Wayland might be the future (though I'm personally a bit skeptical). It is already the default on many distros. At the same time, X11 is very unlikely to just stop working or disappear, since there's really no good reason to kill it.
Stuff might eventually decide to render directly to Wayland only APIs or something.
I'm actually not a very big Wayland fan, I prefer the single implementation model rather than all the different implementations of Wayland.
But I'd rather have just only the Wayland fragmentation mess, instead of the Wayland mess plus also X11, so I'm glad Pi OS and Ubuntu(Right now the only distros I pay much attention to) have switched.
But, Wayland is far and away the best and most serious attempt to replace X, ever, in thirty years and more.
If there is gonna be an X11 replacement, ever, Wayland is the most credible attempt in decades
If it’s gonna mostly displace x11… man, it’s sure taking its time.
It’s older than xfree86 was when the xorg fork occurred.
Yes, and I'm fine waiting 5, 10, or 20 years. It's natural that such major shifts take a long time in an already mature ecosystem.
The major bit will be when and if toolkits like GTK, Qt, SDL, etc. drop X11 support and applications update to X11-less versions. AFAIK there are no plans for that and is still years away (there was some talk about GTK 5, but nothing firm and no one even started work on GTK 5).
I also think Wayland will eventually replace all of X11, in the same way as IPv6 will eventually replace all of IPv4.
As XWayland. XWayland will be the new X.
Some qualified language in all of the above, because hard to predict the future etc. etc.
Or, if necessary, with just a tiny bit of Wayland; XWayland rootful mode lets you run a full X stack with Wayland as little more than a shim to the graphics driver. As a worked example, Puppy Linux implemented this: https://github.com/puppylinux-woof-CE/woof-CE/pull/2265
People that prefer X11 is not what I'd optimize for. To me X11 is deprecated, unmaintain{ed,able}. It became too much of a stumbling block for Linux and other opensource OSes. It's painful, but we have to move on. Wayland is not perfect but it seems to be doing the job lately. In two year --my prediction-- it will be more stable than X11 in all aspects.
I wouldn't either, but that doesn't mean it won't work.
both Wayland and X11 are fairly stable AFAIK. For my part I'd rather not rewrite all my X11-specific stuff. For some I probably need to have direct compositor support as you can do less with scripts, so that's not so easy. I'll probably have to spend the effort at some point, but until I don't have to: why bother?