I am not finding a lack of choice. I can use wayland, or x.org, and switch from one to the other with a reboot.
I suspect x.org will go away ONLY if or when wayland has so matured and gotten so interesting that the x.org guys run over and start developing in wayland space.
Until that time developers form each teach and learn form developers on the other and both improve. Claiming one has to "win" over another is misunderstanding the entire nature of the community. It is not a competition, we all win or we all lose.

I mean, to be fair, basically the x.org guys already HAVE run over and started developing Wayland. Or at least most of them. Xorg hasn't had actual feature development in several years now, everything is bugfix and security patches.
That said, no, x.org won't disappear for a long time. Simply put, until Wayland can be as functional as X.org is, you won't see most distro's switch to it as the default. And it's made large strides, but it's still a fair ways from being as functional a X.org still. And even after switching, it'll still be available for most likely a couple more years. So yeah, many years until X.org is actually gone.

I've seen the article about GTK5 and linux being wayland only (few posts back), and wanted to comment on that though as well. IMO, and this is just that, my opinion, if when GTK5 is released, if Wayland still hasn't managed to be mature enough to have replaced X.org as the default in all distro's, then I would consider the Wayland project to be a massive failure. It SHOULD have achieved the level of usability by then to be the defacto default graphics server for linux. It has a far superior conceptual design, and far more secure, as well.

I'll try to relocate the YouTube video of a symposium that occurred possibly in Australia roughly 10 years ago in which a Wayland dev spoke outlining the progress of Wayland. He said it was an agonizingly slow job for similar reasons to the difficulties of parallel microkernel development ( do this, that breaks... fix that, something else breaks), and adding "It's really hard!" Obviously, since that was nearly a decade ago, his assessment was quite accurate.

I have Xubuntu 22.04 to which I've added Sway. I can switch by just logging out from one and logging into the other (with `ly` as the login manager).

Since my usage is relatively simple, I'm on Sway nearly all the time.

At the same time it is important to note: Wayland has advanced a LOT in ten years!

As an end user, I really don't care what is 'underneath' my DE with the caveat it has to work (of course). No axe to grind. KDE for awhile had problems with Wayland and I remember switching to xorg. Don't recall ever switching back to Wayland. Upgraded from KUbuntu 20.04 to 22.04 LTS and haven't payed attention to which sub system it is using as it has been working just fine.

From https://wiki.ubuntu.com/JammyJellyfi...Notes/Kubuntu:
IIRC, unlike Ubuntu, Kubuntu has never been Wayland by default. It's been making it available as an option for testing ...

I dare you!
 

Sounds like old, out-dated xorg... :rolleyes:


Why not switch as described above? If you have the time, it could provide some useful feedback for us all.

Or you may find the axe! :D

Indeed! That wasn't meant to be a complaint or denigration. I'm GLAD they are talking the time to do it right. It's a HUGE undertaking. IBM bought Redhat for $34,000,000,000.00 USD. I'm betting at least 30% of that was for GUI.

Xorg is very old. Really old.

Since Xorg development is seeing Xorg as very old, they need a replacement. No one care about Xorg there in dev.
They moved on. As they did, you should move on too to Wayland. Basically, in Linux, you have no choice. You still can run an outdated linux distro, in 4-7 years.

Only BSD, Windows*, Apple, will keep Xorg/X11 for some time.
NetBSD has Xorg X11R7.

(Special tool, on top of ms windob).

X originated in 1984. Xwindows is arguably quite old. The entire code base was re-implemented in 1988, so that is the oldest running code I can find (and that code does not live in X.Org!). X.Org and that code stream began in 1999 and I do not believe any code older than about 2000 remains (all having been modified or rewritten at some point) although I may have missed something or misunderstood release notes.

The foundation X.Org released the first rewrite based upon modularized code (the current form) in 2005. Arguably then the x.org system is no more than 17 years old. In reality it has been partially refactored for efficiency twice since then THAT I KNOW OF, reducing size in memory, gaining in performance, and expanding compatibility and automation!

If being that old were a major problem then we would have discarded Linux long since. The reality is that good software is rewritten and renewed and does not age linearly. Linux is forever young and changing, and X has been for nearly all of its existence. The structure and concept of Wayland lends itself to a different kind of maintenance going forward, with better compatibility with new technology, but it is unclear if that advantage will result in other X being obsoleted. What is certain is that it has not yet had that effect, and it is too soon to predict with accuracy.

My advise is as it has always been: play with both. We have the best toys in history, and we do not have to choose among them. Some of us REALLY crazy old farts will even play with alternate or older X servers, and be perfectly happy with all of them where they continue to serve.
.

I follow. Indeed.

The only advantage of Wayland is that the Xorg developers can continue their developments on a new source code. They think that Xorg is old, and this is the major issue. Xorg is old, and it was time to replace it.

New tech. will be implemented on Wayland, and certainly NOT ON XORG/X11.

So... conclusion:
In 4-6 years around, you will be forced to move to Wayland to use modern PCs.

- Edit about old toys -
Hey, does current Linux kernel support old intel i386 / i486?
- Answer no longer, unfortunately.
- Reason: Business/Money/Cost

Old toys... Anyhow, time to move to Wayland.

Just to make the point, I am not forced to use ANY X server to use modern machines NOW. My servers are not running X. I can run desktop without X, although that may get more tricky. "Forced" may not be quite the right word.

Moreover, given the nature of this community, as soon as you "force" everyone to go one way, some of this community WILL step up and code or support an alternative. This is just they way we are. Trying to get us all in one line is like herding carts. Cats with several flavors of tricky sense of humor and way too creative! Examples abound!

To avoid X11 or a graphical environment is likely not possible at full scale.

How do you then do online shopping? Check the web?

With Links on framebuffer?

http://links.twibright.com/download/links-2.20.2.tar.gz

Links doesn't do javascript. It did when it first came out. I believe that was the main reason it was forked from lynx. But maintaining it became too tricky so they dropped it. And a lot of sites won't work without JS.