RHEL 10 Plans To Drop X.Org Server Except For XWayland
'"Red Hat is going to do away with the X.Org server and support Wayland and XWayland for apps that currently (or only) run on X11," writes Slashdot reader motang. Red Hat's Carlos Soriano Sanchez confirmed on the Red Hat blog: "The result of this evaluation is that, while there are still some gaps and applications that need some level of adaptation, we believe the Wayland infrastructure and ecosystem are in good shape, and that we're on a good path for the identified blockers to be resolved by the time RHEL 10 is out, planned to be released on the first half of 2025. With this, we've decided to remove Xorg server and other X servers (except Xwayland) from RHEL 10 and the following releases. Xwayland should be able to handle most X11 clients that won't immediately be ported to Wayland, and if needed, our customers will be able to stay on RHEL 9 for its full life cycle while resolving the specifics needed for transitioning to a Wayland ecosystem. It's important to note that "Xorg Server" and "X11" are not synonymous, X11 is a protocol that will continue to be supported through Xwayland, while the Xorg Server is one of the implementations of the X11 protocol. [...] This decision will allow us to focus our efforts starting from RHEL 10 solely on a modern stack and ecosystem. This means we will be able to tackle problems such as HDR, increased security, setups with mixed low and high density displays or very high density displays, better GPU/Display hot-plugging, better gestures and scrolling, and so on. We are confident that Wayland will provide a solid platform and we're excited to work with the community and all of our partners and customers on building the future for Linux." ' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/23/11/29/0559207 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
On Thu, 30 Nov 2023 09:29:28 +1300, Peter Reutemann quoted:
'"Red Hat is going to do away with the X.Org server and support ...'
A different, more opinionated take <https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/29/rhel_10_dropping_x11/>. The writer seems quite worried about the decline of X11, perhaps even seeing it as a threat to the BSDs, since Wayland development is primarily concentrating on Linux.
On Thu, 30 Nov 2023 09:29:28 +1300, Peter Reutemann quoted:
'"Red Hat is going to do away with the X.Org server and support ...'
Another pithy comment from the aforementioned Don Hopkins <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17637483>: Jon Steinhart: "Had he done some real design work and looked at what others were doing he might have realized that at its core, X was a distributed database system in which operations on some of the databases have visual side-effects. I forget the exact number, but X includes around 20 different databases: atoms, properties, contexts, selections, keymaps, etc. each with their own set of API calls. As a result, the X API is wide and shallow like the Mac, and full of interesting race conditions to boot. The whole thing could have been done with less than a dozen API calls." This is relating to some other interesting ideas that were kicking around at the time (late 1980s) that X11 came out. In particular, Sun’s “NeWS”, which was based on loading an enhanced dialect of PostScript code into the display server to handle much of the mechanics of user interaction. That was not available for long, before Sun abandoned the idea to join in with all the other Unix vendors in embracing X11.
participants (2)
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Lawrence D'Oliveiro -
Peter Reutemann