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.
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.
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 ).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
> 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.
Or, if necessary, with just a tiny bit of Wayland; XWayland rootful mode lets you run a full X stack with Wayland as little more than a shim to the graphics driver. As a worked example, Puppy Linux implemented this: https://github.com/puppylinux-woof-CE/woof-CE/pull/2265
RedHat pushes hardest, they basically do GNOME, GNOME does GTK. So GTK will be first --my prediction-- to drop X11 support.
People that prefer X11 is not what I'd optimize for. To me X11 is deprecated, unmaintain{ed,able}. It became too much of a stumbling block for Linux and other opensource OSes. It's painful, but we have to move on. Wayland is not perfect but it seems to be doing the job lately. In two year --my prediction-- it will be more stable than X11 in all aspects.
> People that prefer X11 is not what I'd optimize for.
I wouldn't either, but that doesn't mean it won't work.
both Wayland and X11 are fairly stable AFAIK. For my part I'd rather not rewrite all my X11-specific stuff. For some I probably need to have direct compositor support as you can do less with scripts, so that's not so easy. I'll probably have to spend the effort at some point, but until I don't have to: why bother?
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There's nothing that forces a Wayland compositor to be written in C. I've seen ones written in C++, Zig, and Rust, but you could really use any language as long as you can still call the appropriate system/kernel APIs
Nothing preventing you from writing a X11 server in something else either (and people have done so!). But fact is, most wayland compositors right now are either pure C or C++ (and I think the rest uses at least wlroots?).
Many X11 window managers are written in non-c languages too and I don't think I am too far off the mark when I say that a decent fraction of wayland compositors would just be external window managers if there existed a standardized interface for window managers when they were written (I think some compositors have an interface for external window managers now, but is there a standard interface by now?).
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.
Eh, wlroots is in C. Tons of the Wayland stuff is in C. There's a bunch of good reasons to prefer Wayland, but this is probably the worst reason I've seen yet.
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.