X11 vs Wayland: what does the timeline look like?

[Enrico Weigelt, metux IT consult]

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