[Discuss] Future of X11 (was Trying to connect to internet in Debian)

[richard.pieri at gmail.com (Rich Pieri)]

On Sun, 18 Jan 2026 07:06:48 -0800
Kent Borg <kentborg at borg.org> wrote:

> My understanding is Wayland is the alternative that is taking over
> the world, and it seems to exist to make GPUs happier and explicitly
> is opposed to running over a network.
> 
> Correct?

Kind of but not exactly. To oversimplify, X11 is a sophisticated
network communications protocol with a display server grafted to it.
Wayland is a display server without the network protocol, using IPC
instead, ostensibly making it leaner, faster, and more secure.

In practice, well, Jordan Sissel already wrote that essay:
https://www.semicomplete.com/blog/xdotool-and-exploring-wayland-fragmentation/

which for me was quite helpful finding a few missing links in my KDE on
Wayland experience. One is kdotool which does things wmctrl does for me
with X11. The other is a KWin script which handles most of my window
positioning needs. I only more recently learned of waypipe which I
mentioned in my reply to Derek.

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