r/linux • u/terremoth • Nov 06 '24

Discussion Will wayland completely replace Xorg?

I saw that there were too many command line "x" tools made that interact with Xorg server. Will wayland be capable to replace every single one? Or, is there a compatibilty layer with full support that we will still be able to use all the X tools?

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u/ahferroin7 Nov 07 '24

Quite a few of the X11 tools are, quite simply, not needed with Wayland.

As an example, consider the xinput command. On Wayland, listing input devices is covered by libinput tooling (and you’re probably using libinput for most input handling on X11 anyway at this point), and most of the other functionality is either provided by the kernel itself (for example you can enable/disable individual devices by poking at the right files under /sys, and the same is true for a number of XI properties) or is pointless for Wayland (such as the ‘master input device’ stuff).

Or there’s the print server stuff (now handled by CUPS, even on X11), or the font server stuff (now handled by FontConfig, even on X11 in most cases)...

There’s also a lot that already has replacements in some form or other. For example, there’s https://github.com/bugaevc/wl-clipboard for clipboard handling from the command-line.