The criteria for operating systems says „Avoids X11“. This is not clear enough, for example, what about a distro that does ship two variants, one avoiding it and one not or one which starts with plain TTY? Is it „easily possible to avoid X11 with this OS / one or more variants of this OS that they …

I think the intent is to indicate distros that default to a Wayland experience. For example, if a distro installs both, but you have to change an option at the login screen to switch to X11 while the default desktop environment uses Wayland, that would be acceptable. If there are suggestions on how …

Wouldn’t it provide more clarity to just have a criterion that is ‘supports Wayland’ instead of ‘avoid X11’? All the text regarding X11 could remain, but this seemingly gets to your intent in a less roundabout way [image] jonah: the intent is to indicate distros that default to a Wayland experi…

No, because in some cases for example GNOME previously supported both. This was more common at the time when that was written. A few years later now and environments are removing X11 code paths entirely.

Right, exactly. Maybe the scenario I described is not even common anymore and we could make this even stricter. I’m not sure what the current state of X11 even is really. @anonymous549 no it cannot be “supports Wayland” because Wayland also has to be the default.

I will just ask this for my understanding but, I am assuming then "supports Wayland by default” would also be problematic?

If I have one at the end, sure I‘ll share it, but to make it clear, is it acceptable in the following cases (feel free to just say for example „1.: yes, 2.: no“ etc if you want to): There are two variants of the OS, one with default-X11 and one with default-Wayland There are two variants of the OS…

We could say “Uses Wayland by default” if we think that’s more clear. However @SYST3M_D3STR0YER brings up a good point that we probably would not want to exclude distros that don’t use Wayland or X11, which I think is one of the reasons we went with “avoids X11” in the first place.

[image] jonah: I’m not sure what the current state of X11 even is really. Even more dead than it was, there was an attempt to revive it by a single maintainer but nobody took that seriously. I think packages a are slated for removal.

@jonah this seems to not answer my question in which cases it is acceptable and in which not :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:? See 7

I think it does actually, but I’ll expand a bit. Yes, but we’ll say specifically in the recommendation which version to use (the Wayland one). I think we already do this with one distro but I don’t recall which. I think so, yes? But that’s my question I just posed in this thread for us to consider…

Clarify „Avoids X11“

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SYST3M_D3STR0YER March 11, 2026, 3:37pm 7

If I have one at the end, sure I‘ll share it, but to make it clear, is it acceptable in the following cases (feel free to just say for example „1.: yes, 2.: no“ etc if you want to):

There are two variants of the OS, one with default-X11 and one with default-Wayland
There are two variants of the OS, one with default-X11 and one with pure TTY (means, without any of them)

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Clarify „Avoids X11“

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