I ran Manjaro Linux as my daily driver a few years ago but slowly phased it out for Windows for some reason, and I’m finally back using Linux (currently Linux Mint). I gotta say, I don’t know why I ever switched back to Windows. There’s just so much freedom Linux gives you right off the bat that Windows is just plain...
Well, if obviously comes from the world of cars. My guess is that its use there dates back to before PCs. It just make sense that people that already used it for cars would apply it to computers. It is hard to know the timing. Probably at the point that at least some people started to have access to more than one.
Red Hat has formally confirmed what many were thinking: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 will be doing away with X.Org Server support aside from XWayland....
This actually makes it sound like Xorg will be supported longer than I thought.
I understood RHEL9 to already be Wayland based and so I was expecting the clock to runout on Xorg when RHEL8 went off support. RHEL9 does default to Wayland but it sounds like Xorg remained a fully supported option for those that wanted it. The move to Wayland only being proposed for RHEL10 did not happen on RHEL9.
RHEL8 goes off support in 2029 but RHEL9 is supported until 2032. The implications of this article are that Red Hat will not put much energy into Xorg after 2025 ( RHEL10 ) but they will still have to support their customers. This at least means security fixes but it likely means continued viability of modern hardware to a certain extent as well.
Regardless, this also highlights one of the “hidden”‘contributions of Red Hat and how much the entire ecosystem relies on them. This can be seen as good or bad but I wish the public debate involving them would at least accurately reflect it.
I thought this as well but the more I think about it, the less true this seems. From an engineering point of view, it could last longer.
Xwayland is really just Xorg and Xwayland continues to be supported in RHEL10 and beyond.
Xorg and Wayland compositors have grown together in some ways. Both now use libinput, libdrm, and KMS for example. Those are not going away.
Xwayland is really just Xorg adapted to talk to Wayland instead of KMS and libinput. It is mostly the same code. So, Xorg will continue to benefit from the care and attention that Xwayland gets. Perhaps there may not be many new features but the code is not going to bit rot and security will continue to be addressed. While Xwayland does not use libinput or KMS, the Wayland compositor itself will, so those pieces are also going to be maintained including new features and new hardware support. Mesa is a common component as well.
So, while Red Hat may stop coordinating releases of Xorg at some point, a surprising amount of the code will still be actively maintained and current. It may not take a lot of work for somebody else to take over and bundle it up as a release.
What will probably kill Xorg is lack of demand.
Despite the anti-Wayland chatter, the migration to Wayland looks like it will gain substantial momentum this year and next and not only on Linux. Three to five years from now, the number of people that still care about Xorg ( as the primary display server - not as Xwayland ) may be very small indeed. Obviously it will be running on older systems for a long, long time but, ten years from now, installing Xorg on a new system is likely to be very rare ( like CP/M now rare ).
Red Hat may end up being one of the very last players that cares about Xorg after 2030. My guess is that most of the current never-Wayland crowd will have moved to it long before then.
For many uses, Wayland has feature parity now or is even the superior option. That is how it can be the default on so many systems ( including RHEL9 as per the article ).
Compositors that do not provide the features that uses want will fail to compete ( what you mean by become useless I assume ).
That said, different users will want different things and, unlike X, Wayland allows competing compositors to address different communities. Some compositors will lack features some users want while offering features that other users need. A composite targeting embedded use cases may not need multi-monitor or fractional scaling features for example. A security focussed option may think that global hot-keys and external lock-screens are anti-features. I think the Wayland world could be quite interesting.
I finally switched back to Linux as my daily driver after a couple of years of being on nothing but Windows.
I ran Manjaro Linux as my daily driver a few years ago but slowly phased it out for Windows for some reason, and I’m finally back using Linux (currently Linux Mint). I gotta say, I don’t know why I ever switched back to Windows. There’s just so much freedom Linux gives you right off the bat that Windows is just plain...
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 Dropping The X.Org Server Except For XWayland (www.phoronix.com)
Red Hat has formally confirmed what many were thinking: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 will be doing away with X.Org Server support aside from XWayland....