Sometimes gnome developers out-apple apple in their attitudes, fwiw.

X11 as a protocol will probably continue to work ~forever.

X11 as a display server will continue to work ~forever as long as someone maintains a display server that targets Linux.

KDE and GNOME will not support X11 forever because it's too much work. Wayland promises to improve on many important desktop use cases where X.org continues to struggle and where the design of X11 has proven generally difficult to improve. The desktop systems targeting Linux want these improvements.

> "Because it's modern" and "Because it's outdated" just aren't compelling reasons for anyone besides software developers.

I can do you one better: that's also not really compelling to software developers either most of the time. I beg you to prove that the KDE developers pushed Wayland hard because they badly wanted to have to greatly refactor the aging and technical debt heavy KWin codebase, just for the hell of it. Absolutely not.

The Wayland switchover that is currently ongoing is entirely focused on end users, but it's focused on things they were never able to do well in X11, and it shows. This is the very reason why Wayland compositors did new things better before they handled old use cases at parity. The focus was on shortcomings of X11 based desktops.

> And "because we're going to drop support so you have to switch eventually" is an attitude I'd expect out of Apple, not Linux distributions.

Yeah. Except Apple is one of the five largest companies in the United States and GNOME and KDE are software lemonade stands. I bet if they could they would love to handle this switchover in a way that puts no stress on anyone, but as it is today it's literally not feasible to even find the problems that need to be solved without real users actually jumping on the system.

This isn't a thing where people are forcing you to switch to something you don't want under threat of violence. This is a thing where the desktop developers desperately want to move forward on issues, they collectively picked a way forward, and there is simply no bandwidth (or really, outside of people complaining online, actual interest) for indefinitely maintaining their now-legacy X11-based desktop sessions.

It actually would have been totally possible, with sufficient engineering, to go and improve things to make it maintainable longer term and to try to backport some more improvements from the Wayland world into X11; it in fact seems like some interested people are experimenting with these ideas now. On the other hand though, at this point it's mostly wishful thinking, and the only surefire thing is that Wayland is shipping across all form factors. This is no longer speculative, at this point.

If you really want to run X.org specifically, that will probably continue to work for a decently long time, but you can't force the entire ecosystem to all also choose to continue to support X.org anymore than anyone can force you to switch to Wayland.

> I don't get why X11 shouldn't work forever.

Sure, assuming nothing else changes around it maybe. It'll work in the sense retrocomputing works.

However, the people who used to maintain Xorg are the ones who created Wayland. Xorg is largely neglected now, it still works mostly by luck.

I mean, because maintaining software is hard and costly, and a lot of this is developed by enthusiasts in their spare time?

Supporting legacy stuff is universally difficult, and makes it significantly harder to implement new things.

At the end of the day these developers are almost entirely volunteers. Codebases that are a mess, ie X11, are not enjoyable to work on and therefore convincing people to use their discretionary time on it is more difficult. If there wasn't Wayland the current set of developers on Wayland might not have been doing DE work at all.

Attracting new contributors is an existential problem in OSS.

I guess I don't quite understand what the selling point of a "desktop environment" is. I use a grab-bag of random software but generally don't bother with the KDE and GNOME-specific stuff.

It reminds me of things like the pack-in software you get with Windows. It's convenient because it all comes in one place and more or less works together, but not much of it is particularly best-of-breed.

I guess they've sucked a lot of air out of some niches though-- I suspect a lot of utilities for things like system configuration and file management have turned into parts of the desktop environment rather than standalone tools.

Yes, and besides, developers not having to support two servers, can focus on improving the DE where it actually matters. And with that, fixing issues, adding features becomes much faster.

I see it as a win for both developers and users in the long run.

Unfortunately no. The app takes automatic screenshots, and the developers are simply not interested to fix it.

How do I run a GUI application over ssh? This is what’s keeping me from switching.

I don’t use x2x but use xev and xdotool for automated regression testing of GUI tools.

I can’t find a low-effort, high-portability, low-menory way to do it with Wayland.

Local and also in CI pipelines.

Not the GP, but I recall the KeePass password manager using xdotool for its autotype feature. I struggled to get xdotool to work correctly back in 2014 on a Debian 7 personal computer. Not familiar with 'x2x' or 'xev'

We are under an article which tells you that you can have problems with Wayland and hiDPI screens. And for example I’m one of those people, who uses X11, because Wayland failed on many levels, like buggy video playing, crashing while changing monitors, or simply waking up my laptop with an external monitor, and I didn’t give more than a few days to fix these (cheers to the author to try this long), so I went back to X11. Which is still buggy, but on a “you can live with it level” buggy.

Btw, everybody who I know, and I too, changes the font size, and leaving the DPI scaling on 100%, or maybe 200% on X11.

I’ve been using X11 with high-DPI screens since 2013, but with integer scaling (200% or 300%), never fractional scaling.

Nobody's going to buy monitors where they need fractional scaling or multiple monitors with mixed DPI if they know it's broken.

There is no particular reason for this theory to be true. X supports high DPI screens well and has for ages.

But Snap and Flatpak have an advanced permission system, designed so you _can_ run random applications that you don't trust.