I don't think they are planning to do this; they are at least maintaining support for whatever MacOS (Metal?) and the Nintendo Switch use in addition to Wayland, which suggests to me they are dropping X11 as a hard dependency not as a usable backend.

It's time to make WaylandX, for running Wayland applications on X. Well, I happily use Wayland so I won't use it, but maybe you would.

That's already a thing, called XWayland, and it's the only way to make Wayland actually usable on Linux desktop.

XWayland is the exact opposite of what GP is asking for.

Looks like your wish has been granted. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40175731

I don't see anything to indicate that they're dropping X11 support? It sounds like they're dropping dependencies that would require X11 to be installed.

No, it doesn’t sound like they’ll be dropping X11 support any time soon. At least, not before the 2.0 release. It is nevertheless one of those worrisome things.

They’re dropping a hard dependency on X11 and instead using a library that interfaces with X11 or Wayland for it.

It still runs fine on X11.

There is a comment in the forum discussion by the author of the Linux section that X11 support is not going away, simply because SDL supports it.

https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?p=609071#p609071

You could use Proton to play the Windows version in x11 just fine, I'm pretty sure.

Just run the last version that supports X11?

Same here.

Apparently I didn't word that section very well, because many people took away this impression. My apologies.

Factorio will continue to support X11 for as long as SDL does, in other words, essentially forever. The only change here is that X11 is no longer required for the game to launch at all. SDL will load whichever video driver is available at runtime, or if you have both, you can choose which one to use in the graphics settings.

Excellent news, thank you for the clarification and all of your work!