X11 is basically already unsupported, pretty much all the developers moved to Wayland. Even the BSD and everybody else relaying on X11 has noticed that and they know they can't maintain X11 by themselves.
It will 100x not go away, there is no way. Literally all big stakeholder both open source (Gnome, KDE, Fedora and so on) and companies like Valve are all in on Wayland.
The reality is, X11 is a complete train wreck and always was. Its just that for a long time people invest in it and made it usable. The same is true for Wayland, things have been improving rapidly in Wayland and it many ways its already better.
The train wreck is being cleared and the trains are running again, literally nobody will go back to horses.
When software works it just works, and if you don't change it it continues to work. But if you had an issue, its unlikely that it would be fixed or that new features you want would arrive. Unsupported is fine for much software on the world.
Hardware is evolving, and while the core feature set works, it wont keep up. If you personally don't care about those things, that fine, and its a feature for you. But eternal stagnation isn't actually a realistic option.
I mean yeah. Wayland started with a feature aversion from its initial developer, then continued with feature avoidance by committee, the committee in turn required by the "everyone gets to implement the X server equivalent" design and some of the trouble coming particularly from "everyone" including Gnome. Some of these missing features are really not considered optional at this point by many desktop Linux users. But there aren't many left now. I'll probably make the switch in 0.5-3 years ;)
What is there in Wayland is really quite clean though, so it will... EVENTUALLY... be pretty good.
>X11 is basically already unsupported, pretty much all the developers moved to Wayland
In my view, Wayland is basically unsupported. GNOME and KDE support it. XFCE, Lxqt, Mate, and Cinnamon don't. It's been over 10 years. You could make a whole DE from scratch in this time.
For most of those years, fundamental parts of the desktop experience were just not possible on Wayland. Even today, there are some current Xfce features that are just not implementable on Wayland.
> You could make a whole DE from scratch in this time.
Depends on your goals and team size. Part of me would love to rewrite Xfce in Rust (yes, I'm one of those people), using a different, lighter, actually-well supported toolkit (unlike GTK3), but with the team we have, that would be another two decades.
Consider that Xfce 4 is a little over 20 years old at this point. It's taken that long to build it to what it is. Starting over wouldn't take any less time to get there with the people and resources we have.
"Unsupported" as in there are no maintainers, there's no roadmap, there's no future. X11 is a dead end. All the people who were working on it would rather work on Wayland instead. It's taking a while for the DEs, etc. to catch up, but even the slow pace of improvement Wayland is exhibiting is much better than "dead in the water" which is where X11 is.
You maybe don't want to hear it, but the overwhelming majority of people are on Gnome or KDE. You might as well claim X11 is not supported because Hyperland, Cosmic and many others aren't supported on X11.
Unsupported in the context of software doesn't really mean what you took it as anyway.
I don't agree, because experimental support means it's being worked on. Legacy support means the opposite - it's not being worked on and never will be worked on.
So for now it happens to work. But none of those DEs are contributing to the X.org implementation of X11, right? So it will slowly break down over time. That's the current status of X11, it's on hospice.
>Wayland has a myriad of unresolved problems regarding surface suspension blocking presentation and the FIFO (vsync) implementation being fundamentally broken leading to reduced GPU-bound performance.
To which someone replies:
>If we do this, we are basically accepting these issues are unfixable for the next ten years (SDL4). Having this as the default in SDL3 (which isn't being used yet!) is important for signaling to other stakeholders that we actually do need to get solutions in place for detected issues.
To which the committer says:
>SDL is not your tool for "signaling to stakeholders" about what is important. It's an actual library used by real developers and users!
Likewise. My PC is not a tool for signaling library/DE developers that there are more and more people using Wayland now and that they can finally stop maintaining X11 legacy code. I use my PC for real things. I couldn't care less if things are running on X11 or Wayland so long as they work.
If Wayland isn't working with my use case, I just won't use it. I won't switch to Wayland juts to beta test it, and then spend years begging people who know how to hack Linux to implement the features I need that I had on X11.
If Linux drops X11, and Wayland still doesn't work. I won't use Wayland. I'll use Windows.
> they can finally stop maintaining X11 legacy code
They already have, this is what I'm trying to tell you. All the X.org maintainers are on Wayland, and none of the DEs are contributed to X.org. It's on hospice. It happens to work just because, but that won't be the case forever.
It's fine if you currently like X and use X. I myself use X on Debian Stable.
But the reality is that it's dead technology, and eventually it won't work right.
Wayland is constantly being improved by many, many different parties. Valve, KDE, Gnome, freedesktop, Redhat... they're all constantly making new protocols and implementing them to solve problems.
They haven't stopped maintaining it because the programs still run on X11.
GIMP supports PNG. That doesn't mean GIMP contributes code to libpng, or libpng needs updates. It just needs to have code to make it work with PNG.
X11 will stop being supported when the developers literally remove the code to make their programs run on X11 from their projects. Until then, it's still supported.
Why would I need updates when things already work in the current version?
All X11 programs already run under Wayland. There will always be applications that are X11-only and they will always work. This is a fake problem, IMO.
> Why would I need updates when things already work in the current version?
I guess you don't, but then again, I don't see you running Windows 95. I think this is maybe something you like to believe, but in practice people do want new things and new software.
It will 100x not go away, there is no way. Literally all big stakeholder both open source (Gnome, KDE, Fedora and so on) and companies like Valve are all in on Wayland.
The reality is, X11 is a complete train wreck and always was. Its just that for a long time people invest in it and made it usable. The same is true for Wayland, things have been improving rapidly in Wayland and it many ways its already better.
The train wreck is being cleared and the trains are running again, literally nobody will go back to horses.