this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2025
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As typical, GNOME has a tendency to drop support to older software before the newer one is ready. I'm glad that I dumped it in 3.0 times.
For someone who has not used Gnome in 14+ years you sure seem to know a lot about it...
X11 has effectively already been deprecated for years, seeing little to no development on it. No one should be surprised.
And still, there are SEVERAL Long Term Support distros out there that will support X11 for the coming years. Please stop pretending that stuff will start breaking. It will not.
X11 is complete.
Wayland is incomplete, and is missing essential features like accessibility and automation (ydotool will never have half the features xdotool has).
X11 is "complete" in the sense that we have followed it to the end of the road. X11 has a series of well documented fundamental problems that does not make it suitable for a modern OS. I will not belabor them here (except to note that security in particulat in X11, is exceptionally weak for modern standars). These issues are unfixable because they are built into core assumptions and behaviours of all legacy apps.
At some point there has to be a switch. There simply is not manpower to maintain 2 separate windowing systems. I am sure we would all want there to be an army of devs working on these things on maintain the 2 stacks. But that is not the timeline we live in. The number of devs working on these things is very low.
Was it too early? I don't know. There will never be 1-1 feature parity with 30 years of legacy apps. I honestly believe that fixing things like a11y are gonna be much more tenable with only a single windowing system.