Now that it’s clear Xorg is reaching the end of its road—with major Linux distributions and desktop environments moving away from it and putting all their efforts into Wayland—it makes sense that some are still focused on supporting X11 applications that haven’t yet made the jump.
That’s where Wayback comes in—a new experimental project created to bridge the gap and keep those apps running smoothly. It is designed to host a rootful instance of Xwayland and, in turn, run an entire X11 desktop environment on top of Wayland components.
Led by Ariadne Conill, one of the original developers behind Alpine Linux, Wayback is written in C and currently links against wlroots 0.19, libwayland ≥ 1.14, libxkbcommon, and the usual Wayland client/server libraries. Based on TinyWL, the project’s long-term goal is to replace Xorg in Alpine, streamlining maintenance while keeping compatibility intact.
Although the project is closely tied to Alpine, it has a real shot at broader adoption, especially if enough developers are interested and involved. I mean, Wayback can become a safety valve for users who still depend on classic X desktops such as Cinnamon, Xfce, LXDE, or fvwm.
That said, it needs to be noted that the project is still in its early experimental phase, and the developers are upfront about its current limitations. Breaking changes and bugs are expected, and users are encouraged to contribute fixes via pull requests rather than just filing bug reports.
For more information, see the project’s GitHub repo.
as far as i know xwayland and wayback are “not fully compatible” with xorg. everything seems upside down here. bigtech first tries to force you to give up x11, and when you don’t they try to force you to use infererior alternatives to xorg. you took away my xorg, and now you are trying force me bad craps. unbelievable.
You could hardly call Alpine Linux “big tech”. This project is taking what is left after the corporates have ravaged X11 and trying to put together something to replace it which uses a backend based on Wayland for driver support but provides a frontend based on X11 for application support.
I think this project is to be applauded, personally, it has potential to have much better X11 compatibility than normal Xwayland because it has a custom Wayland compositor that can be customized any way the authors choose, and because everything including the root window run under X11 automation tools like devilspie and accessibility tools like screen readers should run fine.
Because Xwayland is actually being maintained by the big tech companies for the foreseeable future, this is probably the best hope for an X11 environment that works with future hardware.
I think you’re being too negative, there may be some incompatibility with X11 still, but it should be far better than mixed desktops with Wayland apps that don’t interoperate properly with X11 apps for “security” reasons.