As it is widely known, Wayland is still very unusable and many important applications don’t work with it at all or are too buggy to use. I believe the few security improvements that come with it are NOT worth the hassle of having to fight against your system every waking minute of your life, and some people simply need a functional operating system that can keep them anonymous without disrupting their workflow. Additionally, Xfce is also just much better and a more functional DE than LXQt is in every way. I think it’s likely that the downsides of usability and compatibility issues will far outweigh the benefits of switching to Wayland for most people.
My question then is, will it be possible to switch back? Or will some Whonix components stop functioning if you do?
I don’t think there’s currently a plan to continue supporting X11. There are concrete security issues with X11 beyond the usual “the protocol is old, any app can read any other app’s keystrokes” that make it a liability (most notably the fact that it runs as root and its IPC sockets are world-writable). Beyond even the security issues though, X11 is rapidly dying - GTK5 already plans to not support the X11 protocol anymore, and graphics driver support for X11 is starting to become bit-rotten. We’re close to the point where using Wayland won’t just be a good idea for security, it will be necessary for usability.
We are going to provide Xwayland for compatibility with X11-only applications, and you should be able to force applications to use X11 if they support both X11 and Wayland and you find the Wayland versions unsuitable for general use.
I am interested in the functionality issues you’ve encountered with LXQt. Are there particular issues LXQt presents that Xfce doesn’t?
It’s quite strange. I’ve been using Wayland (KDE Plasma) for a very long time, over a year, and during that time, all the problems I’ve had have been specific to Plasma (Plasma tends to crash with the Nouveu driver). I’ve had basically no problems with Lxqt, although Wayland isn’t as deeply embedded in the system there as it is in KDE. I feel like Wayland is even smoother than X. In today’s world, I see no reason to stick with X if Wayland is an option.
If you have problems with Wayland (even X applications run quite well on it), please report them. Also, make sure you either have your NVIDIA GPU disabled or have NVIDIA’s proprietary drivers installed.
I hope you’re criticizing Wayland based on personal experience. There are a lot of complaints online about Wayland’s speed, bugs, and other issues, but all of these complaints are very old, and judging the modern world by them is like criticizing Xfce’s graphical interface by comparing it to DOS.