Red Hat Expecting X.Org To "Go Into Hard Maintenance Mode Fairly Quickly"

[MartinN]

That's a non-sequitur. Java IDE's can and often are used for developing server or web applications. They don't imply the presence of popular java consumer desktop applications. Java on the desktop is essentially dead. You haven't really provided any good counter examples for consumer desktop applications. Oracle's last try was JavaFx and they have abandoned that effort as well.

Oracle has not abandoned JavaFX, merely decoupled it from the base JDK.

[MartinN]

None of which is installed in any significant capacity on workstations, apart from MacOS where I suspect you won't be running Xorg anyway.

believe it or not, I run XQuartz almost daily... only because I need some X binaries run from AIX. Yes, I said AIX.

[RahulSundaram]

Oracle has not abandoned JavaFX, merely decoupled it from the base JDK.

No, it is definitely worse than that. Oracle hasn't done any major development in JavaFx in a really long time. It just didn't get any mainstream adoption

[Charlie68]

I often use Tumbleweed KDE with Wayland, it's true there is still work to be done, but with my Amd graphics it all works quite well. Kde has made big strides on Wayland and in the last versions I noticed many improvements, I think that soon there will be a good Wayland experience even for Kde users, but even today it is usable if there are no special needs.

[MartinN]

No, it is definitely worse than that. Oracle hasn't done any major development in JavaFx in a really long time. It just didn't get any mainstream adoption

well, you're probably right about that... to your other point, I'm not sure what if anything on the Linux desktop is a popular consumer app, outside of dev apps like Eclipse, Intellij's stuff, etc.

I do have it in some pipe dream that Microsoft eventually moves to Linux instead of NT kernel... and inspires brand new life into the Linux desktop w/seamless integration of Windows apps at first, then eventually moving over to full Linux ported Office apps, and the rest of the world following suit.

Or maybe now that RH is in IBM's fold... perhaps you guys can devise a way of making money and providing a top notch Linux (Wayland based of course) desktop experience.

I don't see why Linux can't be equally good as OSX or Windows for desktop apps.. it's just that no one's been willing to put some serious effort in it. By no one, I mean corporations that can devote a large chunk of time/money to developing it, even if it's an afterthought to another money making product to keep the company alive....

Linux is super mature, super widespread.. on the server....but now it's time RH, Microsoft, IBM, whomever to make some waves on the desktop without destroying altruism.

[RahulSundaram]

well, you're probably right about that... to your other point, I'm not sure what if anything on the Linux desktop is a popular consumer app, outside of dev apps like Eclipse, Intellij's stuff, etc.

Popular is a relative term of course but there are certainly examples of much more popular consumer desktop applications in Linux. Ex: Firefox, LibreOffice or more recently several of the Electron applications including Skype etc. None of them are written in Java and applications that used to have Java like LibreOffice, deliberately made an effort to remove them. That is not an accident

Or maybe now that RH is in IBM's fold... perhaps you guys can devise a way of making money and providing a top notch Linux (Wayland based of course) desktop experience..

I am not part of Red Hat however Red Hat is one of very few vendors in the desktop space that heavily invest in engineering resources. Their target is more of workstations than consumer desktop and I am not sure anyone else is going to target consumer desktop because it just isn't a growing market anymore. Canonical tried recently and they predictably failed as well. It certainly doesn't work for Red Hat's current support based business model. They already tried that and it didn't work then and it won't work now. Something like Chromebooks could certainly work and you now have the ability to run Linux applications in a VM within it. That's pretty much all you got at this point

[r08z]

what about Devuan, will they riotly fork it into a non-wayland release!?

But Wayland is not systemD so they'll go for it like everyone else.

[kgonzales]

In that case, are there any developers willing to get crowdfunded to maintain X.org?

This is exactly the kind of work that needs to happen.