I wonder what is going to be the stance of Xfce and co about this.
Xfce’s stance is that they want to offer Wayland support soon but will remain X11-compatible for the foreseeable future. Going by what their wiki says about it, work seems to be progressing fairly well.
I know. I’m pointing to the thing that this article states - that GTK will drop X11. Won’t make things easy for them if they want to keep X11 compatibility.
Fair point. It remains to be seen how well this will work out for them. But given that doesn’t seem to be even a vague launch date I’d say there’s going to be plenty of time for a transitional phase where they can get their bugs sorted out – and the underlying operating systems can get Wayland running if they haven’t already.
Xfce is on GTK3 and there are no plans to migrate to GTK4.
The blog post says they’re just deprecating X11 APIs at this point; GTK5 will remove them.
I’m still very worried about this. Wayland still has many rough edges and I think forcing a move to X11 is premature. One of the main benefits of the Linux ecosystem has always been that it strived to run on hardware far longer than commercial vendors, who have gotten even worse at forcing obsolescence of hardware for purely revenue-focused reasons (looking at you, Microsoft – Win11 refusing to work on chipsets it is perfectly capable of running on…)
Wayland doesn’t require specialized hardware though. How is it obsolescence?
Deprecation of X11, currently, only affects cutting/bleeding-edge distributions and will, hopefully, push app developers to target Wayland properly.
Those who strictly require features of X11 can continue using desktop environments running on it. It is not like deprecation of X11 in GTK5 will suddenly make all apps using other toolkits require Wayland.
I admit I may misunderstand the situation; I hear there’s a compatibility layer or something named xwayland – will that allow older apps linked against x11 to run on a wayland desktop?
I’ll have to give wayland a try again soon – if it’s stable on my laptops and I can figure out the custom keyboard layout stuff (I posted on another thread recently asking about that – sounds like there are good solutions for that) then I’ll feel comfortable moving to it finally.
You definitely should. I am running Fedora 41 with KDE Plasma and I don’t miss anything running the Wayland session. I am using it for all my gaming, university home assignments in a Windows VM, playing with local LLMs, content creation and programming. In fact, Fedora had Wayland enabled by default for nearly a decade.
The older versions will still stick around for many years; it just means apps specifically targeting GTK5 won’t support X11.
In any case, X11 has all but been abandoned already so the writing is on the wall.
Things must move on eventually, I suppose. I just really hope they reach feature parity before then. It sounds like most of the annoyances that have kept people from migrating are being tackled, so I’m hopeful.
The quickest way to fix Wayland is to get more people using it.
Nice. I’ve already been happy with GTK4 so far, and it looks like GTK5 is removing a lot of legacy baggage. I hope this makes things more maintable for the devs.
Oh no, please someone pick it up.
Wayland is so much worse than X11currently,IMO. Specially on older devices.
I don’t understand the forcing of wayland upon users.
