Right, the name or any kind of lineage does not matter, Wayland is the X11 successor because it is the current seriously developed and improved open display protocol. Nothing about Wayland stole from X11, has any less legitimacy to be the post-X11 protocol than something called X12, or prevents anybody else from improving X11 or from working on an alternative they call X12 or anything else.
I don't know why people get so hung up about this. People including its creators may have been over-optimistic about Wayland, but it was never going to be a case of a weekend hacking binge producing something useful out of the gate (X11 had that distinction because it was entering a very small and very green field). X11 has been used for so long because it is very well supported, robust, and has been extended and improved for decades and most of the remaining problems it has are very hard to solve. And that's exactly why we also didn't see something called X12 happen overnight either.
The fact that Wayland has been created and worked on and blessed by a number of X11 alumni did lend it a good amount of credence early on, and one might say gives it the right to be spiritual successor to X11. But really if you censor the names and look at the practical reality rather than sentimentality, Wayland creators and developers have been going down the long difficult road of coming up with something better and nobody else did, so that is really why it is the next X11. Progress may seem slow but it does not stop. Features continue to be added, implementations continue to improve, support continues to expand and its takeover seems almost inevitable at this point.
Someone might mention "network transparency" at this point. As far as I've seen from the outside looking in that was never the fundamental requirement of the protocol as far as I can tell. Non-transparent protocol like DRI were never not considered to be X11 by the X11 architects and developers who wrote and merged them, showing they have always been quite willing to step out of rigid dogma and embrace practical application. The original X announcement never said the project was a network transparent window system, it said it was a good-but-not-perfect window system and if a good windows system today does not require network transparent protocol (because users don't care as much as they did back then or because networking can be achieved at other layers) then there is no reason it couldn't be X12. The X12 page linked here enumerates some other X11 features that could be dropped too, I've never seen a reasonable argument for why a network transparent protocol is the be-all and end-all of X.
Good point. And for those who need to connect over the network there are now FOSS implementations of RDP, for example. (And VNC, but the performance there is probably not so good.) Then there’s also proprietary solutions such as BeyondTrust and NoMachine.
Yeah, I know RDP was developed in Redmond but from my layman’s perspective, it’s one of the best protocols for accessing a graphical desktop environment over a network. If you worry about the security, just tunnel via WireGuard.
> I don't know why people get so hung up about this.
People get hung up on this because they believe that free software somehow entitles them to dictate that others perform infinite labour on whatever schedule, projects, or features that they deem fit, irrespective of whether the people they are dictating to want to, think that it's a good idea, or whatever.
That's quite a stretch, Wayland and X (any X, 11 or hypothetical 12) are so vastly different that calling Wayland "the new X" is like calling Quartz "X for macOS".
It's not as far fetched as you'd think. My understanding is that Wayland is a result of X11 developers going together to design a new protocol based on the thoughts and ideas they've had for an "X12" throughout the decades.
Wayland doesn't inherit any architecture from X. XWayland is just a display server hosted by Wayland same as Exceed or Xorg on MS Windows. This is why X will never die since it can always be run on top of other graphical systems.
100% of the developers who know anything about how graphics works under Linux are focusing on Wayland. Development on Xorg is moribund, with only Xwayland getting significant attention.
Hint: X was optimized for 1980s graphics, which was 90% simple blits, line draws, and fills mediated by the CPU perhaps with special fixed-function accelerators for those operations.
In 2023, graphics is done with the GPU -- period. You post draw commands, geometry, and textures to the GPU via shared memory and let it do the work. Programmable shaders open up vast amounts of capability that X11's graphics primitives just don't get you.
So you may be right that Wayland isn't good at what X11 is useful for. But nobody's doing what X11 is useful for today. What people are actually doing, Wayland is excellent at. You will be running a Wayland desktop soon, because toolkit maintainers and distro packagers will simply drop support for X. The Gtk maintainers are already talking about dropping support for X in Gtk+5.
Sure but GTK and the gnome world is highly politicized by RedHat. KDE and Qt are much further away from cutting X11 off. I see the case for Wayland but similar to X11 it is already showing its age in poorly conceived design decisions. Desktop sharing for example should be a first class citizen in 2023.
Xorg is maintained... by Red Hat. As steponlego pointed out, they're already binning up chunks of the code base, but that's just preparing for when they shut the lights off entirely. As soon as Red Hat says "Shop's closed, boys, we won't be updating this code anymore" KDE and Qt will happily cut out their X support. Especially since Qt has for years been targeting mobile phones, car displays, and embedded applications as its business model -- markets where Wayland is at its greatest strength.
Yeah I know RedHat 'maintains' X11, this is part of the politicizing they do. Embrace, extinguish, they just forgot the extend part :)
RedHat and their business focus is a lot of what is wrong with Linux for users today. We don't make money for RedHat so their priorities aren't with us.
I'm hoping someone will still take it over for when happens. RedHat doesn't own X11. Wayland has its uses but there's a lot of niche and legacy usecases what will still need X11.
Probably your best hope is OpenBSD's Xenocara project, a fork of Xorg. If Xorg bitrots away and Red Hat won't touch it, some OpenBSD madlads are likely to step up... at least until Wayland gets running well on OpenBSD. :)
It doesn’t matter to me if the X.org developers have decided not to do their jobs, which is maintaining X.org. This isn’t proof that X.org is bad, it just shows that giggers who really work for big tech firms shouldn’t also be trusted to maintain Free software.
I’ve noticed them slowly trying to ruin X.org for a couple years now, deprecating drivers for no reason whatsoever, etc.
Network transparency doesn't offer any tangible benefits for a lot of apps and desktop environments because they are drawn with bitmaps and textures rather than vectors.
This topic has been done to death for the past decade. VNC and RDP won. X11 was a razor edge case and nothing more.
Yet network transparency was the whole point of (and whole reason for the complex byzantine architecture of) X11. So you have to pay the full expensive complexity and asynchronous distributed api tax, and you still have to reimplement half-assed virtual desktop network transparency at another layer.
X11 just had a different usecase. It was not meant for internet but for many terminals on the local network. Hence the proto design which didn't consider latency a potential problem.
ssh -X is still easier and lighter weight that running a VNC server on any machine I need to run a GUI though.
Incidentally at $CURRENT_JOB this happens very often: when WFH, I RDP to a windows machine, form which I VNC to a unix xvnc box form which I ssh -x to my actual dev box. It is amazing that it works at all and it is quite usable!
