Without question, plasma is leading choice for Endeavourites, with GNOME and XFCE as the runner ups.
Fedora is planning to drop X11 installation from their workstation 41 release later this year, and with the release of plasma 6, a truly Wayland world is coming.
That being said, I’m (admittedly) not sure the path forward for other DEs, and notably the window managers. i3 without x11 isn’t even remotely feasible, is it just a slow death as it trickle down to the last remaining Debian LTS release?
XFCE, Cinnamon, budgie and coming cosmic are all working on Wayland stuff. Lxqt is ready to go I believe.
Anyone know about MATE, openbox, lxde? I mean x is in the name for lxde? Will it finally just be laid to rest?
What about dwm? i3? Bspwm? And many more?
I don’t really use many of these, so I was wondering for you folks out there who do, what’s the long term goals for these? Adapt? Retirement?
It’s very interesting to me this brave new world we find ourselves coming into.
Noted, I will make this correction. I thought I saw they were dropping it, I made the assumption that’s what they meant, but I guess since they have others like MATE and i3 they won’t be completely dropping support.
Btw, if you are willing to already remove the Xorg session from GNOME in Fedora, it is perfectly feasible.
Unlike how dependencies look like on Arch side where gdm and gnome shell have dependencies on some Xorg packages and therefore practically impossible to remove the Xorg session, on the Fedora side they seem to be rather uncoupled.
sway is near drop in for i3 , River basic replace bspwm for me if want use wayland . Hyprland can be KDE of wm’s or lite fast if keep simple . dwm i no sure ( no use in long time )
I believe they were also planning to remove Xorg from the official repos (moving it to COPR).
So while the package might still be available, it won’t be “supported”.
Not by dedicated fedora resources at least, it could still be “supported” by whoever chooses to maintain it in COPR.
That said, with a quick search I couldn’t find the specific thread where I remember having read that discussion, so I could be remembering wrong…
Edit: I found the relevant discussions/tickets I had read:
The conversation seems to have been argumentative and messy, but my understanding is, they concluded that separate packages that implement x11 support are still acceptable in the main repos (for the time being, F40 horizon).
Yes, you may be right.
As @dalto also mentioned, those packages may very well end up being maintained by others and not by Fedora itself. How and when this will happen seems to remain to be seen.
On the roadmap of Ubuntu MATE, Wayland support is mentioned; quote: Wayland is set to become the defacto next generation display server. While Xorg has some years of usefulness remaining, now is the time to start planning for how MATE Desktop, and therefore Ubuntu MATE, implement support for Wayland.
Although the future seems bleak, I do know that it is possible to use some x11 WM’s (and possibly DE’s but I do not know) via xwayland rootful mode. There is a video by Brodie Robertson showcasing AwesomeWM through this. Although I doubt that the average user will ever do it, it is nice to be able to do so.
By reading your post @fbodymechanic I immediately thought of Enlightenment but they seem to be OK for Wayland with minimal modifications (If I understand correctly) ;
Perhaps it’s just me, but I’ve grown so accustomed to using River and Hyprland running Wayland; that my old favorites like Herbstluftwm, Spectrwm, and Bspwm lack the appeal to want to stay within X11.
Although, some of the smaller, more obscure projects will probably cease to exist, some of the more popular ones like Awesome and I3 will still continue to have a user base, for those taking a wait and see approach as Wayland matures and finds wider adoption.
To me, things like Rust in the kernel, Wayland, systemd, and Pipewire all went through intense debate, and scrutiny on route to becoming linux standards. Whether you like them or not, they influenced, and shaped the direction of linux development moving forward.
i look at dwl little times ago. If i want use wayland River cover my need , sway is ok if you like i3. i will stay on bspwm ( it no fuss , fast + get the job done ) if time come i just switch to River …
If you wanna go to wayland and ur using one of those, just use sway or hyprland or one of a dozen other options.
If not, stay on the one you like, the only reason not to is that nobody’s working on X11; and yet somehow wayland is still lagging behind it to such an extent that there are still more reasons to use X11 than Wayland despite wayland having existed longer than X had when wayland was first created
The only legitimate reason I can think of to use wayland instead of X is better multi-monitor support. That’s it, that’s the whole list. And it only really applies if you have two monitors with vastly different resolutions, or different refresh rates.
User interface:
Raspberry Pi OS has a desktop environment,
PIXEL (short for Pi Improved Xwindows Environment, Lightweight),
based on LXDE,
Will Raspberry PI foundation find it necessary to develop PIXEL or LXDE for Wayland?
Is Raspberry Pi foundation back porting it’s improvements and fixes to LXDE?
I find it interesting watching the Wayland saga unfold. Time will tell.
