Comment by dylan-m | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dylan-m | Hacker News Reader

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> things which were working are suddenly broken

…

> Wayland is 15 years old.

So, it's not very sudden, then, is it?

So much of what people see as wrong in Wayland is about slow-moving applications and driver vendors refusing to adapt; waiting until their software is actually broken before they do anything. We've had more than a decade knowing full well what is coming. I sympathize that an application you rely on is caught up in that. Nobody wanted that situation. But X11 has had a pretty good life. And unless Talon on Linux is suddenly abandoned, I really doubt those developers are going to keep hitching their wagon to X11. At some point, (probably soon now that distributors are getting serious about it), they will take a look at what's new and they will make it work with Wayland.

With that said, I don't think you have to worry for a while. I doubt apps are ever going to stop working in X11 altogether. You might end up with a different desktop at some point if you're using GNOME or KDE, but that's all.

To an end user it could easily be sudden; you install a new version of Fedora and oops your screenshot tool no longer works, and better hope the only accessibility tools you needed were built in to GNOME.

> And unless Talon on Linux is suddenly abandoned, I really doubt those developers are going to keep hitching their wagon to X11. At some point, (probably soon now that distributors are getting serious about it), they will take a look at what's new and they will make it work with Wayland.

That's assuming that they can make it work with Wayland, which appears rather unlikely since the API surface doesn't exist. As you say, Wayland has had more than a decade but most of that time was spent loudly proclaiming that such functionality was a security problem and had no legitimate usecases so here we are.

> With that said, I don't think you have to worry for a while. I doubt apps are ever going to stop working in X11 altogether.

I certainly hope I can keep using X until Wayland actually reaches feature parity, but I'm already seeing pressure on both sides; waydroid is the first[0] application to outright refuse to support X, while Asahi Linux was loudest about not wanting to support Xorg but they're hardly the only ones. I suspect I'm going to end up with a 3-layer system comprised of cage[1] running xwayland running my real graphical environment with some applications in their own little cage windows. It's a little annoying but as a break-glass option it seems to function with only slightly more papercuts than X11 programs on Xorg:\

[0] Well, first that I've noticed at least.

[1] https://www.hjdskes.nl/projects/cage/

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