Today I talk about the future of Xorg and Wayland.
Xorg will live on as a compatibility layer called Xwayland. Beyond that, no. Everyone dealing X on Bare Metal is either running away from the project or getting paid very well to continue maintaining that mess.
The best part of Xwayland’s design is how it can go away when it isn’t needed anymore.
You aren’t stuck dragging Xwayland along behind you forever - when you don’t have any X apps, you don’t need the compatibility layer.
If only firefox would render to the framebuffer, I’d need neither X nor Wayland.
What’s the reason why it doesn’t?
Pretty sure I’m the only one who’d appreciate it.
I can’t remember what broke, but I’m on archlinux with KDE, which gives you a choice of X or Wayland. I used X for ages, decided to try out Wayland, and immediately something didn’t work. It might have been discord screen share but I can’t remember tbh. That’s why I’m still using X.
I’ve been able to screenshare with flatpak Discord on KDE Wayland, without sound (same as X). 8 months ago a Discord dev said “Linux users will see audio sharing supported when we upgrade webrtc and are able to find the time to hook it up to pipewire”. You might be thinking of PTT not working when the Discord window isn’t focused, some workarounds exist for that.
I hadn’t had internet in months and I had installed pipewire before they rolled out the video system fully in Sway and Pipewire itself.
Rebooting and having functional video calls through discord and screen recording with no needed configuration is amazing.
I committed to moving over about 6 months back but screen sharing is the one thing i’ve still not been able to conquer. I get around it by having a laptop I can share from but it can be quite annoying.
If you’re on a distro with pipewire as a new default, it is definitely worth installing because many DE’s now use pipewire for screen recording on Wayland, and since that feature rolled out I’ve never had a major issue with it. (Besides firefox not selecting windows properly)
The nice thing with Xorg is that it just works until it doesn’t. And the bad thing about Wayland is, that the tooling outside of heavywheights Gnome & KDE is only about 90% there yet.
I don’t think it will die for quite some time, but Linux distributions will eventually all switch to Wayland as support grows.
Xorg will survive for a long time. X is still part of many BSD flavors, other UNIX variants, and academic institutions still use it. The project will continue to be maintained for years as some die-hard contributors stay aboard.
ssh -Y is so good though
Probably not until nvidia step up their game and fix myriads of wayland issues in their driver. Also, plenty of people use BSD and wayland support there is severely lacking right now. I think they only got it works ~1-2 years ago on FreeBSD? I’m not even sure if wayland actually run on OpenBSD right now or if there is any effort to make it run on OpenBSD.
I think it’ll live on for a while, but eventually nobody will use it, so it’ll be just “hey remember when we used to use x?” and lol about it. Wayland is the future, so as more distros go Wayland by default, it’ll slowly switch over.
