Fedora 40 Eyes Dropping GNOME X11 Session Support

[mSparks]

According to the article they fired just 4% of the staff. "Most" AFAIK means at the very least 51% but I normally think of something above 75%.

4% of the workforce.
94% of the talent and experience.

[kpedersen]

Deceptive.

Most of the work appearing in the xserver branch is for xwayland not for bare metal. So questionable if you can call bare metal X11 usage with xorg x11 server as maintained.

Check my URL; it specifically links to the bare metal part of the repo so people don't make that mistake you just did.

As you can see; work is being done on the bare metal xfree / hw part of the codebase. Perfectly well maintained. But you knew that didn't you?

Read carefully,[...]
That a fork off of x.org from 2012. So hope you not expecting modern features in any way shape or form.

Privilege separation is a pretty modern feature; likewise tear free and the entire modesetting / KMS / DRM subsystem.

back in 2012 things were still user-mode display drivers. It has since modernized to make Wayland be fairly redundant.

Also, Xenocara is not a fork. It is purely there to fix the dumb fragmented build system and include OpenBSD specific features such as pledge(2).

[guglovich]

Fedora as a sponsor of high-profile weird news.

[avis]

4% of the workforce.
94% of the talent and experience.

I operate with facts, not with conjectures. You pulled that 94% figure straight from where light doesn't shine. Sorry, I'll leave you right there.

[mSparks]

I operate with facts, not with conjectures. You pulled that 94% figure straight from where light doesn't shine. Sorry, I'll leave you right there.

It is an estimate mostly based on

https://web.archive.org/web/20220202173243/http://techrights.org/2022/02/02/ibm-ruins-red-hat/

Whitehurst on his own counts for at least 50% of their former talent and experience.

[qarium]

That's asinine. You don't have this problem with other commercial OS'es. I have a 2021 computer where I can install and use Windows XP (in basic graphics mode but still in graphics mode) for Christ's sake.
With the direction Fedora is taking, either you pray Fedora supports your HW properly, or you die trying. I can imagine Fedora 39 or 40 are going to use Wayland for installation. Whoa, what a nice idea. The laptop I bought two months ago was not supported by Fedora 38 installation media, I barely installed the OS on it.
Just when Linux has started to support most HW properly, Fedora stewards decided that's too good to be true, let's just break everything.

what a lie its the complete opposite i was on Debian a long time and was forced to switch to Fedora because debian did not work on my new hardware.
this was in 2017 when i bought my threadripper 1920X with Vega64...

and today its the same many new hardware is not supported on debian in any shape or form.

[Mez']

This is the cringest comment from a Linux fan I've seen in 25 years. It's not just wrong, it looks like as it it was made in an alternative universe entirely.

RedHat has given us:

• A stable distribution you can run up to 12 years while maintaining the same software stack and kernel drivers
• A hassle free power audio system, PulseAudio and then PipeWire (ALSA with dmix was a hell to set up, esound/artsd never really worked correctly)
• systemd (Luddites hate it but it's allowed to speed up the boot process by a factor of 10 or more, it simplified and removed the need for pages long fragile bash scripts, it streamlined system configuration)
• The company has maintained and contributed to the Gnome software stack and related libraries, the Linux kernel, the Xorg server, Wayland we are discussing now and many others
• A ton of enterprise Linux features including KVM, docker, flatpack, etc. etc.

Without RedHat Linux would have been taken back by at least a decade or two.

Fedora may look like it's an experimental distro except I've been running it without major issues since version 1.0. I only skipped a couple of releases when systemd was first introduced: it was really rough but the company needed to break it in.

The only thing I can hand to you there is Pipewire. The rest would have been or has been done by others better.
I'm not cringing, whatever else I'm using from them is a hassle for me to use.
Just look at Budgie, they have understood that as well, and are going away from as much Red Hat stuff as possible.

[Mez']

Without Red Hat (and Valve to a certain extent), the Linux desktop would've been stuck in the early 2000's, when you had to manually configure things like xorg.conf and pray it'll even work on your hardware. So it's an illusion to think that without Red Hat, Linux would magically move forward. Maybe you know another company which can move it forward? no? Because you know, you need corporate support to really push things forward. And separate volunteers / hobbyists who do it for free can't do it single handedly. I'm not saying absolutely everything what Red Hat does is perfect, but thinking it has an alternative is schizophrenic.

