Well known KDE developer Nate Graham is out with a blog post today outlining his latest Wayland thoughts, how X11 is a bad platform, and the recent topic of “Wayland breaking everything” isn’t really accurate.
“In this context, “breaking everything” is another perhaps less accurate way of saying “not everything is fully ported yet”. This porting is necessary because Wayland is designed to target a future that doesn’t include 100% drop-in compatibility with everything we did in the past, because it turns out that a lot of those things don’t make sense anymore. For the ones that do, a compatibility layer (XWayland) is already provided, and anything needing deeper system integration generally has a path forward (Portals and Wayland protocols and PipeWire) or is being actively worked on. It’s all happening!”
Nobody’s getting rid of X support. Not for several years.
Go tell Fedora that then lol. They want it gone to the point where Nate is telling users who want X to stay away on that post. Xwayland I believe will still be around though.
They’ll recant after their usage drops to a fraction. This move makes zero sense no matter how you look at it. As a generalist distro it’s too early to drop X.
If they want to become a niche distro whose only claim to fame is “we only pack Plasma 6”, big whoop, like there’s any shortage of that. What kind of distro defines itself by what it does not offer? And is that the kind of distro that Fedora aims to be?
Hell, GNOME has been wayland-default since twenty-fucking-sixteen if I remember my dates right. You’re overestimating the value X.Org provides.
This is the kind of distro Fedora has always been, both for better and for worse.
I don’t see this decision driving users away from Fedora any more than other decisions they’ve made in the past and will surely make in the future.