X.Org Server Development Hits A Nearly Two Decade Low

[phoronix]

Phoronix: X.Org Server Development Hits A Nearly Two Decade Low

With Red Hat shifting their support to Wayland and expecting the X.Org Server to go into a hard maintenance mode quickly, in 2019 indeed it did...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=X.Org-Server-2019-Low

[Guest]

Bad news. Wayland is for "gamers", Xorg for serious Linux users. Does this mean we should aspect "bugs" in Xorg code to force people to adopt the unwanted Wayland?

[tildearrow]

Here’s what some of Xorg devs are doing now.

Adam Jackson

https://gitlab.gnome.org/nwnk

Olivier Fourdan

https://gitlab.gnome.org/ofourdan

Hans de Goede
https://gitlab.gnome.org/jwrdegoede

Michel Danzer

https://gitlab.gnome.org/daenzer

From X11 to Xwayland+Mutter Besides a pack of X veterans you only need 5-10 additional hired developers and maintainers to have a sustainable Wayland desktop compositor. Mutter got that from Redhat, Endlessm and Canonical And a few enterprise releases helps as well

Drive-by hacking, short term contractors and weekly blogs won’t cut it in the Age of Wayland.

I have always thought that Wayland is designed by GNOME, for GNOME.

...and that makes me feel bad since that isn't the only desktop.

[CochainComplex]

Mh....5 years ago I thought we will be already using Wayland by default in 2020. But somehow it seems that there will be an additional 5 years to wait.

[Gusar]

I have always thought that Wayland is designed by GNOME, for GNOME.

That's because it is. The KDE and sway devs work on interoperability and write protocols, while Gnome devs just do their own thing. So there is no Wayland, there's gnome-wayland and then there's wayland-protocols. Under gnome-wayland you're expected to use GTK and do everything the Gnome way, and if you're no fully immersed into the "Gnome platform" either as a user or an application developer, well, tough luck. Everything that's not Gnome is considered by their devs as being on the same level as Win32 or MacOS, a whole different thing.

Drive-by hacking, short term contractors and weekly blogs won’t cut it in the Age of Wayland.

You're saying that as if it's a good thing. A lot of people choose Linux to get away from corporate control, but here you are, welcoming it.

[foobaz]

Bad news. Wayland is for "gamers", Xorg for serious Linux users. Does this mean we should aspect "bugs" in Xorg code to force people to adopt the unwanted Wayland?

That's exactly backwards. Gamers will continue using X for years for compatibility with old games. Game developers will continue targeting X for years because it will have more marketshare. Wayland will be used primarily by system administrators and back-end developers.

[Bigon]

Mh....5 years ago I thought we will be already using Wayland by default in 2020. But somehow it seems that there will be an additional 5 years to wait.

GNOME defaults to wayland for several releases already and distributions (Debian, Fedora,...) are not switching back

[Bigon]

That's because it is. The KDE and sway devs work on interoperability and write protocols, while Gnome devs just do their own thing. So there is no Wayland, there's gnome-wayland and then there's wayland-protocols.

Source of this?

[Guest]

That's exactly backwards.

Or not...

[Gusar]

Source of this?

Gnome devs' refusal to implement protocols like idle-inhibit and xdg-decoration, both of which are part of wayland-protocols. Here's all the gory details regarding xdg-decoration if you're interested (warning - it's a long read): https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/issues/217