The difference is that a huge number of essential features both exist and actually work in X, but not in Wayland.
That particular X developer might have abandoned X, but X itself is still here, still works, and still does what I need. Can't say the same about Wayland, yet...
The X development community has decided, almost unanimously, that Wayland is the way forward. More powerful and knowledgeable forces than you have cast this die for you. It is now upon you to either adjust, or step up and contribute where Wayland is lacking.
I'd like to use Wayland. But there's no replacement to my bspwm+picom setup that works with a little configuration. Tough luck, guess I won't be using Wayland for now.
This is NOT a hypothetical. Projects have dropped ALSA support and adopted a policy of PulseAudio or GTFO -- and ALSA has more commitment to its long-term maintenance than Xorg now does. And I suspect the next phase will be Wayland maintainers putting pressure on toolkits to drop X support, much like Lennart pressured the GNOME community to hard-depend on systemd.
Lets keep them separate. I have no PulseAudio, solved Skype with apulse, though I don't use much media except browser, player and tuner.
When about do you think firefox will no longer build for X?
Python 3 was ready in 2008 but 2 will be supported by RHEL until at least 2024 16 years later. I will be surprised if in 2030 I can't simply pick distro with X and fire up firefox.
When about do you think firefox will no longer build for X?
Python 3 was ready in 2008 but 2 will be supported by RHEL until at least 2024 16 years later. I will be surprised if in 2030 I can't simply pick distro with X and fire up firefox. Its kind of silly to expect users who are disinterested in using foo to pitch in to make foo acceptable when said users really want bar because you tell them that bar is now the standard "get over it".
Firefox? 2025 at the latest. Firefox was the project that deprecated ALSA a few years back. Now that all major distros ship with Wayland as the default, it's time to assume Wayland and not assume X. Eventually X support will become burdensome, and be removed.
The majority of users are still using x11 which is why for example Firefox just added hardware decoding under X last month. Optimistically for wayland this might change between 2024-26 at which point application developers can stop supporting it at which point people who are so inclined can provide an x11 build of Firefox in 2026-2028 which are liable to work through 2030.
In a less optimal world we are still in step one in 2030.
Anyone who thinks X is going anywhere this decade is dreaming.
Actually, that's exactly one of the major reasons put forth for switching to Wayland. The very comment you replied to quotes it:
>>> a major maintainer of X server telling you he's not going to work to maintain the project anymore
If the project ends up truly unmaintained, it really would end up disappearing from the face of the earth as the platform under it (the hardware, the kernel, etc.) changes to the point that it becomes non-functional.
You don't want people to use a new thing because it might siphon off resource you're benefitting from now?
If you love X, go work on it, or pay people to. Otherwise... what possible point are you trying to make?
Did I express any want in my comment? I didn't even say anything about my preferences. I wonder if perhaps you replied to the wrong comment?
> what possible point are you trying to make?
To correct emersion about Wayland being an option. Do you think what I said was incorrect?
I’ve seen this happen multiple times with replacement systems: as long as people can escape back to the old system the new one remains rough around the edges, but once the old one is turned off the new system rapidly improves to production level quality.
The problem is that they can't be fixed, as I understand. People are asking for things that some see as features and others see as bugs.
The only way to keep everyone happy is for both to continue co-existing, but unless something changes, it doesn't seem like that's going to happen.
The kernel has a pretty strong backwards-compatibility stance, so you'd need to wait a long time.
Nobody stops you from running an outdated and insecure distribution to use X11 (in this hypothetical future). Nobody stops you from patching X11 to support newer interfaces.
If you want to stick with X11, you can. Nobody urges you to upgrade.
No, sorry. X11 clients are eternal, there's just way too many of them out there that are line-of-business and will never be ported to anything else. So I'm always going to need some solution to make those apps work, and since for the foreseeable future that probably means "run a nested X server that translates things to the native display server's API", that means Xwayland isn't going away any time soon, and if/when it does it'll be replaced by some other translation layer I'll need to support.