Thank you Gerardo for the hints. Indeed, I hope to not have to go to the level of XLib or wlroots. I tend to converge towards a simpler solution than writing any graphical interface, even if GTK (and Cairo) are some viable options. I will most likely keep my work entirely separate from any display protocol/graphical environment developments in the GNU/Linux world by using well-proven third-party tools like Gnuplot as long as the Gnuplot functionality under Wayland improves (I do not want to use XWayland or similar, nested layers). A similar philosophy for visualization is applied in GNU Octave (it uses QT to display Gnuplot plots). On my system (Trixie with hyprland from Sid), I cannot get on-screen, real-time or interactive plots yet, as there seem to be no suitable Wayland-compatible Gnuplot terminal in my Gnuplot installation (v6.0, from Trixie) yet unless I have overlooked something essential here.
I hope the situation with GNU/Linux graphics improves in the near future and either the Wayland ecosystem matures faster or the X11-based ecosystem is modernized and continued if the transition to Wayland will require users like me to wait for a few more years. Wayland already works very well on my mobile devices with Ubuntu Touch (I hope to run Mobian in the near future!) though. Thanks to all for this constructive discussion. Wojciech On 2025 Oct 10 10:19, Gerardo Ballabio wrote: >Wojciech Lipinski wrote: >> As a non-IT person >> who is involved in development of specialized simulation software >> (solar energy engineering), I feel uncertain about investing my time >> in solutions compatible with X11 or with Wayland. > >Hello Wojciech, >I don't see why you should worry about that at all. >You need not develop an application that talks the X11 or Wayland >protocol directly. Nobody does that, it would be like reinventing the >wheel. If you use one of the most common graphical toolkits (e.g., >Gtk+ or Qt), it is my understanding that they support both protocols >transparently. >I have been developing a few programs with Gtk+ and when I switched my >Debian system from X11 to Wayland (if I'm not mistaken that was with >the Bookworm release) they simply kept working, I didn't need to do >anything. >Do you actually have any specific requirements that either X11 or >Wayland would not support (and would XLibre change anything to that >respect)? > >Gerardo
