this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2025
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And X11 will never be ready for most modern users. They have different goals. But that's the thing with open source. As long as someone somewhere needs it. Even if 90% of us don't need X11 for legacy software. It will still be here.
I most agree with you. The Xlibre project may become popular and do something to make X11 popular again. Who knows?
And I just argued on a forum yesterday that Xorg will keep working for 20 years at least. But a lot of smart people claimed I was wrong about it being able to support new hardware. But I think Xorg is likely to build and run for decades yet.
But the X server implementation that is likely to last the longest is Xwayland. And with Wayback, the “stand-alone” X server that many distros will bundle will be Xwayland running on Wayback (Wayland) and not Xorg.
As I have said elsewhere though, few people will be daily driving an X server (Xorg, Xlibre, or Wayback) simply because many desirable applications will require Wayland.
And what will be the x11 only applications that will make people run an X server to use them? Xeyes? Xfig?
I think even running Xwayland will be pretty niche. X11 is going to be a software preservation project. You can boot up OpenLook, CDE, Trinity, or i3 for the memories (and then go back to Wayland for the apps you need).
I could be wrong. Time will tell. Within a couple of years after the release of GTK5 at the latest, we will know. By 2030 maybe.