Wayland is great and ready for (idk) 95% of users/use-cases.
There is a long tail of more-or-less critical stuff that depend on X11 and do not have working Wayland substitutes. While the tail has been shrinking for every year, it will be decades if ever until all can be realistically migrated. Consider the Lindy Effect and that some of these systems have been running for >10y already. Consider shared but secured environments at universities and research institutes. Consider obscure hardware incompatibilities and hardware-specifix performance issues which might never be fixed.
On the software side, acessibility aside, there are a lot of VNC and other remote-X setups out there with no viable replacement in sight (yet).
Alsa, pulseaudio, pipewire and jack can all coexist and so can display servers.
I understand GNOME and RedHat will do things their way. I understand distro and GUI framework maintainers wanting to reduce their load. I understand people who like Wayland, want it to succeed, and want to evangelize. I do not appreciate when it turns into tribalism, forcing of monoculture and insisting "X11 is deprecated".
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OP is from 2023 but as they note in their update, the situation is fundamentally not that different 2y later. Are maintainers and decision-makers really sincerely imagining that a supposed deprecation and removal of X11 can be forced onto the wider community over a couple of years from now?
superkuh · 5m ago
You talk about wayland as if it were one thing. But the wayland protocol is intentionally minimal. Each wayland compositor picks and chooses between different third party libs to support various features. So you never know if something will actually work on the wayland compositor you use. If you stick within your ecosystem, yes, but it's not unified like X11 linux is. It's very fragmented and your personal experience definitely doesn't say anything about other people's experience. Unlike with X11 where everyone uses the same thing.
For example, mouse and keyboard support and libei, libinput, or nothing (looking at you, weston). You never know what you're going to get and so applications that need to do basic keyboard/mouse things have to guess. It doesn't work all the time. In X11 it does.
Another example, accessibility features. The only wayland compositor that supports screen reading is GNOME's. They invented two new protocols, incompatible with all existing linux accessibility libraries. Only GNOME's wayland compositor and userspace applications use them.
So, in summary: your experience can't be extrapolated with wayland because there is no single wayland.
shmerl · 37s ago
It makes sense for stuff like accessibility to be part of the protocol.
There is a long tail of more-or-less critical stuff that depend on X11 and do not have working Wayland substitutes. While the tail has been shrinking for every year, it will be decades if ever until all can be realistically migrated. Consider the Lindy Effect and that some of these systems have been running for >10y already. Consider shared but secured environments at universities and research institutes. Consider obscure hardware incompatibilities and hardware-specifix performance issues which might never be fixed.
On the software side, acessibility aside, there are a lot of VNC and other remote-X setups out there with no viable replacement in sight (yet).
Alsa, pulseaudio, pipewire and jack can all coexist and so can display servers.
I understand GNOME and RedHat will do things their way. I understand distro and GUI framework maintainers wanting to reduce their load. I understand people who like Wayland, want it to succeed, and want to evangelize. I do not appreciate when it turns into tribalism, forcing of monoculture and insisting "X11 is deprecated".
---
OP is from 2023 but as they note in their update, the situation is fundamentally not that different 2y later. Are maintainers and decision-makers really sincerely imagining that a supposed deprecation and removal of X11 can be forced onto the wider community over a couple of years from now?
For example, mouse and keyboard support and libei, libinput, or nothing (looking at you, weston). You never know what you're going to get and so applications that need to do basic keyboard/mouse things have to guess. It doesn't work all the time. In X11 it does.
Another example, accessibility features. The only wayland compositor that supports screen reading is GNOME's. They invented two new protocols, incompatible with all existing linux accessibility libraries. Only GNOME's wayland compositor and userspace applications use them.
So, in summary: your experience can't be extrapolated with wayland because there is no single wayland.