I think X11 is ideal at the state it is currently. Only getting real fixes, that don’t break anything. If you are a kind of user who needs X11, you probably don’t need any features Wayland offers anyway.
And X11 will never be ready for most modern users. They have different goals. But that’s the thing with open source. As long as someone somewhere needs it. Even if 90% of us don’t need X11 for legacy software. It will still be here.
And X11 will never be ready for most modern users.
Most modern users don’t care either way so long as it works.
X11 works for most users.You completely missed the point being made.
Wayland is what new users start on. And Wayland works for most users. In fact, for these users, it works better than Xorg.
So nobody is going to switch to Xorg. The only people using it will be the few that have not switched to Wayland. And, as the applications go Wayland only, that will become a very short list.
It is mot Wayland that has to prove itself. X11 is not winning the battle for new users, or even old ones.
I spent 4 years with an external monitor on my desk that I couldn’t use because it was absolutely painful to find a consistent way to make the 2 different DPIs of the screens work in a way that made sense. Only now with proper Wayland can I enjoy and use it. Yeah there’s hacks, but I’d rather let it be dead in a corner than try to work around it. It was a bunch of black screen, inconsitencies between the order I’d plug the external screen, when i did it (before or after logging in), etc… I can’t even imagine all the other pain points about hdr, variable or high refresh rates, etc.
Wayland is great.
Had to wait a bunch of time and tried many times before and it wasn’t ready for my needs, but now it is and I’m happy. God knows how many rants I’ve done on fedi about it not working for a lot of time on plasma and weird bugs everwhere.
Currently, X11 is not really being developed, just maintained, which is the real issue. In this piece they are questioning whether Wayland was a good choice or not. I am using Wayland, have for some time, and I do acknowledge it is still a work in progress, validating the articles list of ‘issues’ yet to be addressed, but unless you are running a really old system, I am guessing the complications affect a very minimal group of users. There are also workarounds, for example on KDE, the gtk apps don’t adhere to those using the global menu. However, there is a fix to get around it.
In reference to using a completely different solution, isn’t it a little late in the game (16 years in development?) I think we are stuck with Wayland, no?
X11 would have needed almost a complete rewrite. Wayland made sense. Eject the technical debt and focus on your use case. We aren’t time sharing on a large central mini computer/mainframe anymore. And even then they generally are full single user systems run in parallel under a hypervisor these days. As wasteful as that might be.
But there’s still occasions when you need to run a legacy application on old AIX, Irix, etc, or vax Hardware. And need a workstation. Which right now Wayland simply can’t do without x.
X11 isn’t gonna disappear, it will always be there as a compatibility layer for old programs. That’s okay.
They have different goals
I am not sure about that. They have different designs for sure. Mostly because one was designed 25 years later. I guess you mean they have different goals because Xorg did not incorporate some goals in its design (like security). But is it a goal of Xorg to be insecure? That feels like a stretch.
There are design goals in X11 that are not included in Wayland. Take asking the display server to draw primitive shapes for you as an example. But modern X11 apps do not do that either. That is not how things like Qt and GTK work. So, more of a “25 years later” thing than a true difference in goals. The “compositor” approach. The DDX layer. These are more of a reflection of “how things work today” on both systems than they are differences in goals.
Perhaps you mean things like “network transparency” as I hear that one a lot. Wayland’s design is to have a simple core that can be extended. But the same capabilities exist for Wayland. For example:
https://www.mankier.com/1/waypipe
or even better:
https://github.com/wayland-transpositor/wprs
What goal does Xorg have that Wayland does not? Again, other than poor security (not a goal).
The lack of security in Xorg makes many things easier. Wayland apps run in a sandbox which makes some things harder. Many complaints I see ultimately boil down to this difference. Flatpaks are also sandboxed and a lot of the solutions on Wayland are similar (eg. XDG desktop portal). But again, am not sure crap security was really a “goal” of Xorg. It is simply convenient.
Because of security, things have to be explicitly supported on Wayland while X11 apps can just do them. There is no official way to capture a screenshot on X11 even after 40 years. But any X11 app can do it pretty easily as all apps have access to the entire display (even contents of other windows). On Wayland, there is a protocol for screen capture. There has to be, or it would not be possible. The same is true for many other features. And, I fully admit, some protocols for Wayland to do things done by some x11 apps do not exist yet (or are not yet widely supported by compositors or apps).
But again, I do not really see “poor security” as an x11 design goal. It was simply born in an era where that did not matter as much. Projects that want to modernize X11, like Xlibre, will have to break things on X too. Time will tell what that looks like.
X11 is a display server. Wayland is a presentation layer. Different goals. I have run graphical multi-seat systems using x11. Something like that will never be possible in the same way for Wayland because it is out of the design scope
