Re: The state of X in 2026

On 23/7/26 01:57, Alexander Orlovsky via openSUSE Users wrote:
> Simon ,
> 
> thanks for your input, i think there is no perfect solution at the 
> moment, if community decide to go with Wayland , i will follow and i 
> will be working on making sure that TDE gets into Wayland natively.
> This would be of-course a lot of work, i will have dedicated hardware to 
> have the best possible to enduser experience.
> There is a lot of work and people should do that.

Yeah I don't think there is a cheap easy solution, For the next 2-3 
years I think you'll just be able to pick display server based off 
whatever is supported best by your desktop after that it might get harder.

Based off looking at what other desktops had to do and my own research 
for a similar project its probably 2-3 years of work for 2-3 people. 
Your life might be easier because you would likely be able to borrow and 
adapt the app library stuff from Qt. Even LXQt is just using kwin for 
wayland support. It is a significant rewrite of the window manager to 
support wayland.

I ended up coming to the conclusion that it was easier to add the few 
features I was missing from the DE I used for 15 years to KDE then it 
was to port the whole thing to wayland. I was then lucky enough that 
someone else implemented the main feature I needed at the same time. So 
now i'm eventually just left with theming. Long term i'd like to port 
some of the TDE themes to KDE 6 anyway.

Porting the TDE app suite on the other hand is probably far simpler 
process of porting the contents of the Qt6 Wayland platform plugin back 
into TQt.

> 
> Am 22.07.2026 um 04:57 schrieb Simon Lees:
>> 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
SUSE Linux                           Adelaide Australia, UTC+10:30
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