That's just wishful thinking.
It wouldn't have been, it would have freed more pragmatic and user-oriented solutions.
Red Hat has the means to influence people into believing into their crappily designed apps, but most of what they design is developer-oriented utopia forced onto users.
In corporations, users would reject anything they are pushing onto them. In corporations, users pull the design, it's called user requirements. Developers have to implement things according to it. Ubuntu has understood that and it's why it's the most popular distro, even now with their snap forced onto people. Still, they let users decide how to fulfill their workflow for most things.

Only in Red Hat world do they push their own geeky workflow onto practical users. What is happening is that you have keyboard warriors geeks deciding how others should do their workflow. That's why Gnome is a failure in the eyes of most people.
That is basically why nobody is really happy with anything Red Hat produced, and why they are criticzed 10x more than any other Linux IT company.

I know for some people it's cool hating on everything related to Red Hat, but like it or not, Red Hat is behind many of the freedesktop standards like dbus, which are used in virtually every Linux distro and as said above, it's also behind significant contributions to the Linux kernel. So you can't really "get away" from it. If you don't like it, stop using Linux.

And now, please can you give us a comprehensive explanation of how does Red Hat "hold back" the Linux desktop instead of spewing baseless hate?

I don't like it, I'm "forced" to use these, but wherever I can I remove things designed by these anti-user ayatollahs. And little by little, my life and workflow gets better.

[Mez']

Redhat gave linux many things.
Unfortunately the only thing that remains of Redhat mid 2023 is the logo. IBM fired most of the staff

https://www.theregister.com/2023/04/28/red_hat_layoffs_union/

the rest are leaving of their own free will and IBM completely reoriented their remaining staff to try and be more like Microsoft, which while it may make sense at face value, is pretty much never going to work out for them.

That's kind of funny for a company trying to be the Apple of the Linux world, copying them blatantly, locking users into doing things their ways (theme, workflow, lack of features and options, etc...).

I'd say Fedora dropping X11 for wayland is wayland's last chance (and to a certain degree RH). If it doesn't work out (and it wont), even more heads will roll, only this time in upper management.

Let's hope so, that would really liberate other Linux actors with more modern views on desktop paradigm and anything related to it.
The problem until now is that Red Hat marketing machine has always managed to kill off superior alternatives through paid influencers. If they disappear, we'll finally have those more modern visions going through without an artificial filter. That would be glorious days for Linux users.

[mSparks]

That's kind of funny for a company trying to be the Apple of the Linux world, copying them blatantly, locking users into doing things their ways (theme, workflow, lack of features and options, etc...).

Let's hope so, that would really liberate other Linux actors with more modern views on desktop paradigm and anything related to it.
The problem until now is that Red Hat marketing machine has always managed to kill off superior alternatives through paid influencers. If they disappear, we'll finally have those more modern visions going through without an artificial filter. That would be glorious days for Linux users.

Interesting perspective, I hadnt really thought of it like that. I was coming at it much more from a user perspective.

Because I read the title of this thread as
Fedora 40 eyes dropping support for RandR, nvidia settings, android studio and steamvr, none of which currently work on wayland and I don't really expect them to anytime in the next few years if ever.

Thing is, Linux is VERY much driven by its users, do stuff they dont like (enough) and switching to an alternative is a USB stick away.

Gnome grew on me quickly when I gave it a chance, they have made some rather silly choices, many of which kept me on KDE for a long while - but I actually decided I liked its main choice to be invisible most of the time, only coming out of its hole when needed.

Breaking everything and offering nothing is a huge deal, especially when on the one hand they claim to be independant from IBM linux, while on the other stating they are going to break everything and offer nothing in future fedora releases because IBM linux depreciated everything that actually works...

I expect this to either roadblock the FC40 release, or the vast majority of FC39 users will just skip 40 and either move to 41 when xorg comes back or switch to an entirely different distro that works. Im currently planning on oracle linux for my next distro, might give FC39 a chance first, but Im pretty unhappy with FC38, so FC39 has a lot of ground to make up.