X11 will stay for a long time I think, the question is how good it will work for the main Desktop Environments. And new hardware. There have been enough discussions about advantages of Wayland v.s. X11.If X11 disappears in Debian 14, perhaps X11 can still be installed from repo.
Raspi-config has three options at the moment, X11, Wayfire, Labwc. they probably won't go away anytime soon.
If things don't work it is just a change in Advanced options and reboot.
If X11 would be the best way forward for a former TV platform (that is where the Pi/Broadcom comes from), the default for Bookworm and also much newer distro releases would have been X11.
Also look at other (cheap) Arm SBCs; Their SoCs are TV/mediaplayer or Android focused, so everyone who has looked into CPU-GPU HW details knows that you won't get enough (open source) developers to even try to optimize X11 on (new) hardware. With enough brute-force and money and power-consumption you can get good results with X11, as Nvidia did (or still does?). Also if you just focus on the ARM CPU and CLI and occasional dumb framebuffered GUI (via VNC or other remote protocol), who cares.
Companies like RedHat, who set the standard for many Linux software, simply won't waste their developer resources on X11 I assume. Instead they made already the decision that GNOME will be Wayland only. I am not 100% sure when, so have a look at Fedora / RedHat EL plans.
For KDE Plasma, with no dedicated company backing, they will follow. Same as for RPL made Wayland default, KDE developers default to Wayland. Some end-users might hate it and select X11 again, but most will use Wayland. That means bugs in Wayland get solved faster and new features added faster. New features are things like efficient HW accelerated 4K video decoding.
Statistics: Posted by redvli — Mon Mar 17, 2025 8:44 am