X11 Will Completely End Without Your Help

I know this is going to sound crazy to some people. I don't hate X11. I don't know where they got that idea from. I know there are people out there that are talking about "Oh, well, I'm making changes to kill X11. I have killed X11 myself." That's not me. I never said that. I talk about the reality that most people at this point are making use of Wayland. You can complain about that. You can say, "Well, I'm not." Which is not a rebuttal to the fact that most people are using it. But, you can certainly say it. All decent metrics at this point point to the fact that most people are using Wayland. There being one exception, that being Linux hardware.org, which has the issue of HW probe, which is used to collect the data, primarily being pre-installed on distros that only have X11, which >> [gasps] >> certainly doesn't bias the data whatsoever. Absolutely not. At this point, most people are not concerned with the protocols that are still in the works. Protocols that haven't even begun being developed yet. Yes, this is absolutely a blocker for some people, but most people can kind of just live with it. Somehow, some people forget that I have made a bunch of videos hyper critical of the way that Wayland protocols repo is being handled, so much so that some people in that repo are not exactly a fan of mine. But, at the end of the day, your PC You can do what you want with it. However, you don't get to turn developers into your slave to continue maintaining the thing that you want that they don't want to deal with. If you want to pay some money, you want to do it like that, hey, that's fine. If you want to fork things yourself, you can do that as well, but if you're not going to, there's not much else you can do. But, whilst I do talk a lot about Wayland, I do promote Wayland, there are legitimate reasons why someone might want to keep using X11. So, let's talk about those today. One thing I see very often is old Nvidia hardware. If you're on something relatively modern-ish, it works totally fine, assuming you can afford them, and also assuming you're actually running recent drivers. Some distros ship really old out-of-date garbage, and you're going to have a really old out-of-date garbage experience. Nvidia on Wayland is a very recently good thing. If you're not on new drivers, it's going to suck. Also, things are continually getting better and better and better, so you always want to be on the latest driver branch. They have thankfully decided to put at least some level of work in ironing out the stupid driver issues that frankly never should have been driver issues in the first place. Are there still issues? Yes, absolutely, and those should be reported. But, if you're on, say, a 10 series Nvidia GPU, this doesn't support the latest drivers, maybe you'll have some luck with the open-source drivers, but anything that old or older is likely going to be bad forever. Anything newer than that, at least right now, I believe is supported by the latest drivers, and you should, assuming you have them installed, have a good experience, at least a much better experience than you might remember from three or four years ago. Also, there is old hardware in general. Whilst there have been strives to make Wayland desktops more performant, if you're comfortable on a 15-year-old laptop or worse, you're not able to actually go and replace it, it doesn't matter if it's Nvidia, AMD, Intel integrated graphics, it's not going to be a great experience. Wayland desktops tend to rely very heavily on GPU acceleration with APIs that your hardware probably never supported in the first place. So, in a lot of cases you might be falling back to software rendering and in cases where you're not, you're going to be having a partial GPU rendered experience, whereas on modern hardware it will perform considerably better. And I know this isn't nice to hear, but sometimes this just is the way it is. There is not infinite time, there is not infinite resources, and if you're a developer, there is a set of things you are going to prioritize, and that set of things is going to likely be firstly where you are, where your friends are, and where most of your users happen to be. And the older your hardware gets, the more you start to fall outside of that general expected supported range. That doesn't mean it's not going to work. Maybe the Nvidia stuff Maybe the Nvidia stuff, but if you want to run modern KDE on a 15-year-old laptop, modern genome on a 15-year-old laptop, you can do it. You're just going to have a worse experience than if you were running the X11 version. Xorg has the advantage of being software that was made for hardware 20-plus years ago and designed around that hardware. When you have modern hardware that is faster, what tends to happen, and this isn't just a Wayland thing, a Linux thing, this is a software thing in general, optimizations that were common back then become less common as there is more of a optimization around developer time, building things in a more readable way, building things in a more maintainable way, software tends to get slower over time. Again, there have been general improvements. It's not like things are just always getting worse, but there is a general trend in that direction. If you're willing to try out a more window manager-like experience on Wayland, something like a Hyperland or a Nery or a River, something like that is going to be a lighter, nicer experience. But some hardware frankly you're only going to get a good