Fedora Workstation 41 To No Longer Install GNOME X.Org Session By Default

[sophisticles]

If your life relies on legacy apps, you shouldn't be choosing Fedora in the first place. In case you are, you ought to switch to Rocky Linux 9 with a desktop environment, which shares a pretty similar ecosystem with Fedora, but instead of following the trend everything is rock stable.

I would never use Rocky just on principle.

And yes, I am waiting for someone to ask me why so I can go off on them.

[sophisticles]

I would say Fedora is a technology forward distro that emphasis on software Red Hat may want to add to RHEL and to mature it. I think his comment was agreeing with you that maybe Debian or some other distro that emphasizes stability on already mature software is what you want.

Fedora is technology forward?

Fedora is a nightmare and i didn't realize it until recently.

I wrote a bunch of GUI programs, using Rust+GTK/QT/Druid, I also created a few using Go, C# and C++, and these were simple utilities for educational purposes, meant to be cross platform, running on all Linux distros and Windows.

I employed various programming techniques, including inline assembler, threading, and SIMD.

Basically I wanted to expand my knowledge and improve my resume.

I tested it extensively on Ubuntu and Windows, everything worked as expected.

I then tested it on Fedora.

Guess what happened?

I could not get a single one of them to run, not a one. The CLI versions run just fine, but the GUI versions? Nothing, even though all the libraries and dependencies are the correct versions.

And in case people think its that i don't know what I am doing, the same issue exists with Black Magic's Resolve, it runs fine on Ubuntu, I have never gotten it to run on Fedora and looking around the net it seems this is a known issue.

Fedora for me is amateur hour.

[darkonix]

I doubt any company is paying managers and HR to keep unmaintainted software on some server. And yearly cost of a server like X.org is less than one month salary of one developer.

It is simple boolean logic.
Either it is unmaintained and that costs next to nothing.
Or it is maintained, because people and companies still need it.

Looking at the announcements of updates of various x.org components, I can not see a lot of RedHat involvement. More than 50 % is done by Alan Coopersmith or Oracle.

https://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-announce/2024-March/thread.html

https://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-announce/2024-February/thread.html

https://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-announce/2024-January/thread.html

I hope Redhat is not spending billions on secretaries to maintain that.
https://www.redhat.com/en/about/pres...d-cloud-future

It is maintained, because security patches keep being released. That's basically all that is being developed for X.org. That means some company is paying that. Total cost is never negligible for a company. Also they will probably want to have their developers working on new things rather than maintain legacy software.

I thought it was mainly Red Hat but maybe other. It doesn't change the fact that they are paid, that's a cost for companies. They are going to keep it as long as their support contract require it of them. I'm guessing 10 years or so from the moment that Red Hat decides to release an enterprise distribution without X.org.

[hf_139]

It is maintained, because security patches keep being released. That's basically all that is being developed for X.org. That means some company is paying that. Total cost is never negligible for a company. Also they will probably want to have their developers working on new things rather than maintain legacy software.

I thought it was mainly Red Hat but maybe other. It doesn't change the fact that they are paid, that's a cost for companies. They are going to keep it as long as their support contract require it of them. I'm guessing 10 years or so from the moment that Red Hat decides to release an enterprise distribution without X.org.

Companies have lots of in-house software that runs on xorg.

Porting it to wayland costs money. Or might not even be possible, if its a multi-window application.
They might not even want to pay for wayland porting.
They might go with xorg for as long as possible and if xorg is dead, their Software will just deprecate Linux support.

[Weasel]

We as in the (or at least most) users of Phoronix, who come here to talk primarily about Linux and not to pester people about how Windows is soooo much better and how Linux sucks worse than Vista and XP. Also, we as in the Linux developers, who are perfectly capable of engineering and developing something on their own merit and do not need to pander to Windows/MacOS/iOS/Android tech stacks like birdies in heat, and who certainly do not need clueless non-developers to "educate" them as to how they should be doing their jobs.

Go play with birdie, Weasel.

Speak for yourself. If you're a dev for anything and you "don't give a fuck" (your words) about your competitor then you are a child throwing a tantrum or someone who lives in ignorance as I said.

Thank fuck that the actual Linux devs including me aren't like you though. Linux would still be stuck as a FreeDOS fork if they were.

[emblemparade]

I'm a heavy Fedora X11 user, and I still welcome this. As long as I can install X11 easily after installing Fedora (I usually do clean installs on new releases), I will survive.

I'm hoping that my need for X11 will disappear.

For what it's worth, my specific need is using X11-over-UDP to get GUI access to a device I can't control. I've tried to get this working with Xwayland, but got stuck. Has anybody here got that scenario to work?

[Yndoendo]

One would think that's the right move after so many years. If only, the Wayland session in GNOME was production ready after so much time. Right now, if the shell crashes, everything goes with it, that's not production ready in 2024. We're talking about a shell that's constantly changing and is partly written in JS and worst of all, even third-party extensions run in the same process, bugs and hence crashes are unavoidable. While it's true that X.Org also can't survive crashes, that happens extremely rarely nowadays because of how it's used and years of bug-fixing in compositors, e.t.c.. A bug in an extension may crash the shell or even the compositor could crash but will restart and the state will be preserved. Of course, Vista back in 2006 was and still is much better than any Linux stack and can survive a display server crash and despite the complete overhaul in the display stack, software for XP or earlier work just fine in Vista and later versions.

Window's architecture for installing updates requires the shell' ability to crash for system updating. Noticed this while updating Windows on 20+ Atom N, slow CPU and iGPU, computers used in automation. Screens kept flicking and none of the updates where drivers. A couple screens did not come back from crashing. Touchscreen interaction did nothing. Had to plug-in an external keyboard and push keys for the shell to start working again. Windows must have a check to verify the shell while engaging with HID input. Since the display went down, it broke HID input communicate, hardware or OS level, and required a jump start.

** Windows updating too one hour just to install four main KBs from a local USB drive; systems are air-gaped. This is where Windows needs better architecture. Updating an Arch last week took 15 minutes when it was last updated in 2019. That was with the first attempt failing because two increment updates where needed to resolve conflicts.

Maybe moving away from X, they can look at keeping the session active when the shell crashes. I find most of the crashes are from incompatible Gnome extensions found right after logging in. Since 40 and latter, only had two non-extension crashes during long term usage. Average five days of constant session running with screen locks between usage. Never had the Gnome shell crash while installing distro and software updates. Gnome 3.30's where crash happy with Wayland and warranted falling back to X.Org.

Linux and BSD has had `sudo` for the longest time and Microsoft finally started copy the behavior for Windows 11; even gave it the same name. This shows that restructuring solutions take time to become apples to apples while always being apples to oranges under the microscope.

[mSparks]

I'm hoping that my need for X11 will disappear.

why? This is a sentiment I really do not understand,

like

just switch to android and you get exactly that? The whole android ecosystem is now literally decades ahead of exactly what the wayland developers were trying to achieve.

[mSparks]

Linux has never offered anything that sets it apart (except being choke full of bugs and regressions and not offering any compatibility - yeah, that's something),

You got me interested in what ChatGPT had to say about that.
thanks, absolutely hillarious

[MrCooper]

For what it's worth, my specific need is using X11-over-UDP to get GUI access to a device I can't control. I've tried to get this working with Xwayland, but got stuck. Has anybody here got that scenario to work?

Do you really mean UDP, not TCP?

If it's the latter, for rootless Xwayland, the Wayland compositor would need to pass "-listen tcp" on the Xwayland command line. If that's not possible or desirable, you can run a rootful Xwayland instance with "-listen tcp" and have your device connect to that.