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Wayland Will Never Be Ready For Every X11 User
(hackaday.com)
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this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2025
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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.
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.