I'm afraid to open this can. Logically, it is not something that really scares me, but the topic can raise blisters among those who look to the future and those who prefer what is best known and stable. Therefore, I will wash my hands and just quote what other people say. On the one hand, those who are already thinking about Fedora 40, and on the other hand the KDE project that is behind Plasma, Kubuntu and KDE neon.
This news is intended to be a 2-in-1. The first of those two news is that Fedora 40 will completely abandon X11. Right now it is an option that coexists with Wayland, and in the KDE edition it is still what is used by default. But the future is different. It is its main edition (GNOME) that will bet everything on Wayland and will no longer allow you to log in, always by default, with X11. Fedora was the first to make the move from X11 to Wayland, and now it also intends to be the first to forget about X11.
Fedora 40 GNOME without X11
If we refer to Fedora as the entire project with its official flavors, X11 will continue to play a secondary role. The KDE edition Fedora 40 should offer the possibility of using X11, but the default session will be Wayland. They won't be the first this time, as Plasma 6 will use Wayland by default and at least KDE neon will implement it a couple of months before Fedora.
And speaking of KDE, last Sunday it was Nate Graham who said that "Why does Wayland exist?" ANDIn short, because X11 -what it is replacing- is dead«. He article gives details about how it all started and the direction it is going now. The author of pointieststick, among other things, says that if X11 is currently doing well it is because In recent years he has done nothing but apply patches, and that Wayland was born from an idea by the X developers (nothing to do with the new Twitter) who wanted to avoid repeating their own mistakes.
Problems… and also solutions
This part according to Graham, not everything sounds perfectly right in the use of Wayland, going so far as to say that "it sounds like it's disgusting» at a certain point. But he later says that there are solutions, and that the future looks better with Wayland than with X11. That its implementation is taking time more than with Systemd and PipeWire, but that is the way to go.
The problem is going to be, above all, third-party software. He KDE software works fine on Wayand, but that of other developers not so much. Still, what is going to be done in Fedora 40 and plasma 6 It is something necessary that will force everyone to work bravely to adopt Wayland. It has been used by default in Fedora and Ubuntu for a long time, and, at least personally, I have not experienced any major failures in GNOME, not to mention any failures.
It's them, not me
Right now I am using Wayland in KDE, even though I know that not everything works perfectly. X11 seems more stable, but I ended up liking Wayland more. If someone thinks that X11 is very much alive and still has some life left, they are probably right, and if you intend to complain, let Fedora Project and KDE know. I am just the messenger.
What remains to be hoped is that the transition will not be too painful. It shouldn't be if they leave the X11 option in an environment where Wayland falters a bit, but Fedora GNOME users should start thinking about saying goodbye to X11. That or install it on your own, which being a Linux-based distribution is likely to continue to be available for at least a few more years, even if unofficially.
Perhaps the best thing is to hope that the decision of these two projects encourages the rest and Wayland takes off completely.