Matthias Clasen, leader of the Fedora Desktop Team, member of the GNOME Release Team, and one of the active developers of GTK (responsible for 36.8% of changes in GTK 4), has started a discussion about the possibility of ending support for the X11 protocol in the next major branch GTK5 and only allowing GTK to work on Linux using the Wayland protocol.
In the note regarding the proposal to cease support for X11, it is stated that "X11 is not getting better, and Wayland is already widely available." It further explains that the GTK backend for X11 and code based on Xlib are stagnant and facing maintenance issues. It is indicated that for support for X11 to be maintained, someone would need to write and support the associated X11 code, but there are no enthusiasts, and existing GTK developers are mainly focused on supporting Wayland. Developers interested in working in environments based on the X11 protocol may take on the maintenance themselves and extend its support in GTK, but given current activity, the scenario that someone will take on the X11 backend maintenance is considered unlikely.
Currently, GTK is already positioning Wayland as the primary platform for developing functionality and APIs. Due to the lack of any activity in the development of the X11 protocol, leaving its support in GTK will cause the X11 backend to increasingly lag in terms of new functionality available to developers, or become a barrier to implementing new features in GTK.
Source: opennet.ru
