XFCE, Lxqt, Mate all have at least partial wayland support.
Cinnamon has experimental support.
So for now it happens to work. But none of those DEs are contributing to the X.org implementation of X11, right? So it will slowly break down over time. That's the current status of X11, it's on hospice.
The current status of Wayland is that it doesn't.
It's really that simple. I think this exchange can help you understand my position better: https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/pull/9345#issuecomment-201...
>Wayland has a myriad of unresolved problems regarding surface suspension blocking presentation and the FIFO (vsync) implementation being fundamentally broken leading to reduced GPU-bound performance.
To which someone replies:
>If we do this, we are basically accepting these issues are unfixable for the next ten years (SDL4). Having this as the default in SDL3 (which isn't being used yet!) is important for signaling to other stakeholders that we actually do need to get solutions in place for detected issues.
To which the committer says:
>SDL is not your tool for "signaling to stakeholders" about what is important. It's an actual library used by real developers and users!
Likewise. My PC is not a tool for signaling library/DE developers that there are more and more people using Wayland now and that they can finally stop maintaining X11 legacy code. I use my PC for real things. I couldn't care less if things are running on X11 or Wayland so long as they work.
If Wayland isn't working with my use case, I just won't use it. I won't switch to Wayland juts to beta test it, and then spend years begging people who know how to hack Linux to implement the features I need that I had on X11.
If Linux drops X11, and Wayland still doesn't work. I won't use Wayland. I'll use Windows.
They already have, this is what I'm trying to tell you. All the X.org maintainers are on Wayland, and none of the DEs are contributed to X.org. It's on hospice. It happens to work just because, but that won't be the case forever.
It's fine if you currently like X and use X. I myself use X on Debian Stable.
But the reality is that it's dead technology, and eventually it won't work right.
Wayland is constantly being improved by many, many different parties. Valve, KDE, Gnome, freedesktop, Redhat... they're all constantly making new protocols and implementing them to solve problems.
GIMP supports PNG. That doesn't mean GIMP contributes code to libpng, or libpng needs updates. It just needs to have code to make it work with PNG.
X11 will stop being supported when the developers literally remove the code to make their programs run on X11 from their projects. Until then, it's still supported.
Why would I need updates when things already work in the current version?
> Why would I need updates when things already work in the current version?
I guess you don't, but then again, I don't see you running Windows 95. I think this is maybe something you like to believe, but in practice people do want new things and new software.
For most of those years, fundamental parts of the desktop experience were just not possible on Wayland. Even today, there are some current Xfce features that are just not implementable on Wayland.
> You could make a whole DE from scratch in this time.
Depends on your goals and team size. Part of me would love to rewrite Xfce in Rust (yes, I'm one of those people), using a different, lighter, actually-well supported toolkit (unlike GTK3), but with the team we have, that would be another two decades.
Consider that Xfce 4 is a little over 20 years old at this point. It's taken that long to build it to what it is. Starting over wouldn't take any less time to get there with the people and resources we have.
What features are missing from Xfce perspective?
"Unsupported" as in there are no maintainers, there's no roadmap, there's no future. X11 is a dead end. All the people who were working on it would rather work on Wayland instead. It's taking a while for the DEs, etc. to catch up, but even the slow pace of improvement Wayland is exhibiting is much better than "dead in the water" which is where X11 is.
Unsupported in the context of software doesn't really mean what you took it as anyway.
In my view, Wayland is basically unsupported. GNOME and KDE support it. XFCE, Lxqt, Mate, and Cinnamon don't. It's been over 10 years. You could make a whole DE from scratch in this time.