Re: The state of X in 2026

Hi,

On 21/7/26 20:33, Alexander Orlovsky via openSUSE Users wrote:
> Am 21.07.2026 um 03:10 schrieb David C Rankin:
>> This is quite an odd question for an openSUSE mailing list, but here 
>> are a couple of thoughts:
>>
>> A look at the activity in X11 and forks currently
>> https://go.reg.cx/tdml/4nHZ
>>
>> Your next decision is a rather simple one. Are you only going to 
>> support Plasma, Gnome and Xfce (when wayland port finished), or are 
>> you going to support the other 40+ desktops for Linux that do not 
>> support Wayland at all?
>>
>> If you could only pick one, I'd pick X11, and leave the collusion 
>> between freedesktop and the other three desktops to run its course. 
>> Also, if you want to restore a desktop session the same way you left 
>> it when it was shutdown, you may be very disappointed with the pile of 
>> windows all dumped in the middle of the screen wayland leaves you... 
>> it has no ability to remember window sizes or locations.
>>
>>
> David, this is interesting, i think in my case i need to support 
> Wayland, because i have commercial clients which want to switch from 
> other distros it is their wish , which i need to satisfy.
> I think what is fascinating about Wayland is theirs software 
> architecture , xorg and xlibre they have a lot of legacy code , xorg 
> wont be developer actively , xlibre has good dev community but they need 
> to prove themselves in enterprise environment , that can take up to 1 to 
> 3 years.

I have some experience here, I have been openSUSE's Enlightenment 
Desktop maintainer for a number of years. From an architectural 
perspective wayland is certainly significantly better but also has some 
intentional restrictions that have taken more time to get around.

I have recently moved some of my systems from Enlightenment/X11 to 
KDE/Wayland. In my opinion its only really been the last 6 months where 
Wayland on KDE has been completely ready with things like Screen 
sharing, Deskflow/Synergy/Barrier and other harder to implement features 
have been completed. Having not used it my understanding is Gnome is 
probably 6-12 months ahead of that.

> Since i run smaller distro my plan to support only windowmanagers TDE 
> and XFCE but with ability to extend and support future tech and 
> currently my polls show that people prefer to use Wayland, that of 
> course can change , still this why i posted my question here, i need 
> feedback , i need to know what people experienced so far and what 
> challenges are existing.

I think that even once xfce has basic wayland support it would still be 
2-3 years before it supports all the portals / features well reliably.

In the meantime KDE is now at the point where they are removing X11 
support from there desktop session, Gnome has already done that. For now 
KDE atleast is keeping X11 support in there apps although i'm guessing 
this will be much less tested so at some point I suspect some apps will 
stop working well in X11.

At the same time there are a series of smaller wayland only compositors 
based of the wlroots libraries which might be an easier option to 
maintain then a full Gnome or KDE stack.

I imagine that most apps just using common toolkits will continue 
working with X11 desktops for quite some time.

> Some people even claimed that there issues with screen recording in 
> Wayland , but for that i need verifiable conformations.

There is now a full Portal / Protocol for allowing this. For Wayland 
compositors and apps that support this Portal it works fine, I've used 
KDE with obs-studio, Chrome for web calls and slack all of which handle 
it fine. Maybe some smaller things don't support this yet and they may 
have images.

> I believe there  is no silver bullet, the beauty of running src based 
> customized distro , that i am not limited by packages dependencies and i 
> can just to whatever the requirements are, anyway please do vote on pools
> that would not only help me it would give all broader picture:
> https://x.com/OrlConsultGbR/status/2078537990708560017
> https://mastodon.social/@orlovskyconsultinggbr/116942299603168304
> https://github.com/orlovskyjavaprofi/t2customlinux/discussions/31

Done

-- 
Simon Lees (Simotek)                            http://simotek.net

Emergency Update Team                           keybase.io/simotek
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