and work both, but, I can at least imagine a world where Wayland is the new default. That is not something I could say about the last hundred attempts to replace X11. Edit: Again, this is just a suspicion. A notion. I neither hope for Wayland's success nor failure. I just keep my finger to the wind.

Kwpolska 2y ago
Wayland might be the future (though I'm personally a bit skeptical). It is already the default on many distros. At the same time, X11 is very unlikely to just stop working or disappear, since there's really no good reason to kill it.
- hapless 2y ago
  My skepticism should be quite obvious: I am still posting through an X11 system. But, Wayland is far and away the best and most serious attempt to replace X, ever, in thirty years and more. If there is gonna be an X11 replacement, ever, Wayland is the most credible attempt in decades
  - vundercind 2y ago
    Agreed that it’s made the best show of attempting, but Wayland’s only got about nine years before it’s as old as x11 (the protocol) was when the Wayland showed up. If it’s gonna mostly displace x11… man, it’s sure taking its time. It’s older than xfree86 was when the xorg fork occurred.
    - The_Colonel 2y ago
      > If it’s gonna mostly displace x11… man, it’s sure taking its time. Yes, and I'm fine waiting 5, 10, or 20 years. It's natural that such major shifts take a long time in an already mature ecosystem.
  - raffraffraff 2y ago
    I'm also using X11, even though I've attempted to switch to Warplanes twice and had to switch back due to screen sharing and remote desktop being trash or just breaking after some update or other (most recently, browser). It's a work machine and I simply can't waste an hour fucking around with it. Aside from those issues which are deal-breakers in work, there's a bunch of minor annoyances I won't go into, thrust not deal brakes but they're "there". With X11 everything I need just works. I'm on a bleeding edge distro (OpenSUSE Tumbleweed) so I'll probably try it out on a weekend every few months to see if it's better. But in fairness I did that before, made the switch and then lost screen sharing after some random update...
    - petepete 2y ago
      Screen sharing was the final hurdle for me. I switched to running Slack in a Chrome tab and it works better than it ever did on X11 for me. I've used it on both my work computers for a few years now and it's been totally solid.
      - guappa 2y ago
        I've done screen sharing for years on X11.
        petepete 2y ago
        Me too. But Wayland is just better for everyday use.
        guappa 2y ago
        I will certainly switch when the things I use daily will work on wayland as well.
  - arp242 2y ago
    Tons of X11 infra will have to remain for a long time to support X11-only "legacy" apps that can't easily be updated. There's a long tail of that from games to scientific software to just unmaintained software that still works and is used. The major bit will be when and if toolkits like GTK, Qt, SDL, etc. drop X11 support and applications update to X11-less versions. AFAIK there are no plans for that and is still years away (there was some talk about GTK 5, but nothing firm and no one even started work on GTK 5). I also think Wayland will eventually replace all of X11, in the same way as IPv6 will eventually replace all of IPv4.
    - cies 2y ago
      > Tons of X11 infra will have to remain As XWayland. XWayland will be the new X.
      - arp242 2y ago
        Well, also libX11 and all of that type of stuff. And as I understand it XWayland shares a lot of code with the regular xserver (it's built from the same repo).
        cies 2y ago
        Yes, it just sits in a Wayland "container". So we can have security/fractionalScaling/modernMultiMonitor by default and X.oldness when required for that last bit of stubborn software.
        arp242 2y ago
