> outside of the XWayland scope given the diminishing developer interest and lots of talk but little action by those anti-Wayland holdouts in the community to actually contribute to X.Org Server development.
I don't know.. maybe they're actually rising to this "challenge."
Although, I've never understood why the presence of Wayland means X.Org needs to disappear. To me it seems part of our modern churlish desktop software cult that is perennially annoyed that their new systems, while slightly more visually appealing, have actually removed more useful features than they have added and fail to be a compelling upgrade on their own.
So, instead of making anything better, they focus on destroying what already exists.
> I've never understood why the presence of Wayland means X.Org needs to disappear
It doesn't, except for a few annoying facts:
* Most of the people who maintained X.org are sick and tired of it, have moved on to Wayland (or completely unrelated) work.
* No one has stepped up to work on the non-XWayland parts of X.org to the level that's needed to describe it as more than just in maintenance mode.
* Popular GUI toolkits seem to be moving on. GTK, for example, still accepts bug fixes for the X11 backend, but they aren't really working on it. I expect at whatever point maintaining the X11 backend and keeping it up with core changes becomes too big a burden, they'll drop it entirely. I don't know what Qt's stance is, but I wouldn't be surprised if momentum has or will move more toward their Wayland backend.
The end result here is that X.org eventually will be the less-stable, less-featureful platform. It's going to take a while to get to that point (Wayland clearly still has a ways to go), but it feels inevitable, unless some interested parties decide to step up to maintain the non-XWayland parts of X.org and the X11 backends of the popular GUI toolkits.
> I've never understood why the presence of Wayland means X.Org needs to disappear
Same.
I'm on Wayland right now and I already know the next installation will run X11.
Nothing against Wayland but so far all functional differences I noticed were things that don't work anymore.
I don't expect everything to work exactly the way it was previously, but nonexistent alternatives for X11 tools are a dealbreaker for me.
I had the same issues. I try Wayland whenever I end up with a new machine or do a reinstall for whatever reason. It felt like death by a thousand cuts just small things like inconsistent drag and drop behaviour, the primary clipboard working in some places and not in others etc.
Things that are just ingrained in my daily use being inconsistent or broken ever so slightly just become intolerable even after a few days of tweaking and tracking down 5 year old bug reports with no action.
I might have a better time using one of the big 2 DEs but (using KDE on a Surface Pro with Wayland has been fine) but i3/Sway are my preferred WMs and I'm not giving them up.
> Although, I've never understood why the presence of Wayland means X.Org needs to disappear.
Because it takes time, money, and effort to keep it around. Literally everyone who knows anything about the Linux graphics stack agrees that Wayland is the superior approach. So rather than maintain one code path for a superior graphics stack that actually enables a competitive desktop environment and another code path for yesteryear's graphics stack that only caters to a bunch of old grognards who fear change, the project maintainers just said fuck the grognards, the wasted effort supporting them is holding the Linux desktop back. The situation has gotten so bad that the Asahi Linux kernel's video driver attempts to detect if it's being accessed by an X server and refuses to work if it is; Wayland is the ONLY supported path by the Asahi project.
Sorry, X11 has got to die -- because the grognards have supplied nothing but endless whining about the Wayland situation instead of putting in the work necessary to keep it alive. You want to keep it around for your niche use case? Maintain it yourself, or hire someone else to. Just don't expect support from the major distributions, GUI tool kits, or application projects -- or kernel drivers.
For a very simple reason: developers don't want to support multiple backends for their app, and end users don't want to install two different windowing systems to support different apps that made different choices.
The situation on Linux is already pretty bad w.r.t. having to install multiple big frameworks, with some apps assuming Gnome and others KDE. Imagine GTK chose to move to Wayland, but Qt chose to stick to X - you would probably end up with 4 different combos on many systems to support all expectations.
> For a very simple reason: developers don't want to support multiple backends for their app
Yeah, that is why in my code i don't bother with Wayland and just stick with X11 :-P (though things largely work on Wayland via XWayland, aside from a few things like some code i wrote that resets the mouse cursor position manually to allow for scrolling/panning/rotating without being limited by where the cursor is - well, under Wayland this limitation will exist, but it is a minor one).
I don't know.. maybe they're actually rising to this "challenge."
Although, I've never understood why the presence of Wayland means X.Org needs to disappear. To me it seems part of our modern churlish desktop software cult that is perennially annoyed that their new systems, while slightly more visually appealing, have actually removed more useful features than they have added and fail to be a compelling upgrade on their own.
So, instead of making anything better, they focus on destroying what already exists.