Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 Dropping The X.Org Server Except For XWayland

[cynic]

Floppy disks, then zip drives and then CDs were replaced with something unconditionally better and more versatile - USB flash drives/cloud/the Internet.
The transition to Wayland has been nothing but unconditionally better. So far it's been a very painful story.

my point is: new tech becomes better in the moment everybody start to use them.

zip drives were extremely expensive before they became "mass adopted".
CDs were expensive, slow, fragile and read only, before they became mass adopted.
USB flash drives were expensive and required their drivers to be installed on every PC in order to work, so they were no near as portable as they are today.

I'm sure that when everybody will use wayland we'll see great improvement as well.

[gustavoar]

People don't understand how Open Software works. Companies or people aren't obligated to attend your needs. If you want X not to die then support it yourself or pay someone to do it.

[boeroboy]

The Red Hat power grab continues. If it's not forcing everyone onto systemd it's forcing everyone onto the next rewrite that they control to stay relevant through false threats. I predict a major boycott starting with Fedora as they're already cutting out XOrg and leaving most users with half-baked replacements of critical daily usage apps.

Red Hat survived the systemd blowback because init is vital to both servers and desktop usage. It won't survive this because RHEL and Fedora are far less relevant outside of the server space.

[treba]

I'm currently typing this comment from my laptop running Xorg where GTK 3/4 and Qt 5/6 applications work beautifully. What am I missing? What doesn't map well?

Why is every second Wayland proponent here is trying to gaslight everyone into believing that X.org is already not working at all? And that's despite "Wayland being great" in December 2023 is only applicable to Gnome and Intel/AMD users.




https://dudemanguy.github.io/blog/po...land-xorg.html

The list of things obviously broken on X11 (and unfixable with major breaking changes) is long enough that I don't think that I have to repeat it here. But let me give you an example for your concrete use case, a simple GTK4 / Qt5/6 app (or Firefox or Chromium). On X11, transparency with EGL has been broken forever on Mesa (and is apparently hard to fix). So all toolkits / apps wanting to do GL with transparency (e.g. for CSD) are stuck with GLX. Which is horribly outdated and doesn't have a sane implementation for partial damage. So now every small change, the whole window has to be redrawn. That's inefficient. Some apps like Firefox do wild tricks to mix GLX with EGL to make things work. But that's just incredibly ugly.

Now you might say: well, then just do SSD and write your engine in a way so it requests RGB instead of RGBA like you do on every other platform. There you have it. Weird extra stuff just to keep X11 running.

Yes, people still do that in many cases. But they could invest their time much better.

[schmidtbag]

To all of you griping about this: so long as complete X.org is still in the repos, why do you care? It's not that hard to just install it and get your display manager to swap over.
While I think this is an unnecessarily risky move for RH, I am in support of it since this ought to accelerate adoption and refinement of Wayland. It's already in a very usable state.

Can Wayland do tricks by now such as having trackpad support for 2 and 3 finger click (to emulate right and middle click)?

That has worked for years on KDE. Fractional scrolling and pinch-to-zoom also works great with a wide variety of applications.
I think sensitivity controls are working correctly now in Wayland too - it wasn't for a long while but the defaults never bothered me much so I just left them be.

People don't understand that how Open Software works. Companies or people aren't obligated to attend your needs. If you want X not to die then support it yourself or pay someone to do it.

Actually, Red Hat is obligated to attend to your needs, seeing as they are paid to support their customers. On the other hand, people aren't typically using RH for their home desktop. Wayland is perfectly fine for most tasks.

[przmk]

Not anymore. You're forced to use Wayland or Gnome or both.
[...]

Nobody is forcing anyone to use Gnome. I'm using Sway without issues on my main machine (OBS works as well).
Before that I was on KDE with Wayland and I had no issues either. In fact, it's been years since I last used a X11 session.

Feel free to assemble a team and fork X11. The devs moved on to Wayland though.

