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Ubuntu Joins the Movement: X11 Officially Being Phased Out
(linuxiac.com)
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this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2025
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Hope they're gonna devote the development resources to making it actually work.
While it actually works, there are truly some missing features obviously. The hope is, when lot of major distributions and desktop environments stop supporting X11, then application developers and Wayland developers have to find a solution quicker. This will accelerate development of Wayland, at least the remaining issues.
One area where Wayland needs to improve is support for various accessibility features.
That does feel rther like jumping out of a plane and hoping you can finish making your paracute before it's too late.
The concept of moving on from X11 is a good one, but making Wayland just a protocol that every compositor has to implement separately, and having so many optional larts to the spec seems like a guarantee that the ecosystem around it will never properly mature.
The KiCad developers have a good article about some of the issues with Wayland here.
Oh wow. I am suddenly less excited about our Wayland future.
Damn yeah. Just the window managment issues are a complete no go for any productive work.
I actually see this working out in the long run at least. In the mean time, there will be a lot of creativity while everyone tries to "invent the wheel" while great ideas perculate up during the stabalization phase.
This is big "if we break your old toys, you'll HAVE to play with the new ones" energy.
Tell me when they port FVWM. Seriously. FvwmButtons-- a pretty trivial dock except it can swallow other windows-- seems like it would be out-of-bounds on Wayland unless it was owned by the compositor itself to access the other windows. I don't see any of the new taskbar-tools used with Wayland compositors offering similar functionality (I could be wrong) and that seems an amazing loss of feature parity.
In what way does it not work?
Remote desktop support is buggy on gnome and nearly non-existant on other DE's, which speaks to how poor a job wayland does at managing functions between DE's, where each individual DE has to build their own solution for basic functions, further fragmenting development efforts.
Then there's accessibility functions, which wayland breaks almost by design by denying apps access to each other. Even something as simple as an on screen keyboard becomes nearly impossible to implement.
Any software thats being pushed to users as the "main" experience, should not break things as common and fundemental as remote desktop or onscreen keyboards. Great way to drive away potential users switching from windows 10.
I've been using remote desktop for work daily on wayland (kde) for the last 3 or 4 years... I have no idea what "buggy support" you are refering to
That's a side effect of just dumping everything into X11, once you switch from it you lose all the random kitchen sink warts it grew over the years.
Like an on-screen keyboard shouldn't be fiddling with a display protocol to fake keyboard inputs, it should be using the actual OS input layer to emulate them (So then it'd work with devices that read input directly and not go via X11). Same with accessibility, there's a reason other OSs use separate communication channels with their own protocol.
"i don't care about that. Hhit was working and now it's not" - the users
I think it boils down to trade offs.
The major benefit to Wayland is that it has less overhead since apps talk directly to the desktop. Having desktops implement the protocols instead of relying on a external project means that the user experience is cleaner.
For smaller projects like window managers there are libraries that implement the core protocols. This allows for the minimal window managers Linux traditionally had as an option.
I won't argue that Wayland has issues with remote desktop. The problem currently is that it has to be implemented as a custom non standardized solution by every desktop. I don't think that there are any portals for doing session management which is unfortunate.
From a accessibility perspective I believe that has already been addressed.
I also don't see any reason to try to "market" Linux. Windows 11 is the successor to Windows 10. It isn't that bad compared to ever other version of Windows.
I guess we will see. Tiling WM on Wayland was, at my last check, totally limited to sway. As a dwm guy Wayland has yet to give me what I need.
Have you tried dwl?
I have not, I wasn't aware it existed until right now.
As someone who's a week into trying to switch from Windows to Linux, I don't even know what X11 or Wayland are. My biggest hurdle has been how the Linux community always just assumes everyone knows every little thing. This article is a perfect example. It would have taken a sentence or two to add "X11 does this, but is being phased out".
I spent at least an hour today trying to connect to a shared network printer! As a geek, I love Linux but it's still not ready for the masses. And that's referring to Mint.
Honestly, that's not something you should have to know about. Many Linux folks just care about the inner workings of everything so they can make it work how they want.
Of course, when things break it helps knowing what the reason is and how to fix it. But usually your distribution should handle everything so that nothing breaks.
I agree with your first part, but I dont think I've ever used a windows, osx or linux computer that hasnt had issues connecting to printers, the problem there isnt with the computer.
It probably depends on the printer. I helped dad install Mint on a used laptop he bought, and the only help he needed with the printer was figuring out which config application to open to add it.
I use system-config-printer to set up both our Canon and Epson printers any time I install a fresh Linux here; it works flawlessly.
