GNOME 50 is confirmed to be Wayland-only, with X11 dropped entirely. This isn’t something Zorin can really influence, it’s a GNOME decision and Ubuntu 26.04 LTS will use GNOME 50.
Given that Wayland still has many rough edges and problems even after ~15 years (screen sharing, remote desktop, screen casting, input issues, application support problems, NVIDIA, niche workflows; more: Think twice about Wayland. It breaks everything! · GitHub), what should Zorin OS do in this situation?
Should Zorin consider switching to a different desktop environment?
Zorin Lite used XFCE, but it’s not going to be continued. Why? Without X11 (without having to resort to use XWayland), are we likely to see more bugs once everything is forced onto Wayland?
A wise man said:
Wayland came to solve all the problems I never had and break most of softwares I use at the cost of less performance than X11, awesome.
Do you expect things to stabilize after X11 is gone, or will users just end up dealing with new Wayland-only problems?
When you look at the history of decision making in GnuLinux over the last fifteen years made by the powers that be, it is no surprise that they think harebrained impulsive ideas are gold.
I'm just glad I will still have mine for years to come, while GnuLinux flounders.
I will see in 2029 what will be my choice (maybe sooner if gnome continue to ignore bugs created in 46 and still there with 49.3, for nautilus for example)
There would be the Option that the Zorin Dev's try to built X in the Desktop by thereown. But this would be a lot of Work I guess.
I would think the Forcing leads to fixing the Stuff - maybe naive. But when only this is available, it have to be done. And there would be the Point that the Implementation of Wayland in Gnome 50 will be on a different Level that on Gnome 46 now.
I don't think that would even be possible.
The term "without X11" would mean there is no Xorg backend you can choose in the login manager, the GNOME default apps only support Wayland and the older apps work only through Xwayland.
At least for the former two, I don't think there is a proper way to handle it without completely forking GNOME.
I know the state of things, for me personally Xorg is a preferred display server, but GNOME on Wayland is almost a trouble-free experience, compared to other desktop environments at this point.
There is a noticeable push towards Wayland - all major DEs either are in a process of dropping X completely (GNOME, KDE) or are developing Wayland compatibility (Xfce, Cinnamon, LXQt). There are also Budgie and COSMIC, being entirely Wayland-driven desktops.
With all that considered, I guess 2030's might be the last decade we ever see Xorg support on all the major distros.
They are not removing Mutter in its entirety.
Rather, they have been hacking at it and trimming it.
This is not heresay - I have looked directly at the Mutter code.
They are "simplifying" Mutter in anticipation of Wayland fully taking up the tasks and slack.
We already see precocious fallout from these actions and I am also uncertain of how much chopping will affect XWayland...
(Just out of curiosity I decided to use an A.I. search as to whether MS has ever funded Wayland, they haven't but have been contributing to it in other ways. What is more disconcerting is that Collabora has been pushing Wayland too, the Enterprise arm/version of LibreOffice!):
" Microsoft has not directly funded the Wayland project as a whole. However, Microsoft has contributed to open-source components that are integral to Wayland-based systems, particularly in the context of WSL2 GUI support.
The company developed WSLg , a system that enables GUI applications from Linux (via WSL2) to run on Windows. WSLg is built on top of Weston , the reference Wayland compositor, and includes modifications to FreeRDP , PulseAudio , and other upstream projects. These contributions are made publicly through Microsoft’s mirror repositories, with the goal of eventually upstreaming changes to the original projects.
While Microsoft has not provided financial support to the broader Wayland project (led by volunteers and organizations like Red Hat, Intel, and Collabora), its engineering efforts have significantly advanced Wayland integration in Windows environments. This work reflects a strategic investment in enabling Linux GUI applications on Windows, rather than funding the Wayland protocol itself."
To me this is a clear indication that MS feels threatened by GNU/Linux. We can see where this is going. "Such a shame that GNU/Linux didn't make it to 2030. Don't worry people, you just need to come back to Windows, all your favourite GNU/Linux programs will now run as sandboxed apps on WSL3, so no need to leave Windows at all, you now have the (cough) best of both worlds."
I don't like wayland. People say it's for security etc but there should be options to let apps access some stuff by default.
I use Flameshot (let's you take screenshot and draw/highlight/write.. on it) but on wayland each time you want to take a screenshot by shortcut, you have to let app take a screenshot and then you can take it. It's crazy.
Also wayland reminds me of Snaps, AppImages and Flatpaks.
Most of the app developers say Flatpaks are amazing and easy to install on different envs. But when the app doesn't run, most of the time you go back to APT version.
Example:
A video player on flatpak (haruna) cannot access some ffmpeg features so I had to remove and install via apt.
A db viewer (dbeaver) installed with snap and cannot access to local mysql instances at /usr so again I needed to go back to apt.
I had many similar issues like this, I like flatpaks in general but on some cases they won't be enough.
I do expect that things will stablize with x11 gone, there are several possible outcomes though for this DIstro (Zorin_OS)
From most likely to least likely:
(X11 fully dropped, Gnome Only DE) -
I think this is most likely, if you are an X11 user you are just out of luck on Zorin.
(X11 session readded and manually maintained/backported to Gnome 50 DE)
Less likely based off the ammount of work/tooling done to Zorin this is a much larger undertaking.
(X11 Pheonix Session added and intergrated to GNOME, see above)
(Zorin changes Desktop Enviroment)
This is the least likely because plasma/budgie/gnome are all dropping X11 and XFCE probably would not be impossibly far behind.
I found Plasma Wayland really solid/my main issue with Wayland has been app compatibility/apps crashing to desktop although this is aledgedly due to a lack of
compatibility packages being included in Zorin OS.
My personal opinion is zorin will avoid this decision and buy time for it by sticking on a older LTS with a newer kernal applied, and wait to see how it pans out, before ultimately shipping Wayland only with Xwayland or some other compatibility package.
In terms of my preference because of this Wayland is still a bit wonky on my 2060 RTX outside of plasma so i am drawn to considering a distro for my gaming rig that has Plasma + Wayland or Budgie + Wayland/Cosmic
I currently have taken up solus on an additional old laptop and have even learned how to make packages for their repo's. (the only thing more i would want out of Zorin would be a bigger team (so updates are more frequent) and more transparency (we don't really know whats going on hence me making the Zorin Update Overview, we can only guess the direction and speculate)
My Surface would 100% stay zorin since it runs wayland + zorin fine
I agree Canonical (owner of Ubuntu) has become a company that works for Microsoft, rendering a complete switch to Linux unnecessary. They are killing the Linux Desktop with their own hands.
Slight correction. Linus Torvalds is very naïve to allow Microsoft to submit code to the Linux kernel. Apparently we have to thank MS for GNU/Linux being able to run Virtual Machines.
But on the negative, a few years ago pre-Covid, attending the local LUG (Linux User Group) one member told me that it says a lot when a German maintainer of the Linux kernel swore in English instead of his native German when he saw code submitted for USB drivers indicates how poor the code was. His (Linus') naïvety extends/ed to Google.