However the messaging that the general public get is that"wayland color management is complete" while in reality it is only half done for us professionals.
I reiterate my opinion again, HDR was all that mattered for the devs from the beginning. Who knows how long it will take to get color profiling and verification
Yeah, itâs rather sad. I can still install the X11 packages for Atomic Fedora, but who knows for how long thatâll work without problems.
Your choice seems to be becoming more limited rather quickly. According to this article, while one will be able to run X11 applications on Fedora 43, it will be over a Wayland only Gnome
Maybe Red Hat could instead increase funding for Wayland development before discontinuing the packages. Whilst we have a real catch 22 problem here and app devs need to be forced to support Wayland, this will just result in them losing a part of their user base. Maybe with proper funding developments could take 6 months to 1 year instead of 5+ yearsâŚ
Fedora has multiple spins. I, for example, always install additionally XFCE which uses X11. And then I can switch between Wayland/X11 (Gnome) or X11 (XFCE). Hopefully when X11 is gone from Gnome it still will be available via XFCE.
XFCE is working hard to make it wayland only too. so is KDE.
and living on wayland works just fine. there is no need to hang on to X11 so much.
Wait, this 826 post thread was a mistake? 
Is it still not the case that we canât profile our monitors under Wayland?
this was a very productive thread that actually got us color management for wayland. and your behavior in this thread and others today is kinda toxic.
Suddenly, the dust-up becomes more than just forum wars for me. sigh
You mentioned that there is not much need to hang on to x11. Does that mean that the monitor calibration issue is fixed (or sufficiently in progress)? I am really out of the loop on all this.
people are working on those things yes.
Here is to hoping it gets resolved before I have to make hard choices then.
But people are not working on profiling. Best Iâve seen is that Pekka Paalanen said he might write a protocol for calibration in the future and he acknowledges the current implementation isnât good enough for artists.
This largely depends on what you do. In the audio/music domain, using Wayland is counter-productive. Very few plugin frameworks support Wayland. In fact, I canât think of any. Try using generic host-generated UI for a virtual synth with 200+ parameters, and youâll have a much better idea.
Programs like FreeCAD donât really work on Wayland either. No doubt, this will change over time. Until then, Iâll hang on to X11, thank you very much.
I use bitwig and so far all plugins work fine with xwayland, including windows plugins using yabridge. Do you have examples of plugins not working so that I can give them a test?
⌠so they donât actually work in wayland? I think that was the point. Its nice theyâve sort of built an escape hatch, but claiming things âjust work on waylandâ then saying âwell xwaylandâ sort of misses the point, no?
Not really as there is no performance or feature (in this case) impact. They work, they just donât work(the display side only) natively. Just like windows games donât work natively on linux and yet they âworkâ under wine or proton. Should we tell the millions of steam deck users their games are not working because they are not running natively? I feel like this is grasping at straws. The software world is full of layers of abstraction or compatibility to get things running one way or another.
Edit: do note that xwayland is automatic, there is absolutely no configuration or user actions needed for it to be used. Itâs completely transparent.
Edit2: You also cannot instantly port every application to a new paradigm like that. Some plugins have extremely old builds and probably will never see native wayland graphics. If you want other features of wayland, you will probably need to use xwayland for one software or another for the next decade.
Ardour 8.12, latest Surge XT, Wayland on Fedora 42.
Create a track with Surge XT. Try to open the pluginâs window. Nothing, Ardourâs UI gets blocked. Then the right-click menu in Surge XT shows up. Then, after some ferocious clicking, Surge XTâs UI finally renders. Then, if, god forbid, you close and reopen Surgeâs window again, you have to deal with the same again. That would be at the top of my list of issues.
All the issues with Ardour and plugins âmagicallyâ disappeared once I switched back to X11. GNOME removing support for X11 means I will have to eventually stop using GNOME, which has been my DE choice of 25 years. And since other DEs are moving in that direction as well, maybe itâs time for me to embrace the forbidden fruit (and deal with a different set of issues).
But also note that, if X ceases to exist, there will be nothing for xwayland to work with. So, applications will either have to work well with pure Wayland, or they wonât work at all.
2025-05-23 19-59-10.mkv (3.8 MB)
I gave it a test and it works on KDE Wayland. But I do remember having that specific problem in Ardour last year when I was testing it before buying bitwig. I use Arch so hopefully itâs something that has gotten updated in the meanwhile and now works but hasnât reached Fedora yet. Could also be a Gnome wayland issue.
I agree that DEâs shouldnât discontinue the X11 session just like that as long as users still have real use cases that are not working in wayland.
But X11 is not ceasing to exist, only the desktop environment sessions. I am sure people will still be using it in 20 years 
After all the X.Org Foundation is also involved in the development of Wayland and I am sure they donât want to leave hundreds of applications stranded like that.