experience running something like a Puppy Linux with XOrg with some 90s window manager. On the topic of old hardware, I can talk all day about how Wayland does HDR. You can have mixed variable refresh rate, so one monitor that has it, another monitor that doesn't. I can talk about better display scaling. I can talk about better multi-monitor support. I can talk about all of these different things. But if you're happy on a laptop with a 1280 x 720 display, no external monitor, or even 640 x 480. If you're happy on this, you don't use a modern desktop, you don't care about modern desktops, you don't use any sandboxes, flat packs, anything like that, you don't have a system that is secure anyway, you've been on Slackware since 1995 and you never plan to change that. Yeah, it's a niche group of people, but these are people who would literally not benefit whatsoever from anything that Wayland is doing. And you know what? More power to you. Keep doing what you're doing. I think that's awesome. Whilst many workflows on Wayland do have new approaches, new software you have to learn and use, there are some cases where a missing protocol or lack of implementation of that protocol does break a workflow. Yes, we do have the global shortcuts portal and it is implemented in the major desktops now. But we are still waiting on apps that need it to actually implement it. I know Discord should have it soon. OBS, I don't even know if they're working on it. As for other things, who even knows? And yes, we can do screen capture on Wayland. Anyone who tells you you can't is lying to your face. But every time I open up OBS, I do get spammed with permission prompts and there's not really a good pre-auth system for this. I can't just say I want to always capture the window titled Firefox. This is something that should be there and I know KD devs are working on this. So, hopefully KD might just be the best Wayland experience you can get soon. It's pretty close to it already. But right now, especially if you have a lot of these windows, it can be a problem. Your monitors typically get remembered, but if you unplug your monitors, well, now they're forgotten. So, that's great. And yes, the zones protocol was merged to properly support multi-window applications and have those windows spawn where they're supposed to spawn. But nothing yet implements the protocol. I think there might be some in-progress work in the desktops, but no applications making use of it. I have worked around some of these problems like using my Stream Deck here and this interacts with OBS using OBS WebSockets. But I don't want to have to do this and some applications just don't have a workaround. Nowadays on Wayland, we have some really good window manager options. We have Hyprland. We have my go-to choice right now, which is Neary, a scrolling window manager. KD is doing absolutely fantastic work as a desktop. Cosmic is coming along. It needs some work, but it's definitely coming along. But there's no real replacement for some of the options out there. There's no real good option for DWM users. Yeah, DWL does exist, but it's not the same. Awesome WM, yeah, Mango WC does exist, but it is not the same. Let alone some of the weird experimental stuff out there, which someone out there is probably using, even though it is not exactly a common option. There are things like 1WM, which is a window manager written in 20 lines of code. It does basically nothing, but it is technically a window manager. There are things like Metisse. This is a 2 and 1/2 D window manager, which is intended to be like used on a touchscreen, and you can manipulate the screen in 3D. It's weird. Also, there is SCWM, which is kind of like taking the idea of window rules to their logical conclusion. This was last updated 26 years ago, right? So, probably people are not using this, but there are plenty of X11 options out there where they're just weird, right? And there's just no good replacement. Or, if you're a Cinnamon user, you're going to keep using Cinnamon until Cinnamon has Wayland ready, because you're happy on Cinnamon. Why would you move? Some desktops out there aren't even trying to move. And in those cases, if you're happy to continue using it, hey, keep using it. Enjoy your life there. Whilst most X11 software's going to run totally fine through XWayland, there are these weird random applications which don't. Usually, they're things based on older toolkits, weird legacy games, some custom toolkit that was doing some weird hacks that Xorg barely supported anyway. And if those applications don't have a replacement, or for whatever reason you desperately want to keep using it. There can be these situations where even though it might technically work, the experience is so degraded that there's just no point. I know there's some random old games out there which behave weirdly, but again, most things are fine. And the only way to really know is actually go and try it out on your system. You can't even really just look it up because sometimes well, if it's a really old application, maybe no one knows. Secondly, it might be a problem on someone else's system but not on yours or on yours but not on someone else's system. Sometimes people say that Wayland has no accessibility. This is not true. There are explicitly accessibility devs working in both KDE and GNOME. Things do work. Things are getting better. Ask anybody who needs a screen reader or any of these other tools who are on Wayland, and they will tell you that things work. Depending on your