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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.