Asahi Linux developer warns the one true way is Wayland
Hector Martin, one of the lead developers of Asahi Linux, is warning that Wayland is the future of graphical desktops on Apple Silicon Macs.
In a lengthy post on Mastodon, one of the lead developers of the Asahi Linux project to port Linux to Apple Silicon-powered Mac computers has asked users not to use X.org, saying: "we absolutely do not have the bandwidth to spend time on it."
Martin warns that the future of graphical desktops on Apple Silicon is Wayland and nothing but Wayland. Xwayland will be supported, so that X.org apps will run under Wayland based desktops, but the developers hope that people will use only Wayland-based environments on Asahi Linux and related distros.
Up to a point, this is not such a shock for the nascent Linux ecosystem on Arm-ISA-based Macs. These machines have a single family of GPUs, which is closely integrated with the main processor, so there are no questions about which GPU vendor to choose, or what drivers a machine is running – because you have no choice. Additionally, the laptop models' displays, as well as Apple's own external screens, are all hi-DPI devices, or as Apple calls them "retina displays". These effectively mandate the use of fractional scaling – something that X.org does not support well. The Apple Silicon market is a closed one, without the free choice of mix-and-match GPUs and displays found in commodity PCs.