X11 vs Wayland: what does the timeline look like?

[Enrico Weigelt, metux IT consult]

On 07.07.25 19:57, Robert Heller wrote:
> At this time it looks like I *cannot* switch to Wayland -- several things
> about Wayland just don't work (for me).

You don't need to.
Even though Xorg team decided not to do any substantial development and
no major releases anymore, there's Xlibre (growing number of distros
already shipping it - or having 3rdparty repos)

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

There are many more ...

> And no I don't like Gnome or KDE (or really *any* so-called "modern" desktop environment.

You're not alone.

> 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.

One of many core reasons why we (Xlibre) continue X11 development, no
matter whether certain corporations like it or not.

> 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?

Decades.


--mtx

-- 
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Enrico Weigelt, metux IT consult
Free software and Linux embedded engineering
info at metux.net -- +49-151-27565287