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Comment by el_memorioso | Hacker News Reader

I am a Kicad user, not just a random speculator. The problems are not solved by XWayland. For example, Kicad uses different windows to represent different views of the circuit and circuit board and warps the cursor according to the view you are looking at. XWayland doesn't solve this, because it only allows warping within a single window. I know there is new warping code coming out, but I don't know if it will ever get into the LTS OS we use at my work.

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The obvious right choice if you're on an LTS OS where Wayland isn't in a good enough shape is to continue using X11 sessions. Very few things are dropping support for X11 right now, and on an LTS OS you presumably would be insulated from that. Obviously you can't benefit from anything Wayland improves on, but I suspect that's not a huge problem.

I'd guess an LTS release x years from now would be a different story. Even next year possibly, based on the pace things are going lately.

> Obviously you can't benefit from anything Wayland improves on, but I suspect that's not a huge problem.

Indeed, that's not a problem at all, because there are zero such things I care about. The problem is that a lot of distros and DE's are dropping support for X even though Wayland still isn't viable at all for so many people, and LTS isn't forever.

You're always free to step up and support continued X development. Nobody else wants to, because the code is truly terrible, and that's been the main driver for distributions dropping support.

That seems like a solved problem though. LTS distros will drop X11 when the Wayland session is viable for most people, which is very nearly true, but ultimately not. When it does happen, it really shouldn't come as a sudden surprise.

> Very few things are dropping support for X11 right now

GNOME 49 will drop X11 sessions completely. That in turn means that the default editions of Ubuntu 25.10 and Fedora 43 drop X11 session support.

https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/12/ubuntu_2510_to_drop_x...

Arch will presumably pick up GNOME 49 as soon as it's released, and so GNOME on Arch will also drop X11 session support this (northern hemisphere) autumn.

I know that most Ubuntu users run LTS versions, but still, those are probably the 3 most widely-used Linux distros in the Western world, and as such, I think the statement that "very few" things is false where it applies to Linux distros.

When I said that, I meant applications and UI toolkits are not dropping X11 support. Non-LTS OSes will definitely be dropping X11 support pretty soon, since yes, KDE and GNOME are both throwing in the towel. To me the timeline seems about right for that too.

It's such an incredibly niche use case, but nevertheless, I will retract my statement.

99.99% of stuff should work under XWayland.

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