this post was submitted on 23 Apr 2025
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Everyone seems to poke on the vim vs emacs/gnome vs kde/systemd vs everyone else but it seems to me the most toxic feud in the foss world has been x11 vs wayland. People had throwed shit at it because of their own specific issues and its "slow" development pace without realizing it's a titanic endeavour and the hate and toxicity brings absolutely nothing positive to the table nor the development of Linux & FOSS in general.
I think most realize that it is a titanic endeavour and know that it might take years until their issues are solved, so they get angry when people are like "works for me, so everyone should use it now". I've tried Wayland twice, each time it was deemed "ready" by someone, and each time something obvious was broken. x.org works and does what I want, so I'll continue using that.
I don't think it's quite a titanic enough endeavour to put slow in quotes. It's been in development for 16 years and only got a stable support for screenshots a few months ago. Does drag and drop work yet?
IMO at this point it is reasonable to say that the idea of having a shared protocol and then making every desktop environment implement the entire display server was not a good one. The Linux community does not have enough manpower to make that work well.
Wayland replaced a shitty protocol with equally shitty one. So it's still shit, but different.
There is a difference. vi vs emacs is about preference as is GNOME vs KDE. All can exist side by side and the fans can duke it out.
Wayland is replacing Xorg. It is not a choice between the two. It is a choice between the future or the past. That is a more bitter pill for those that choose the past.
X11 the protocol will be around for quite a while. Xwayland has no end date in sight. But the Xorg display server is going to be parked on the history shelf next to SystemV UNIX. You can still run UnixWare today but UnixWare vs Fedora (or RHEL) is not a real fight.
Wayland vs Xorg is not a fight either. Wayland is not just winning. It has already won.
Outside of Xwayland, nobody is going to invest in Xorg going forward. Most Linux desktop users have already moved to Wayland. It will be almost 100% by the end of the year. BSD and other POSIX operating systems will follow.
The BSD folks say that they will maintain Xorg themselves into the future. We will see. My guess is that it will increasingly be an option for legacy hardware only.