I've been using Linux for just about my entire adult life, except for a brief experience with Windows Vista, and I don't know what x11 and Wayland are. I just know Linux does what I want without bogging itself down with weird shit.
X11 is the display server. Your desktop environment, like gnome, has a window manager managing your opened applications and tells the display server "please render this stuff on the actual screen".
X11 is ancient and sucks, because for example, it can't do fractional scaling well, which is important for screens that have a higher resolution, since everything appears tiny otherwise.
The display server also offers some functionalities that the desktop environment can make use of, like global hotkeys, or screen sharing.
I'm not an expert or anything, but I think it's about right like this.
Many thanks for the explaination!
Sessions don't resume properly after sleep. Tools like Barrier don't fully work. Wayland is fine, but it's just not mature.
Ctrl+Shift+V in KeePassXC should autotype username and password in another window, but I believe is still broken out of the box on Wayland.
There may be some workaround that I haven't tried yet.
Is that a problem of Wayland or a problem of KeePassXC?
I'd be highly surprised if Wayland actually has a protocol for applications to just type across other applications, we barely even have global shortcuts (it's getting there but reaaaaaally slowly).
KPXC might be able to get around it by using whichever method
ydotooldoes (by faking a device AFAIK) - probably needs root to do this though, and it would also need to implement the global shortcuts API to be able to respond to a key bind I believe.So perhaps a bit of column A and column B.
It works on X11, so I'd say Wayland.
Here we are YEARS later and OpenBoard is STILL broken.
No, I don't want a fully contained, separate whiteboard application - As a teacher, I need to be able to DIRECTLY DRAW ON THE DESKTOP. Until this is a fully supported feature that software can implement, Wayland is completely broken for me.
Drawing directly on the desktop is a native feature of KDE Plasma. :)
It might be a problem of the openboard software, not a problem of wayland. I don't know what you mean by "directly draw on the desktop", but whatever it is have you looked for other apps that might do the same thing?
Quite simply, you can draw and annotate the screen. I can circle things, draw attention to things, and highlight things on every window in the desktop environment without ANY consideration of what application is running - it's completely agnostic. Wayland's design doesn't allow it.
Until this feature is present, Wayland is unusable for me.
This kind of thing is precisely why the overall decision to replace X by building something NEW was folly from the beginning - because you are ALWAYS going to be missing use cases. X should've been treated like an API and "completion" be measured directly and terms of how much of the functionality is implemented - not in terms of "how much, in fuzzy natural language terms, do we have that works equivalently".
Also, and let's be entirely clear about this... Open Board got here FIRST. It was FINISHED software. Developed, released, and doing its job. To come along, make a change to its dependencies, and then blame IT for doing something wrong? Is it the job of every single developer to update their software to match what Wayland wants? Thousands of projects over decades? What happens when the Wayland devs make another change and something else breaks? I'm getting flashbacks of Linus Torvalds RIGHTFULLY yelling at a developer blaming an application for not functioning after a kernel update. "WE DO NOT BREAK USER SPACE."
Android forces developers to make these kinds of retroactive changes, and it's why the ecosystem sucks and any stable, well-built software is a couple updates away from being useless. I don't want my desktop OS to be more like that.
Wayland isn't a piece of software. It is simply a set if standards apps use to talk to the desktop which then talks to the kernel and hardware.
Apps access resources via XDG portals. If there isn't a portal for something it needs to be implemented at the desktop.
Back to your use case, I think you probably just need the appropriate desktop extension. Drawing on the desktop sounds like a desktop level thing.
And can you not see how that's a problem? Software that was written without using XDG portals shouldn't have to be concerned about their existence. If it is required that existing, finished software has to adapt to a new paradigm, it is not a replacement - it's new. And it's intrusive. If you replace the water system for a house, that's one thing. If you replace the water system in the house AND the new system requires the owner to buy and install all new fixtures on all the faucets, that's an entirely different thing altogether.
When I resume chrome, all the windows open on desktop 1 regardless of what desktop they were on when they closed
That's a known Wayland limitation
It has been addressed with a new protocol but it takes time for it to work its way down.
Isn't Chrome still an X11 app? I guess Chrome would be one of the bigger programs that need a little more encouragement to finally jump onto Wayland.
Garbage HDR support. But I think that's more of a KDE issue. (IDK I'm not a Linux pro)
x11 doesn't support HDR at all, so even with HDR support still not being fully mature in KDE and GNOME that's a argument for wayland.
HDR support is the whole reason for picking Wayland and anyhow I don't see whats so bad about it.
Support is pretty new so I think it will just take time to iron out