specific needs, right? This is the core part. Accessibility isn't just like a one-size-fits-all. For some people, it might be a screen reader. For some people, it might be really high levels of zoom. For others, it might be certain color palettes. Maybe you need a high contrast theme. Maybe you need keyboard control. All of these different things, right? There's not just one-size-fits-all, and some of these things, frankly, do not work. Things right now are in constant flux. Things are changing. Things are improving, but sometimes there are also regressions. But this is the core part. If this is not just a personal preference, like oh, I don't like light themes, I only like dark themes, it's something I just prefer. But this is a hard requirement for you being able to use the system. You cannot use a computer if it doesn't have a working screen reader. Change isn't necessarily good. Regressions are even worse. Whilst X11 is not perfect, whilst X11 might have some ancient bugs that nobody's ever bothered to fix and nobody's ever going to fix, it works the way you expect and will likely continue to do so. And for some, that's more important than a new feature. That's more important than fixing bugs. Knowing that every day you boot your system, every time you update, things are going to continue working the same way they always have, that might be the most important thing for you. But maybe there's just no deeper reason. Maybe you just like X11. You don't really care about your desktop, you swap desktops every so often, but you just like X11. It's your PC. And if that's what you want to do, hey, do with it as you will. But if that is you, you can't just sit around and complain that distros it Well, you can sit around and complain if you really want to, but it's not going to change anything. You can't just sit around and complain that distros and desktops are moving away from X11. Now, thankfully, some people out there are doing more than just complaining. There are new X11 servers being developed as Xorg is basically being treated as maintenance mode, and that repo is effectively unusable at this point because the maintainers of the repo. There are projects out there like Phoenix, which is very far from done and very far from daily drivable. There are projects like Way Server. This a very recent one that very heavily uses Claude, only has one maintainer, also uses Codex. This one is somewhat functional. You're going to have some issues with it. I know people have tried running like Cinema and an XOC with it and it works. But, again, depending on the hardware you have, you're very well going to run into problems. Then you have projects like Xlibre, the one who did it before most of the others. Remember, Xorg was also a fork from X3D 6 cuz of the whole drama there as well. Xlibre has now been around for about a year. Frankly, I didn't think this project would stick around. I actually thought this would be dead pretty quickly. To my surprise, it is seeming like more than just a protest fork now. It seems like this is actually a project that wants to be something useful. This also is getting some level of adoption. I don't really care about third-party packages. Anyone can adopt things in third-party packages and so can random little distros that three people use. However, over in Slackware land, they are now experimenting with Xlibre packages. This doesn't mean that Xlibre is going to become like the main thing on that distro, but it is something they're at least considering. And I'm curious to see where that goes. But, the X11 server is just one part of the equation. If you want to keep X11 around, you also need the X11 environment. Complaining to GNOME and KDE devs that you love X11 is not going to change anything. They are not shifting back. They are not going to change their mind. This is what they are doing in the projects. If you want to pay them a large sum of money and say, "Hey, here's $100,000. Here's $400,000. Keep X11 around, keep maintaining it. Maybe some people will consider it. But, if you're not going to do that, and you probably don't have the money for it, I don't either, step up and maintain the projects that you want to see around. Fork the desktops. Get involved in something like Sonic DE. Get involved in the X11 window managers. Build a developer community around X11. Show that you can actually do this, that there are people that want this, and it won't shift the course of everything. But, the nice thing about Linux is you don't have to follow what every mainstream user, every mainstream distro is using. Devuan exists. They do things outside of systemd. There are distros that can function outside of this ecosystem. They don't just sit around and say, "Oh, oh, woe is me. Systemd is bad." Now, there's definitely a lot of that, but there are also people there that actually go and make things that require systemd not require systemd anymore. When people say that Linux is about choice, it is about choice. It's about the choice to go and do what you want. But, to do that, you actually need to go and do something. So, let me know your thoughts down below. Do you use Wayland? Do you use X11? And if you do use X11, why do you still do so? I would love to know. So, go like the video, go subscribe, and if you really like the video and you want to become one of these amazing people over here, check out the Patreon subscribe sellout bear pay linked in the description down below. That's going to be it for me, and X going to give it to you. >> Oh. Oh. Oh.