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by notatoad 4984 days ago
I believe Wayland's stated goal is exactly that: to replace X11. of course they don't mean they're going to wipe out X11 from existence, if you prefer that you'll still be able to use it, but wayland should eventually be able to completely fill the role that X11 currently fills.
2 comments

Wayland can eventually fill the role on Linux perhaps. X11 is built to run on many more operating systems.

This is my main issue with Wayland. Whence portability?

Very few apps call the X api directly. Nearly everything uses GTK or Qt, which they'll still be able to do, except that behind the scenes GTK/Qt will hook into Wayland on Linux and X elsewhere.
Wayland for other OSes can be paid for by users of those OSes.
> wayland _should_eventually_ be able to completely fill the role that X11 currently fills.

Which X11 features are still missing? Does Wayland support X11's seemless remote multiuser sessions already?

I've googled around and found this fresh message from April 2012:

http://tech.slashdot.org/story/12/04/06/0538250/update-on-wa...

"... X11 support on Wayland. It's basically ready to go, but window management is implemented only as a hack right now."

That doesn't sound good. It seems that Wayland will have a hard time to replace X11 in the next decade. Currently I see no reason why I should switch.

> That doesn't sound good. It seems that Wayland will have a hard time to replace X11 in the next decade. Currently I see no reason why I should switch.

The reason you will switch is that plain X11 goes unsupported and will not work on modern systems.

The initial thing you will switch is not Wayland proper, it's just X11 sitting on top of Wayland. Thinking of Wayland as a competing display server is as of now not really realistic -- it's much better to think it as a refactoring of the internals of the system that uses X and compositors, taking the parts of both that need privileges on the system and really fast communication and merging them together in Wayland, leaving the rest of the parts into X.

We'll see whether Wayland is able to hold what it promises.