        What I mostly meant was that for people who prefer to use X11, that will probably remain viable for a long time, without any Wayland. There's this notion that X11 is "deprecated" and that "no one is maintaining it", but the reality of it is far more nuanced. The main "flag day" will probably be when toolkits start shifting away from X11 to Wayland only, and applications start using them (there's usually big lag between release and widespread adoption of new GTK versions and such). Some qualified language in all of the above, because hard to predict the future etc. etc.
- deleted 2y ago
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- eternityforest 2y ago
  X11 will stop working if things stop supporting it. Stuff might eventually decide to render directly to Wayland only APIs or something. I'm actually not a very big Wayland fan, I prefer the single implementation model rather than all the different implementations of Wayland. But I'd rather have just only the Wayland fragmentation mess, instead of the Wayland mess plus also X11, so I'm glad Pi OS and Ubuntu(Right now the only distros I pay much attention to) have switched.
- legulere 2y ago
  Security is a good reason to kill it.
- skriticos2 2y ago
  Well, the main reason why Wayland even exists is, that the X11 maintainers got fed up with a design from a time when graphics cards were not even a thing yet and decades of patchwork. They wanted to move on to something that has way less technical debt. Sure, X11 won't go away anytime soon, but finding people who actually want to work and maintain that codebase will be more than a little difficult.
  - bandrami 2y ago
    This article is literally about a team that is actively maintaining the codebase
    - bluGill 2y ago
      Likely the only team that isn't trying to spend all their time on wayland and touching x11 only when forced.
      - bandrami 2y ago
        No, they mention that they work closely with the OpenBSD team, which maintains an explicit fork ("xenocara") that maintains the NetBSD ABI. It was OpenBSD that added wsdiplay and wsinput, which are frankly better in a lot of use cases than Wayland.
guappa 2y ago
wayland's main purpose is to isolate ~~malware~~ proprietary software running in a container, which Xorg doesn't allow (unless of course you run nested servers). It wouldn't be too bad of a goal if it had feature parity, which it still doesn't have.
- welterde 2y ago
  X11 does have various ways to restrict access (one of which ssh does use for instance) and some more advanced security extensions. But as far as I can tell there has never been that much motivation to widely deploy any of it.
  - nolist_policy 2y ago
    Eh even if you secure the X11 API itself, the Xorg server still is a 33 year old (!) c codebase.
    - guappa 2y ago
      Linux is 33 years old as well. Let's stop using it to be secure?
      - jdiez17 2y ago
        Linux is not as secure as most tech people would assume at first glance. The monolithic kernel with all device drivers in ring0 is, let's just say, not the best approach if one were writing a new OS from scratch. It is mostly "secure" due to it being used in practically every server and billions of devices, so there is an active maintainer community around it. Xorg has none of that.
    - welterde 2y ago
      It is only one old C codebase however (or a couple if one counts the *BSD semi-forks separately) instead of many different fresh c codebases (one per compositor with some shared code between some of them to be fair). I don't buy that this is actually better for security. It is a lot of more fun/less painful than cleaning up and improving some legacy codebase however.
deleted 2y ago
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j16sdiz 2y ago
I hope not. The core wayland protocol have so many missing piece and many extension are not standardized nor well defined. This is basically killing the interoperability between UI toolkit for non-trivial cases.
- postepowanieadm 2y ago
  Good enough for Gnome.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
    Well.... yeah? GNOME doesn't care about interoperability; they're the ones known for ex. suggesting that applications remove features for other desktops because GNOME doesn't use them ( https://trac.transmissionbt.com/ticket/3685#no1 https://trac.transmissionbt.com/ticket/3685#no1 ).

