Comment by shevy-java
4 hours ago
Many theories. A simple one is that corporations wanted more control. See systemd's rise - not related to wayland as such, but to corporate-driven influence.
I am not saying all of the design is corporate-controlled. But a ton of propaganda is associated with how wayland was advertised, until some folks had enough with it and decided to stop buying the "xorg is dead" routine these corporations push on:
https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver
It will be interesting to see what will happen though. The GTK devs said they will help kill off xorg with GTK5. KDE also wants to kill xserver. It would be kind of cool if that would not happen - imagine if a non-corporate controlled ecosystem would emerge. Not likely to happen, but it would be a lot of fun. As well as more real competition with wayland. Wayland broke its biggest promise: that it is a viable alternative to the xorg-server. I don't want to lose any feature, so it is a drawback for me.
Xorg is not dead. It is maintained by one of those corporations you are talking about. And since 2/3 of the Xorg code is in Xwayland, they will be maintaining it for a very long time to come. It is not going anywhere.
But already a majority of Linux desktop users have stopped using it. And it will be 90% in the next 2-3 years. GNOME, KDE, Budgie, and COSMIC are effectively Wayland only now and XFCE and Cinnamon will be Wayland native before then.
The GTK5 devs do not have to “kill off” X11. But it is not really worth their time either.
Keep using Xorg, or Xlibre, or Phoenix. It should keep working.
But don’t mind if the rest of us keep building on Wayland.
By the way, I use Niri, a very cool and absolutely non-corporate Wayland compositor. Not sure how that fits into your narrative.