> The question is "when?". Wayland is 15 years old, it already had a lot of time to "get better". So today, in most cases, I'd say X11 is still the way to go, it just works better.
If you run more than one monitor with different DPI, Wayland is the only choice. If you want to do HDR, Wayland will be the only choice.
> When Wayland will get better and apps start supporting Wayland more than they support X11, it will be the time to switch, but at the glacial pace Wayland advances, chances are that your current system will be obsolete when it will happen.
Toolkit developers are already considering removing their X11 code paths. All of the effort is going into Wayland. The best time to switch was a few years ago. The second best time to switch is now.
I tried Wayland (Fedora 39) on two screens and the experience was so terrible and full of bugs I gave up after less than a day. New windows open at random locations and screens no matter what's focused, UI scaling of a window is sometimes wrong for its screen, at least once an hour the screens just go blank for a couple seconds etc.
For me it's definitely not usable yet, let alone the "only choice"
> All of the effort is going into Wayland
Yes, because it's still work in progress. And at some point in the future that effort will have paid off, but that's not now and definitely not a few years ago.
What I care about are the existing features. Bugs don't look any better in HDR.
I'm sure it'll all be fixed sooner or later but until then it's a downgrade for me, and I just don't get this "best time to switch" sentiment about an unfinished component that a user shouldn't even need to know about.
> And because the X11 maintainers decided that Wayland is the way forward and X11 will simply not get new display features like HDR.
Is Wayland a racket? Barely maintain the previous code instead of making clear that others should take it over because you are insterested in something else, then force everyone into your new incomplete code base, and probably bill for the reimplementation of basic capabilities, piece by piece.
OTOH, not everyone involved with X11 thinks it has no future. Keith Packard posted ideas [0] about how to improve it further.
What? It's been known that the X maintainers had moved on to devote almost all their efforts to Wayland for years now. And yes, part of the Wayland strategy has been -- much like with systemd -- to drag the community, kicking and screaming if need be, into modernity.
Anybody who wants to maintain Xorg is free to step up.
Is that article correct, that mixed DPI on Wayland works by just rendering everything to a virtual screen whose resolution corresponds to the maximum DPI of any physical screen, and then downscaling all the other screens?
> If you run more than one monitor with different DPI, Wayland is the only choice.
I run multiple monitors with differing physical DPIs on X11. Yeah, that means they have differing resolutions. It doesn’t bother me, and I can do all the things that I want, unlike if I were using Wayland.
Maybe someday Wayland will be a replacement for X11, but that day is not today.
If you run more than one monitor with different DPI, Wayland is the only choice. If you want to do HDR, Wayland will be the only choice.
> When Wayland will get better and apps start supporting Wayland more than they support X11, it will be the time to switch, but at the glacial pace Wayland advances, chances are that your current system will be obsolete when it will happen.
Toolkit developers are already considering removing their X11 code paths. All of the effort is going into Wayland. The best time to switch was a few years ago. The second best time to switch is now.