[piotrj3]

There's *way* more work for DEs, toolkits and apps whenever internals are modernized. Modern cross-platform abstractions usually just don't map well onto X11.



Ever though about that it maybe wasn't somebody high up? Ever talked to people who understand something about modern graphic stacks?

Sorry, when Xorg is definitly not modern, neither is Wayland. Qt doesn't work beautifully on Wayland (a lot of issues that are diffrent on diffrent DEs), neither does OBS (modern recording software), neither GPU drivers (requiring explicit synchronization model), neither modern APIs (implementing Vulkan on open source drivers was pain due to implicitly synced stack).

Not to mention modern stuff I would expect to have perfect VRR support (nope), HDR (missing except gamescope magic), DRM-leasing (required by a lot of things, Gnome nope), color grading (partial, and annoying), position of window, surviving crashing of compositor (I think only on KDE Qt apps have that possibility everything else dies) and so on.

Sorry Wayland is not modern graphics stack, especially when it pissed off Nvidia, AMD, Intel, Valve and way more engineers.

[Malsabku]

So RHEL 10/CentOS Stream 10 will be more modern than Fedora. x86-64_v3, no X11, etc

[skeevy420]

Ever though about that it maybe wasn't somebody high up? Ever talked to people who understand something about modern graphic stacks?

Yes. AMD graphics developers. They say that one of the biggest reasons why Linux/FOSS doesn't have feature parity with Windows is literally because of Wayland and the umpteen display managers situation. Features that don't go directly into the driver need to be added to the display manager and, unlike Windows, there is no centralized display manager to work with, only a protocol to propose standards where from there they'd have to either submit code to every display manager or hope some random developer adds the AMD extensions to their display manager.

They can't just implement it once and let the rest of the world piggyback off their efforts so they're just not doing it. I don't blame them. Do they pick Mutter? KWin? Wlroots? Weston? Just the protocol?

For all the good Wayland offers, it's very stifling to progress due to not having a centralized display manager solution to work with. Imagine how Linux audio would be everyone had to create their own sound server because they decided that PipeWire was going to be just a protocol instead of being backwards compatible with PulseAudio while simultaneously covering JACK's use-cases. In that world there would be situations where we don't get noise cancelling because the KDE version doesn't implement as much of the PipeWire protocol as the GNOME version does so KDE would have inferior audio. That would suck so hard.

Instead we have a centralized audio solution in PipeWire that everyone can tap into and everyone else can piggyback off of. And there was much praise.

[Britoid]

This exact news piece is talking about how "everybody cannot use whatever they want". Not anymore. You're forced to use Wayland or Gnome or both.



Floppy disks, then zip drives and then CDs were replaced with something unconditionally better and more versatile - USB flash drives/cloud/the Internet.

The transition to Wayland has been nothing but unconditionally better. So far it's been a very painful story.

Compare it to how GDI was replaced with WDDM in Windows Vista. That's how you transition. No one noticed (except for Vista's quite high HW requirements and NVIDIA drivers crashes).

Anyways, Wayland is the future, it's cool/great/fast/superior. I'm no longer interested in this conversation.

GDI => WDDM was easier for many reasons, which can't apply in the Linux world.

1) Microsoft can force OEMs to make driver changes, and it's Microsofts way or the highway, can't have OEMs mess around (e.g. Nvidia EGLStreams/GBM)
2) Nearly every application on Windows links to the system toolkit and libraries, you do not talk directly to the display server, Microsoft ported these libraries to WDDM whilst maintaining binary compatibility. In the Linux world, applications are pretty much talking to the display server direct, unless they go through a toolkit like GTK/QT, hence why the latter have far easier Wayland compatability.

If everyone used GTK or QT to make their app on Linux and didn't do any Xorg funnyness, honestly porting would be much further along, but alas they haven't, and neither GTK or QT have binary compatibility between releases.