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X11 is basically already unsupported, pretty much all the developers moved to Wayland. Even the BSD and everybody else relaying on X11 has noticed that and they

X11 is basically already unsupported, pretty much all the developers moved to Wayland. Even the BSD and everybody else relaying on X11 has noticed that and they know they can't maintain X11 by themselves. It will 100x not go away, there is no way. Literally all big stakeholder both open source (Gnome, KDE, Fedora and so on) and companies like Valve are all in on Wayland. The reality is, X11 is a complete train wreck and always was. Its just that for a long time people invest in it and made it usable. The same is true for Wayland, things have been improving rapidly in Wayland and it many ways its already better. The train wreck is being cleared and the trains are running again, literally nobody will go back to horses.

ahartmetz 2y ago
I mean yeah. Wayland started with a feature aversion from its initial developer, then continued with feature avoidance by committee, the committee in turn required by the "everyone gets to implement the X server equivalent" design and some of the trouble coming particularly from "everyone" including Gnome. Some of these missing features are really not considered optional at this point by many desktop Linux users. But there aren't many left now. I'll probably make the switch in 0.5-3 years ;) What is there in Wayland is really quite clean though, so it will... EVENTUALLY... be pretty good.
AlienRobot 2y ago
>X11 is basically already unsupported, pretty much all the developers moved to Wayland In my view, Wayland is basically unsupported. GNOME and KDE support it. XFCE, Lxqt, Mate, and Cinnamon don't. It's been over 10 years. You could make a whole DE from scratch in this time.
- ac29 2y ago
  > XFCE, Lxqt, Mate, and Cinnamon don't. XFCE, Lxqt, Mate all have at least partial wayland support. Cinnamon has experimental support.
  - AlienRobot 2y ago
    That's not support. That's <qualifier> support. If that counts, then X11 having legacy support counts as well.
    - consteval 2y ago
      I don't agree, because experimental support means it's being worked on. Legacy support means the opposite - it's not being worked on and never will be worked on. So for now it happens to work. But none of those DEs are contributing to the X.org implementation of X11, right? So it will slowly break down over time. That's the current status of X11, it's on hospice.
      - AlienRobot 2y ago
        The current status of X11 is that it works. The current status of Wayland is that it doesn't. It's really that simple. I think this exchange can help you understand my position better: https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/pull/9345#issuecomment-2016904928 https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/pull/9345#issuecomment-201... >Wayland has a myriad of unresolved problems regarding surface suspension blocking presentation and the FIFO (vsync) implementation being fundamentally broken leading to reduced GPU-bound performance. To which someone replies: >If we do this, we are basically accepting these issues are unfixable for the next ten years (SDL4). Having this as the default in SDL3 (which isn't being used yet!) is important for signaling to other stakeholders that we actually do need to get solutions in place for detected issues. To which the committer says: >SDL is not your tool for "signaling to stakeholders" about what is important. It's an actual library used by real developers and users! Likewise. My PC is not a tool for signaling library/DE developers that there are more and more people using Wayland now and that they can finally stop maintaining X11 legacy code. I use my PC for real things. I couldn't care less if things are running on X11 or Wayland so long as they work. If Wayland isn't working with my use case, I just won't use it. I won't switch to Wayland juts to beta test it, and then spend years begging people who know how to hack Linux to implement the features I need that I had on X11. If Linux drops X11, and Wayland still doesn't work. I won't use Wayland. I'll use Windows.
- kelnos 2y ago
  > It's been over 10 years. For most of those years, fundamental parts of the desktop experience were just not possible on Wayland. Even today, there are some current Xfce features that are just not implementable on Wayland. > You could make a whole DE from scratch in this time. Depends on your goals and team size. Part of me would love to rewrite Xfce in Rust (yes, I'm one of those people), using a different, lighter, actually-well supported toolkit (unlike GTK3), but with the team we have, that would be another two decades. Consider that Xfce 4 is a little over 20 years old at this point. It's taken that long to build it to what it is. Starting over wouldn't take any less time to get there with the people and resources we have.
  - panick21_ 2y ago
    Have you looked at cosmic and iced? Maybe there is some bases of cooperation. What features are missing from Xfce perspective?
- bitwize 2y ago
  > In my view, Wayland is basically unsupported. "Unsupported" as in there are no maintainers, there's no roadmap, there's no future. X11 is a dead end. All the people who were working on it would rather work on Wayland instead. It's taking a while for the DEs, etc. to catch up, but even the slow pace of improvement Wayland is exhibiting is much better than "dead in the water" which is where X11 is.
- panick21_ 2y ago
  You maybe don't want to hear it, but the overwhelming majority of people are on Gnome or KDE. You might as well claim X11 is not supported because Hyperland, Cosmic and many others aren't supported on X11. Unsupported in the context of software doesn't really mean what you took it as anyway.
cwillu 2y ago
You say X11 is unsupported, and I note with glee that X11 hasn't _broken_ for me _since_ they stopped supporting it.
- exe34 2y ago
  yes, I wish more software would be "unsupported" like this!
- panick21_ 2y ago
  When software works it just works, and if you don't change it it continues to work. But if you had an issue, its unlikely that it would be fixed or that new features you want would arrive. Unsupported is fine for much software on the world.
  - cwillu 2y ago
    Indeed. It is often a feature that core infrastructure doesn't gain new features.
    - panick21_ 2y ago
      Hardware is evolving, and while the core feature set works, it wont keep up. If you personally don't care about those things, that fine, and its a feature for you. But eternal stagnation isn't actually a realistic option.

