‘Wayback’ Keeps Old Linux Desktop Environments Alive on Wayland

The Linux office ecosystem slowly migrated from X11 to Wayland, which leaves some office environments behind. The Wayback project aims to solve this problem, and it has just reached its first version of preview.

First of all, a story of Unix. The X window system, currently known as X11, was the main method of displaying graphic interfaces on Linux -based and UNIX systems for decades. It has accumulated many performance, use and safety problems that could not be treated without substantial rewriting, so that Wayland was created to replace potential. Wayland is now used by default instead of X11 on Ubuntu, Fedora Workstation, Debian and many other Linux distributions.

Even if you can run applications in Wayland designed for X11, with the integrated XWayland compatibility layer, it is not the same for office environments. The common office environment (CDE) and the window manufacturer do not support Wayland at all. Mate makes progress on Wayland’s support, and LXQT is mainly functional in Wayland, but still considered “rather experimental”.

The new “Wayback” project is a bypass solution for this problem because it creates an X11 server at the top of Wayland for office environments. The documentation explains: “Our objective is that Wayback is possibly a replacement completely without an appointment with the Binary Xorg, thus reducing the maintenance burden for distribution agents.”

Wayback 0.1 is the first version of overview, and it is already available in package managers for Fedora, Arch Linux (Aur), Alpine and other distributions. It’s always very experimental – there is no support for multiple monitors or mouse locking, for example – but it is an impressive first version. Some developers “already lead it daily to find bugs and correct them as they appear”.

It should be noted that Wayback and Wayland are not at all linked to the Xlibre project, the fork that wants to keep X11 alive with modern improvements. His developers say that “the toxic elements in Xorg projects, Bigtech taupes, boycotting all substantial work on Xorg”, and they are looking to “do X again, Wayland has been created to solve the problems with X11, by many of the same people who worked on X11. There are no reasons for using X11 on a Linux computer instead of Wayland, and Wayback corrects one of the rare cases of the remaining edge.

The publication blog post says: “Since Wayback was announced on June 28, we have made a lot of progress to get it as stable and functional as possible, and although it is a version of preview, it is already available by users with simple requirements, as long as you don’t mind.”

You can consult the official Wayback website for more information, configuration instructions and other resources. The source code is available on Gitlab under the MIT license.

Source: Wayback in freedesktop.org