X11 vs Wayland: what does the timeline look like?

[Robert Taylor]

Enrico, thanks for the fork.  Absolutely love to see it, hoping to
help out with testing and dev soon.

On Thu, Jul 31, 2025 at 12:58 AM Enrico Weigelt, metux IT consult
<info at metux.net> wrote:
>
> On 08.07.25 03:37, Fungal-net wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> > I haven't run anything that runs on X that will not run with Xwayland.
>
> I've got a lot of that.
>
> > There is an α or β experimental still system called wayback, basically uses
> > xwayland to provide an X environment to run an X wm or dt on top of wlroots.
>
> "wayback" is nothing but a trivial compositor, for just one full screen
> client. That alone doesn't have anything to do at all with X11.
> (IIRC, Cage can do the same)
>
> One *could* use it for hosting a rootful Xwayland. So far so good. At
> least you can run your own window manager here. But still limited in
> many other places by Wayland's design. (eg. how about all the randr,
> or xf86videmode stuff ?)
>
> And once you're only running just one fullscreen Wayland client, so the
> composer hasn't anything to actually *compose*, why do you need the
> extra Wayland layer (and extra roundtrips, and extra limitations) in
> the first place ?
>
> Just to call it "Wayland" ?
> Don't see the logic here.
>
> >> Also I use SSH X11 tunneling very extensively. I have a whole LAN full of
> >> little Linux machines (mostly assorted 'Pis). Some of these are lower end
> >> machines that I don't want to run full-fledged desktop environments on and use
> >> RDP or VNC with, expecially just to run a simple X11 program on.
> >
> > Cage is another low resource way to run an application alone is wayland, no wm
> > needed.
>
> How does Cage provide remote display of invididual windows ?
>
> > How would x11 vanish, if any of us have the code and a reliable place to store
> > it there will always be fork around.  Will C glibc/gcc change so much nobody will
> > be able to update it so it will compile, even if, the kept binaries will last
> > some centuries on the right antique machine.
>
> In contrast to Xorg, Xlibre is under active development - and it's
> also shipped various distros (and there're 3rdparty repos for various
> others), and more to come.
>
> > The reason I don't use it is 1
> > sudo -u or doas xxx-user X or Wayland app. refuses to start, no seat no xdg runtime
> > and even when you cheat and get it able it would be isolated from the rest of the
> > system as if it was a container.  What I believe the problem is that it is an intentional
> > decision not to allow user1 to run an app. as user2
>
> This problem is several layers above - in the clients / DEs, who're
> demanding certain weird desktop bus stuff for whatever funny reasons
> (you'd also need to re-route dbus connections, too). Classic X11 clients
> don't suffer from those problems.
>
>
> --mtx
>
> --
> ---
> Enrico Weigelt, metux IT consult
> Free software and Linux embedded engineering
> info at metux.net -- +49-151-27565287
>