Support is inevitable, Wayland is staged to replaced X11, all major distros have it in their roadmap (if not already default on stable).
Wayland can't possibly replace X11, it's got a fundamentally different (I'd even say broken or even malicious) design. If anything, some Wayland compositors may emerge as dominant desktop environments, but this would be a dark day for power users, if it would mean not being able to switch to an actually friendly design, as currently offered by Xorg.
Also nvidia still provides drivers for 18 year old hardware for x under solaris
If you want the current version built this year for Linux instead of the legacy version you will have to move up 2010 hardware though.
I find it quite amusing that proponents of insert technology here seem to come in 2 stripes.
A) Those who believe new thing is superior and think you ought to try it
B) People smugly stating that you must move to new thing because the other options are going away see wayland systemd gnome.
It reminds me of a supervisor at a telecom support center who gleefully explained that the new system would hang up on people who kept mashing zero on the automated phone menu that preceeded getting to a person to make you go through it.
He didn't understand that people didn't want to use the new automated process because in general such systems are crappy and confusing.
Edit: To be clear breaking user space is when a change happens in the kernel level wherein software that used to work no longer works because the public interface presented differs. If you have evidence that this is actually going to happen other than your own misunderstandings please link it.
The gist of it is that breakage is OK if the userspace isn't open-source and that new uAPIs come around every few years due to the rapid pace development of GPUs.
I worked on Chrome OS graphics for years on and one of my earliest projects was to bring DRM/KMS (then a newish interface) to the Cirrus display card (an ancient card that QEMU happens to emulate).
Anyways, if the kernel developers decided they wanted to invent a brand new uAPI that does graphics, I wouldn't at all be surprised if new GPU drivers only implemented the new uAPI if their target userspace programs all use the new uAPI instead of an older uAPI. Nothing in userspace is "broken" because it will seem to the old uAPI using userspace as if there is no driver for the new GPU.
If one calls the _ syscall with parameters a b and c it won't suddenly require a 4th or demand they be in a c b order is literally what makes X11 continue working against newer kernels. Providing new functionality wherein if you don't call foo before calling _ with a b and c it fails to perform its function would be functionally the same as changing the order of parameters it would be breaking user space.
I don't see how you could possibly lawyer yourself past that, I don't see that the adults in the room who have to support customers in rhel 8 through 2029 can do anything but keep doing minimum work to keep x and the kernel playing nicely. I don't see how nvidia is going to go from supporting hardware for 10-18 years even on niche hardware to dropping support for X so quickly. I also don't see how you can meaningfully talk about the kernel dropping support for X without basing your discussion on actual kernel developers who logically would talk about kernel foo will be the last to support X probably years before it actually happens. I'm totally sure that python 2 -> 3 took over a decade after it was a completely suitable replacement but we will totally manage to replace X before its replacement is fully baked and the kinks worked out.
In short the whole premise is completely and totally premature wishful thinking by people who want their own way. I'll pour one out for X when its actually and in fact dead.
Or just look at a technical video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWQh_DmDLKQ
I don’t see these conteos regarding linux, especially goddamn desktop with the minuscule user share. It is literally a hobby thing for some graphics enthusiasts without any sort of money. Yeah sure, red hat or whatever..
Oh, and this whole affair has the obnoxious side-effect of stirring up all the /r/linuxmasterrace dipshits into a feeding frenzy that spills over onto HN, where they scramble over themselves to spam everyone who dares disagree with the same half-assed links and excuses.
Do you think that the majority of the debian team that voted democratically multiple times on the issue voted purely because... Red Hat? Come on, it is ridiculous. I hope you are not as blind when it comes to real-life politics, because denying reality to this degree is dangerous.
Accusing the other side of an argument of being deluded doesn't foster useful discussion.
It depends on dbus not systemd and that is replaceable module.
* expected by users of X11, Windows, or Mac
* expected by power users
* needed by the visually impaired
And it is also the reason why the Wayland ecosystem is destined for horrible fragmentation of interfaces, features and implementations.
Another consequence is that the X11 model of having the possibility of easily making a window manager to one's liking is not possible with Wayland, as compositors are monstrous beasts compared to window managers.
I also wrote about all this in some of my previous comments, e.g. there was a large thread here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24886074
EDIT: there's another perspective to this that I didn't express very well, so here are some quotes from Arch BBS:
By user neosix:
> You can't send keystrokes, move mouse, move windows, you can't even get active window. And all that because of security?
> But guess what it's not safe walking down the street, something can kill you, so let's just stay in the house and never go out again :)
By user Trilby:
> While I place a very high value on security and well designed software, the strategy of saying "you shouldn't want to do that" is not a sane policy. Yet this has been the approach of wayland from the start. Can you have a system panel? No, you should not want to have one. Can you have one client talk to another client? No, you should not want to do this. Can you turn on your computer and do anything even remotely productive with it? No, you should not want to be productive: here, watch a cat video.
Emphasis mine.
In my experience it's actually the simplicity of building window managers in X11 that's misleading. It's easy to get something up and running that lets you move windows around, but to build a full desktop that does everything you'd expect is a giant task, and X11 only really gets in the way of that.
Exactly, "not a Wayland problem". That's the problem with Wayland, nothing is a Wayland problem.
> Make a service its own daemon with a dbus interface or something like that
I don't know if I should cry or laugh at this.
> look in other places
There's a contradiction here. How do you expect to avoid fragmentation if adding additional protocols alongside Wayland is required? I mean, obviously there won't be just one protocol. This idea is actually a common joke, there's even an XKCD on the topic.
Yes you can, wlroots has an extension for that, that will work on every “niche” wm based on it. You could not really get a system panel to work on plasma and gnome as well on X.
> Can you have one client talk to another client?
It is way too vague (generally, what does it have to do with the display manager? Pipes, IPC, dbus), but if it means something like drag’n’drop, it is supported.
> Can you turn on your computer and do anything even remotely productive with it? No, you should not want to be productive
This is just utterly stupid.
Exactly my point.
> * expected by users of X11, Windows, or Mac
Windows & Mac have been in a compositor-only world for over a decade now. They are firmly in a wayland-style world, not an X11-style one. Android, too, has only ever had a wayland-style world.
The only thing that exists like X11 is X11. So nobody on Windows or Mac will be expecting anything like it.