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

[Steve Litt]

Rich Pieri said on Sun, 18 Jan 2026 09:45:54 -0500

>On Sun, 18 Jan 2026 00:11:22 -0500
>Steve Litt <slitt at troubleshooters.com> wrote:
>
>> Void Linux has X11 and MATE, it doesn't dance to Debian's tune, and I
>> haven't heard any rumors of Void eliminating X11 or MATE from their
>> distro.  
>
>It's not Debian. It's KDE and GNOME (and I hear XFCE as well) intending
>to remove X11 support, very likely prompted by what IBM (dba Red Hat)
>did last year.

:-)

All email clients suck. All browsers suck. But here's the thing: The
majority of window managers and desktop environments are great. It
would be trivial to switch to a different, high quality user interface.
This can be done when KDE and GNOME start trying to boss their
constituency, instead of letting their constituency boss them.

I'm a huge fan of Openbox, or Openbox with LXDE. In the event that LXDE
finally does what it's promised for 10 years and ceases to exist, LXQt
is almost as good, which means it's excellent. For those wanting a
small footprint, there's IceWM, although the IceWM wm/de has real
problems with their menu system. But it's trivial and better to use
Suckless Tools' dmenu as your menu system. For those willing to tweak,
fvwm can be made into whatever user interface the user wants.

I'll probably use X11 till the bitter end, but by the time X11 goes to
heaven, I think there will be enough good Wayland compositors that the
switch will be relatively painless. Not painless now, just painless by
that time.

SteveT

Steve Litt 

http://444domains.com