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.
