I think "healthy competition" is the most productive way to look at it, given the situation.

With the history of unclear alignment, it would be foolish for everyone to rely on Gnome.

But there's a ton of investment and value in that platform. (Much of it before Gnome even started, but now under the Gnome umbrella.)

So "competition" has been giving us alternatives.

Maybe ongoing competition will help keep pressure on Gnome, to be closer to aligned with the user bases.

> I have no hope for GTK. It is a GNOMEy toolkit now.

G(nome)T(ool)K(it). It always was. It is a CADT program: every new version is a complete and incompatible implementation of the old version.

I'm personally open to Wayland, and able to move to it (and sometimes have, though once I had to back it out because it was breaking too much in a critical factory embedded appliance) (and XMonad works noticeably better for me than i3wm/Sway). But not everyone can move to it.

Wayland is only one of the many Gnome desktop feature and technical decisions that not everyone agrees with. Some decisions are regressions, and outright defective, for years and counting.

There's an awkward situation, in which the companies paying for the programmers effectively get to decide, and the governance doesn't necessarily reflect the user base. But, like "they who has the gold, makes the rules", they who does the work...

So the healthy competition comes in when someone someone can afford to spend time to build alternatives. Sometimes expending effort just to undo changes of someone else, on a fork.

For example, when Gnome decided to take the desktop behavior in their own creative direction, the Cinnamon project gave everyone back a more familiar and intuitive desktop, which continued to work with all the application programs that people had been using.

(Strangely, Cinnamon seems more an enterprise-desktop look&feel drop-in replacement than the default Gnome desktop. When I would've guessed Gnome corporate funders would've been focused on getting Linux desktop on corporate desktop as their first priority, and then second priority would be mobile. But I don't see the default Gnome desktop getting them either. Cinnamon, on the other hand, is immediately usable by any corporate worker who's used any Microsoft desktop since Windows 95.)

> I'm a curmudgeonly old man fond of old tech, but I have still had a Wayland-only setup since early 2020

You must not be that curmudgeonly! I haven't tried Wayland yet, and so long as people are still arguing about it, I'm too afraid to even try it. :-)

The trick is: If you use any sort of a11y tools, it's really hard to move to wayland. Things are improving, but it's slow going.

If you are on for example Mint, X11 is chosen for you and will probably be for a few years to come. There is an experimental Cinnamon Wayland session, though.

Which demographic do you evaluate? Because I am clearly among the xorg users. I don't even use systemd either.

For me at least, Emacs' pure GTK port isn't enough! You'll have to pry EXWM[0] from my cold, dead hands, so until Emacs can act as a Wayland compositor I'm staying on X. That and also Wayland still doesn't seem to support Hyper as an independent modifier.

[0]: https://github.com/emacs-exwm/exwm

The whole audio plugin field is on X11 for formats reason

SteamDeck's desktop mode was X11, last I checked.

I still find Wayland to be buggier than X11.

it seems to have better display scaling which is useful when I switch between large monitor and laptop screen.

There are a few. There is still some software that has trouble with XWayland, which could hold back some users, and there are many who aren’t happy with the state of accessibility tools. But I don’t think this justifies the hatred towards it, as it’s not like these issues are unfixable. (Wayland now works better than X for me on all of my systems.)

It’s really disappointing how often disagreements in the open source world turn into religious wars. I think it’s because so many would rather yell and scream than contribute a single line of code. So much wasted energy.

I don't use a compositor in XOrg.

> How many X11 holdouts are still around, really?

A lot. I have no idea how to start "Wayland" on Slackware. I use FVWM.

OTOH, i saw Wayland in Tails. It is slow and ugly as hell, window managent is nonexistent.

> Example: people wanting to keep X11 alive have been literally banned from the freedesktop.org infrastructure

Yeah - that has been my experience with ebassi etc... too. Also prior to that with Poettering. These people seem on a mission, a crusade. Anyone not conforming to this will be ignored or isolated/banned.

Probably a better reference.

https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/12/the_price_of_software...

> fascistoid appoach that wayland people had all along the way

Ironic to promote a far right dev, and demonizing folks who are sick of his shit.