[3np]

Wayland is great and ready for (idk) 95% of users/use-cases.

There is a long tail of more-or-less critical stuff that depend on X11 and do not have working Wayland substitutes. While the tail has been shrinking for every year, it will be decades if ever until all can be realistically migrated. Consider the Lindy Effect and that some of these systems have been running for >10y already. Consider shared but secured environments at universities and research institutes. Consider obscure hardware incompatibilities and hardware-specifix performance issues which might never be fixed.

On the software side, acessibility aside, there are a lot of VNC and other remote-X setups out there with no viable replacement in sight (yet).

Alsa, pulseaudio, pipewire and jack can all coexist and so can display servers.

I understand GNOME and RedHat will do things their way. I understand distro and GUI framework maintainers wanting to reduce their load. I understand people who like Wayland, want it to succeed, and want to evangelize. I do not appreciate when it turns into tribalism, forcing of monoculture and insisting "X11 is deprecated".

---

OP is from 2023 but as they note in their update, the situation is fundamentally not that different 2y later. Are maintainers and decision-makers really sincerely imagining that a supposed deprecation and removal of X11 can be forced onto the wider community over a couple of years from now?

[jauntywundrkind]

> On the software side, acessibility aside, there are a lot of VNC and other remote-X setups out there with no viable replacement in sight (yet).

I've been using wayvnc for probably 5 years now? Works great. Sway can output fine to virtual-crtc out for headless mide; I expect other compositors can use this part of your GPU too. If you really desperate & your Wayland server just can't for no reason, get a DisplayPort dummy plug for $15.

I know less about others but krfb and gnome-remote-desktop are both there. KDE is recently kicking off a bunch of work to make sure their login manager is remote friendly too.

> I do not appreciate when it turns into tribalism, forcing of monoculture and insisting "X11 is deprecated".

Most of the devs doing X11 agreed en masse that it was at a dead end and not worth caring for anymore. It's not tribalism. It's technics.

[3np]

Great you found something that works for you and that you managed to dodge the parts of the community that somehow managed to turn this into identity politics.

Still, the gaps are there and don't seem to be filled anytime soon, despite the progress you mention.

[superkuh]

As an aside, you talk about wayland as if it were one thing. But the wayland protocol is intentionally minimal. Each wayland compositor picks and chooses between different third party libs to support various features. So you never know if something will actually work on the wayland compositor you use. If you stick within your ecosystem, yes, but it's not unified like X11 linux is. It's very fragmented and one's personal experience definitely doesn't say anything about other people's experience. Unlike with X11 where everyone uses the same thing.

For example, mouse and keyboard support and libei, libinput, or nothing (looking at you, weston). You never know what you're going to get and so applications that need to do basic keyboard/mouse things have to guess. It doesn't work all the time. In X11 it does.

Another example, accessibility features. The only wayland compositor that supports screen reading is GNOME's. They invented two new protocols, incompatible with all existing linux accessibility libraries. Only GNOME's wayland compositor and userspace applications use them.

So, in summary: one's experience can't be extrapolated with wayland because there is no single wayland.

[shmerl]

It makes sense for something like accessibility to be part of the protocol because it almost always needs access to stuff that Wayland restricts by design.

[Fire-Dragon-DoL]

Still with this situation,it will be maybe 10 years before we get accessibility again

[o11c]

Let's do the math. If each Wayland implementation supports an independent 95% of what users need, then:

* With 0 implementations, Wayland is good for 100.0% of users

* With 1 implementations, Wayland is good for 95.0% of users

* With 2 implementations, Wayland is good for 90.2% of users

* With 3 implementations, Wayland is good for 85.7% of users

* With 4 implementations, Wayland is good for 81.5% of users

* With 5 implementations, Wayland is good for 77.4% of users

* With 6 implementations, Wayland is good for 73.5% of users

* With 7 implementations, Wayland is good for 69.8% of users

* With 8 implementations, Wayland is good for 66.3% of users

* With 9 implementations, Wayland is good for 63.0% of users

* With 10 implementations, Wayland is good for 59.9% of users