There's no obvious reason for an end used to switch to Wayland if there isn't any particular problems with their current setup, the main improvements come down to things X11 never supported particularly well and are unlikely to be used in many existing X11 setups. My big use case that Wayland enabled was being able to dock my laptop and seamlessly switching apps between displays with different scale factors. And as an added bonus my experience has been that apps, even proprietary ones like Zoom, tend to handle switching scale factors completely seamlessly. It's not that high of importance, but I do like polish like this. (Admittedly, this article outlines that foot on Sway apparently doesn't handle this as gracefully. The protocols enable seamless switching, but of course, they can't really guarantee apps will always render perfect frames.)

OTOH though, there are a lot of reasons for projects like GNOME and KDE to want to switch to Wayland, and especially why they want to drop X11 support versus maintaining it indefinitely forever, so it is beneficial if we at least can get a hold on what issues are still holding things up, which is why efforts like the ones outlined in this blog post are so important: it's hard to fix bugs that are never reported, and I especially doubt NVIDIA has been particularly going out of their way to find such bugs, so I can only imagine the reports are pretty crucial for them.

So basically, this year the "only downsides" users need to at least move into "no downsides". The impetus for Wayland itself is mainly hinged on features that simply can be done better in a compositor-centric world, but the impetus for the great switchover is trying to reduce the maintenance burden of having to maintain both X11 and Wayland support forever everywhere. (Support for X11 apps via XWayland, though, should basically exist forever, of course.)

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ryandrake 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

> having to maintain both X11 and Wayland support forever everywhere

I don't get why X11 shouldn't work forever. It works today. As you said, there's no obvious reason for an end user to switch to Wayland if there isn't any particular problems with their current setup. "Because it's modern" and "Because it's outdated" just aren't compelling reasons for anyone besides software developers. 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.

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hsbauauvhabzb 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

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

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mitchell209 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

That was the first thing I noticed when I recently went back to messing with Linux distros after 15 years. Booting into Ubuntu and having to use Gnome Tweaks or whatever it’s called for basic customizations was incredibly confusing considering Linux is touted as being the customizable and personal OS. I doubt I’ll ever give Gnome another try after that.

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newsoftheday 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Same, so I switched to KDE and life has been good.

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hsbauauvhabzb 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I get the impression gnome3 is loosely a clone of osx, I much prefer a windows-esc desktop. I’ve never tried kde but feel pretty at home with xfce or openbox. YMMV, but if you have the time they’re worth trying if you’re a recent windows refugee.

	▲	cosmic_cheese 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		GNOME is a much closer match for iPadOS than it is macOS due to how far it goes with minimalism, as well as how it approaches power user functionality (where macOS might move it off to the side or put it behind a toggle, GNOME just won’t implement it at all). Extensions can alleviate that to a limited extent, but there are several aspects that can’t be improved upon without forking.

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mindcrash 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Funny that you mention this, because broadly GNOME is seen as Linux' MacOS, and KDE as Linux' Android. At least in terms of user customization.

	▲	adastra22 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Last time I ran Linux as a daily driver, it was the opposite. Maybe my graybeard is showing.

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jchw 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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yencabulator 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> 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.

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simonask 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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zamalek 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

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guywithahat 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This was my motivation for switching too; better screen size management. Things don't scale weirdly when I plug a 4k laptop into a 1080p monitor. Otherwise I'm not sure I'd advise people switch

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4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

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