ahartmetz 2y ago

I mean yeah. Wayland started with a feature aversion from its initial developer, then continued with feature avoidance by committee, the committee in turn required by the "everyone gets to implement the X server equivalent" design and some of the trouble coming particularly from "everyone" including Gnome. Some of these missing features are really not considered optional at this point by many desktop Linux users. But there aren't many left now. I'll probably make the switch in 0.5-3 years ;) What is there in Wayland is really quite clean though, so it will... EVENTUALLY... be pretty good.

AlienRobot 2y ago

>X11 is basically already unsupported, pretty much all the developers moved to Wayland In my view, Wayland is basically unsupported. GNOME and KDE support it. XFCE, Lxqt, Mate, and Cinnamon don't. It's been over 10 years. You could make a whole DE from scratch in this time.

ac29 2y ago
> XFCE, Lxqt, Mate, and Cinnamon don't. XFCE, Lxqt, Mate all have at least partial wayland support. Cinnamon has experimental support.
- AlienRobot 2y ago
  That's not support. That's <qualifier> support. If that counts, then X11 having legacy support counts as well.
  - consteval 2y ago
    I don't agree, because experimental support means it's being worked on. Legacy support means the opposite - it's not being worked on and never will be worked on. So for now it happens to work. But none of those DEs are contributing to the X.org implementation of X11, right? So it will slowly break down over time. That's the current status of X11, it's on hospice.
    - AlienRobot 2y ago
      The current status of X11 is that it works. The current status of Wayland is that it doesn't. It's really that simple. I think this exchange can help you understand my position better: https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/pull/9345#issuecomment-2016904928 https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/pull/9345#issuecomment-201... >Wayland has a myriad of unresolved problems regarding surface suspension blocking presentation and the FIFO (vsync) implementation being fundamentally broken leading to reduced GPU-bound performance. To which someone replies: >If we do this, we are basically accepting these issues are unfixable for the next ten years (SDL4). Having this as the default in SDL3 (which isn't being used yet!) is important for signaling to other stakeholders that we actually do need to get solutions in place for detected issues. To which the committer says: >SDL is not your tool for "signaling to stakeholders" about what is important. It's an actual library used by real developers and users! Likewise. My PC is not a tool for signaling library/DE developers that there are more and more people using Wayland now and that they can finally stop maintaining X11 legacy code. I use my PC for real things. I couldn't care less if things are running on X11 or Wayland so long as they work. If Wayland isn't working with my use case, I just won't use it. I won't switch to Wayland juts to beta test it, and then spend years begging people who know how to hack Linux to implement the features I need that I had on X11. If Linux drops X11, and Wayland still doesn't work. I won't use Wayland. I'll use Windows.
kelnos 2y ago
> It's been over 10 years. For most of those years, fundamental parts of the desktop experience were just not possible on Wayland. Even today, there are some current Xfce features that are just not implementable on Wayland. > You could make a whole DE from scratch in this time. Depends on your goals and team size. Part of me would love to rewrite Xfce in Rust (yes, I'm one of those people), using a different, lighter, actually-well supported toolkit (unlike GTK3), but with the team we have, that would be another two decades. Consider that Xfce 4 is a little over 20 years old at this point. It's taken that long to build it to what it is. Starting over wouldn't take any less time to get there with the people and resources we have.
- panick21_ 2y ago
  Have you looked at cosmic and iced? Maybe there is some bases of cooperation. What features are missing from Xfce perspective?
bitwize 2y ago
> In my view, Wayland is basically unsupported. "Unsupported" as in there are no maintainers, there's no roadmap, there's no future. X11 is a dead end. All the people who were working on it would rather work on Wayland instead. It's taking a while for the DEs, etc. to catch up, but even the slow pace of improvement Wayland is exhibiting is much better than "dead in the water" which is where X11 is.
panick21_ 2y ago
You maybe don't want to hear it, but the overwhelming majority of people are on Gnome or KDE. You might as well claim X11 is not supported because Hyperland, Cosmic and many others aren't supported on X11. Unsupported in the context of software doesn't really mean what you took it as anyway.

cwillu 2y ago

You say X11 is unsupported, and I note with glee that X11 hasn't _broken_ for me _since_ they stopped supporting it.

exe34 2y ago
yes, I wish more software would be "unsupported" like this!
panick21_ 2y ago
When software works it just works, and if you don't change it it continues to work. But if you had an issue, its unlikely that it would be fixed or that new features you want would arrive. Unsupported is fine for much software on the world.
- cwillu 2y ago
  Indeed. It is often a feature that core infrastructure doesn't gain new features.
  - panick21_ 2y ago
    Hardware is evolving, and while the core feature set works, it wont keep up. If you personally don't care about those things, that fine, and its a feature for you. But eternal stagnation isn't actually a realistic option.