X11 vs Wayland: what does the timeline look like?

Robert Heller heller at deepsoft.com
Mon Jul 7 17:57:46 UTC 2025


At this time it looks like I *cannot* switch to Wayland -- several things 
about Wayland just don't work (for me).

I know of at least three things where Wayland simply fails:

I use KiCAD and KiCAD just does not work with Wayland: 
    https://www.kicad.org/blog/2025/06/KiCad-and-Wayland-Support/
    
I use FVWM2 as my window manager.  And I believe FVWM2 uses features of X11 
that are not available in Wayland.  And no I don't like Gnome or KDE (or 
really *any* so-called "modern" desktop environment.

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.

So, is there a likely timeline where X11 (in whatever form that takes) 
"vanishes" and Wayland totally replaces it as the graphical server 
infratructure under Linux?  Are we talking a few years, a decade, or several 
decades?

-- 
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