Kwpolska 2y ago

Wayland might be the future (though I'm personally a bit skeptical). It is already the default on many distros. At the same time, X11 is very unlikely to just stop working or disappear, since there's really no good reason to kill it.

hapless 2y ago
My skepticism should be quite obvious: I am still posting through an X11 system. But, Wayland is far and away the best and most serious attempt to replace X, ever, in thirty years and more. If there is gonna be an X11 replacement, ever, Wayland is the most credible attempt in decades
- vundercind 2y ago
  Agreed that it’s made the best show of attempting, but Wayland’s only got about nine years before it’s as old as x11 (the protocol) was when the Wayland showed up. If it’s gonna mostly displace x11… man, it’s sure taking its time. It’s older than xfree86 was when the xorg fork occurred.
  - The_Colonel 2y ago
    > If it’s gonna mostly displace x11… man, it’s sure taking its time. Yes, and I'm fine waiting 5, 10, or 20 years. It's natural that such major shifts take a long time in an already mature ecosystem.
- raffraffraff 2y ago
  I'm also using X11, even though I've attempted to switch to Warplanes twice and had to switch back due to screen sharing and remote desktop being trash or just breaking after some update or other (most recently, browser). It's a work machine and I simply can't waste an hour fucking around with it. Aside from those issues which are deal-breakers in work, there's a bunch of minor annoyances I won't go into, thrust not deal brakes but they're "there". With X11 everything I need just works. I'm on a bleeding edge distro (OpenSUSE Tumbleweed) so I'll probably try it out on a weekend every few months to see if it's better. But in fairness I did that before, made the switch and then lost screen sharing after some random update...
  - petepete 2y ago
    Screen sharing was the final hurdle for me. I switched to running Slack in a Chrome tab and it works better than it ever did on X11 for me. I've used it on both my work computers for a few years now and it's been totally solid.
    - guappa 2y ago
      I've done screen sharing for years on X11.
      - petepete 2y ago
        Me too. But Wayland is just better for everyday use.
        guappa 2y ago
        I will certainly switch when the things I use daily will work on wayland as well.
- arp242 2y ago
  Tons of X11 infra will have to remain for a long time to support X11-only "legacy" apps that can't easily be updated. There's a long tail of that from games to scientific software to just unmaintained software that still works and is used. The major bit will be when and if toolkits like GTK, Qt, SDL, etc. drop X11 support and applications update to X11-less versions. AFAIK there are no plans for that and is still years away (there was some talk about GTK 5, but nothing firm and no one even started work on GTK 5). I also think Wayland will eventually replace all of X11, in the same way as IPv6 will eventually replace all of IPv4.
  - cies 2y ago
    > Tons of X11 infra will have to remain As XWayland. XWayland will be the new X.
    - arp242 2y ago
      Well, also libX11 and all of that type of stuff. And as I understand it XWayland shares a lot of code with the regular xserver (it's built from the same repo).
      - cies 2y ago
        Yes, it just sits in a Wayland "container". So we can have security/fractionalScaling/modernMultiMonitor by default and X.oldness when required for that last bit of stubborn software.
        arp242 2y ago
        What I mostly meant was that for people who prefer to use X11, that will probably remain viable for a long time, without any Wayland. There's this notion that X11 is "deprecated" and that "no one is maintaining it", but the reality of it is far more nuanced. The main "flag day" will probably be when toolkits start shifting away from X11 to Wayland only, and applications start using them (there's usually big lag between release and widespread adoption of new GTK versions and such). Some qualified language in all of the above, because hard to predict the future etc. etc.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
eternityforest 2y ago
X11 will stop working if things stop supporting it. Stuff might eventually decide to render directly to Wayland only APIs or something. I'm actually not a very big Wayland fan, I prefer the single implementation model rather than all the different implementations of Wayland. But I'd rather have just only the Wayland fragmentation mess, instead of the Wayland mess plus also X11, so I'm glad Pi OS and Ubuntu(Right now the only distros I pay much attention to) have switched.
legulere 2y ago
Security is a good reason to kill it.
skriticos2 2y ago
Well, the main reason why Wayland even exists is, that the X11 maintainers got fed up with a design from a time when graphics cards were not even a thing yet and decades of patchwork. They wanted to move on to something that has way less technical debt. Sure, X11 won't go away anytime soon, but finding people who actually want to work and maintain that codebase will be more than a little difficult.
- bandrami 2y ago
  This article is literally about a team that is actively maintaining the codebase
  - bluGill 2y ago
    Likely the only team that isn't trying to spend all their time on wayland and touching x11 only when forced.
    - bandrami 2y ago
      No, they mention that they work closely with the OpenBSD team, which maintains an explicit fork ("xenocara") that maintains the NetBSD ABI. It was OpenBSD that added wsdiplay and wsinput, which are frankly better in a lot of use cases than Wayland.

guappa 2y ago

wayland's main purpose is to isolate ~~malware~~ proprietary software running in a container, which Xorg doesn't allow (unless of course you run nested servers). It wouldn't be too bad of a goal if it had feature parity, which it still doesn't have.

welterde 2y ago
X11 does have various ways to restrict access (one of which ssh does use for instance) and some more advanced security extensions. But as far as I can tell there has never been that much motivation to widely deploy any of it.
- nolist_policy 2y ago
  Eh even if you secure the X11 API itself, the Xorg server still is a 33 year old (!) c codebase.
  - guappa 2y ago
    Linux is 33 years old as well. Let's stop using it to be secure?
    - jdiez17 2y ago
      Linux is not as secure as most tech people would assume at first glance. The monolithic kernel with all device drivers in ring0 is, let's just say, not the best approach if one were writing a new OS from scratch. It is mostly "secure" due to it being used in practically every server and billions of devices, so there is an active maintainer community around it. Xorg has none of that.
  - welterde 2y ago
    It is only one old C codebase however (or a couple if one counts the *BSD semi-forks separately) instead of many different fresh c codebases (one per compositor with some shared code between some of them to be fair). I don't buy that this is actually better for security. It is a lot of more fun/less painful than cleaning up and improving some legacy codebase however.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

j16sdiz 2y ago

I hope not. The core wayland protocol have so many missing piece and many extension are not standardized nor well defined. This is basically killing the interoperability between UI toolkit for non-trivial cases.

postepowanieadm 2y ago
Good enough for Gnome.
- yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
  Well.... yeah? GNOME doesn't care about interoperability; they're the ones known for ex. suggesting that applications remove features for other desktops because GNOME doesn't use them ( https://trac.transmissionbt.com/ticket/3685#no1 https://trac.transmissionbt.com/ticket/3685#no1 ).