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

[treba]

The corporate speak in this press release is as sneaky and deceitful as always.

The person who wrote this statement went to great lengths to portray X.org as something that requires a ton of dedication, work and resources which is just utterly untrue.

X.org has been in pure maintenance mode for over a decade now. It requires nothing more than occasional security patches. That's it. Otherwise it works beautifully.

This is not X.org's depreciation, this is imposing Wayland on everyone whether they like it or not.

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.

I still cannot grapple with one thing.

Linux for years now has been about unification and standardization: systemd, pipewire, /usr merge, NetworkManager, DBUS, devtmpfs, etc. etc. etc.

Why did someone high up in graphics [development] decide that it would be great to have twenty discrete display servers with various levels of features implementation, bugginess and readiness? What's the point? The amount of maintenance, work, resources, etc. required to develop 20 different display servers trumps what X.org might have needed by an insane margin. Somehow it's totally ... fine.

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

[avis]

I'm sorry, but this is just nonsense. Even if the design of graphics hardware never changed, the number of Xorg CVEs the graphics team handles is huge, and each is usually high severity and requires a massive amount of validation and testing. The reality is that the X protocol is obsolete and designed for hardware that doesn't exist any more, it does not "work beautifully" by a long shot.

Can you put your money where your mouth is? Validation and testing for Xorg has been streamlined for decades, unlike with Wayland where nothing is even standardized at this point. You can test/validate Mutter but you cannot do the same with Kwin, let alone other lesser Wayland display servers. Xorg has not seen a "huge" amount of CVEs either. And right now Xorg works a ton better for the vast majority of Linux users who are not Gnome users.

I'm typing this message in XFCE which is 100% unusable under Wayland because it doesn't yet have its own Wayland display server. And there's nothing that I can complain about. How is it not "works beautifully"? Looks like Wayland proponents have now resorted to the extreme forms of gaslighting: "You're using Xorg and having no issues? No! It cannot be so, you do have issues!"

[M@GOid]

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

I'm doing it in KDE on Wayland. 2 fingers -> middle click.

[Sesivany]

X.org has been in pure maintenance mode for over a decade now. It requires nothing more than occasional security patches. That's it. Otherwise it works beautifully.

Until you need to implement new requirements such as HDR. If the world stood still and Red Hat and such didn't have to bring new features and capabilities, then yes, there would be no maintenance beyond security patching required, but we don't live in a world that stands still.
,

[hughsie]

Can you put your money where your mouth is?

I'm a senior principal software engineer, who's worked at Red Hat over 15 years in the desktop group -- mainly working on hardware enablement. Every week I hear what the graphics team has been working on. I can tell you that you are talking nonsense and I'm refusing to reply further.

[avis]

Until you need to implement new requirements such as HDR. If the world stood still and Red Hat and such didn't have to bring new features and capabilities, then yes, there would be no maintenance beyond security patching required, but we don't live in a world that stands still.
,

The RedHat press release did not talk about adding new features to Xorg. It talked about the huge burden of maintaining the current Xorg code base. IOW, pure lies.

[cynic]

This is not X.org's depreciation, this is imposing Wayland on everyone whether they like it or not.

I know those RH army that knock at your door in the middle of the night forcing you to install RHEL 10 on your every machine!
bad guys!

[r_a_trip]

Oh dear, the hysteria will swell the coming months. "Muh X.org. Muh X.org!" Yeah, it's dead. Nobody is developing or maintaining it. Nor can you force anyone to do so. This moment was announced 15 years ago. Wayland was the impetus to overhaul the low level Linux stack so Wayland could work and be the new display system.

The way I see it is that a lot of people just sat on their hands and didn't believe that X.org ever was going away. Now they are caught with their pants down and they need to scramble to get on Wayland. Well, get cracking, because more distributions will follow. You either work with Wayland or you are legacy. For window managers and desktops, it's either get a Wayland compositor or you don't work on modern distros.

For me it's a non-issue. I am looking forward to Plasma 6. It's rumored to work even better than Plasma 5 on Wayland.

[avis]

I'm a senior principal software engineer, who's worked at Red Hat over 15 years in the desktop group -- mainly working on hardware enablement. Every week I hear what the graphics team has been working on. I can tell you that you are talking nonsense and I'm refusing to reply further.

If X.org is so broken and is such a huge burden to maintain, you could simply provide examples of that.

I've not been working for RedHat for 15 years but I've been using RedHat products since the late 90s (for more than 25 years), I happen to use your bugzilla and pagure.io, I frequent src.fedoraproject.org, I've sent patches for Fedora packages (they have been applied) and I don't see a lot of ... commotion related to X.org's maintenance burden.

Let's keep it professional and remove emotions from this conversation.

[avis]

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.

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.

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

https://dudemanguy.github.io/blog/posts/2022-06-10-wayland-xorg/wayland-xorg.html

I know those RH army that knock at your door in the middle of the night forcing you to install RHEL 10 on your every machine!
bad guys!

It's about being able to choose what is right for you. For some reasons it was Linux' motto at the beginning. Nowadays, "You can't work with it? Go distro-hop, LOL". Amazing.

Here's an example. When ESD, artsd, etc. were replaced by Pulse Audio:

• You got a more robust audio system
• Older applications continued to work perfectly
• You got new great features

With X.org to Wayland:

• Robust? Only if you use Gnome.
• Compatibility? Here's XWayland for you. Forget about systray and global shortcuts for X11 apps. Forget about proper DPI scaling.
• New features? How about not yet having old features?

Have a nice day.