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

With the Fedora Workstation 31 feature outlook covered earlier this week, there was an interesting comment in that article by Red Hat's Christian Schaller that deserves special coverage.

A Phoronix reader pointed out the significance of one the statements in that blog post, which I hadn't explicitly called out. So in case you didn't read that blog post about Fedora Workstation 31, Red Hat's Christian Schaller says it's their belief that X.Org will soon be going into "maintenance mode" in favor of Wayland. Specifically he said:

Once we are done with [their Wayland improvements] we expect X.org to go into hard maintenance mode fairly quickly. The reality is that X.org is basically maintained by us and thus once we stop paying attention to it there is unlikely to be any major new releases coming out and there might even be some bitrot setting in over time. We will keep an eye on it as we will want to ensure X.org stays supportable until the end of the RHEL8 lifecycle at a minimum, but let this be a friendly notice for everyone who rely the work we do maintaining the Linux graphics stack, get onto Wayland, that is where the future is.

Indeed, there hasn't been a new X.Org Server release in a while nor is there any on the road-map right now for xorg-server 1.21. Red Hat's Adam Jackson has long been serving as the xorg-server release manager since Keith Packard stopped doing so when changing up his roles from Intel to HPE, etc. X.Org Server 1.20 was introduced 14 months ago while traditionally the X.Org developers pursued six month release cycles. So unless some other organization steps up to begin steering xorg-server releases, there likely won't be the 1.21 release in the near future, while Red Hat continues pushing towards a Wayland-first Linux desktop experience as the future.