[Video] Red Hat Is About To End Xorg: Is Wayland Ready?
Come the next major release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat is officially dropping the Xorg package, whilst it'll still be available in RHEL 9 until 2032 the countdown has begun, Xorg is on the way out. Are you and your software going to be ready in time.
Who made Red Hat the arbiter of when xorg should end?
I mean, sure they're a major Linux vendor but their market is servers with hardly any foothold in the desktop market. It would be more interesting to see how long Debian, Ubuntu or Arch will keep xorg alive.
People are completely missing the point here. “Who made Red Hat the arbiter of when Xorg should end?”
I would say nobody but perhaps a better answer is all of us that have left the work of maintaining Xorg to Red Hat. All that Red Hat is deciding is when they are going to stop contributing. So little is done by others that, if Red Hat stops, Xorg is effectively done.
Others are of course free to step up. In fact, it may not be much work. Red Hat will still be doing most of the work as they will still be supporting Xwayland ( mostly the same code as Xorg ), libdrm, libinput, KMS, and other stuff that both Xorg and Wayland share. They just won’t be bundling it up, testing it, and releasing it as Xorg anymore.
So little is done by others that, if Red Hat stops, Xorg is effectively done.
Source?
As far as I know the X.org foundation is an independent non-profit organization, and while Red Hat is a sponsor and they have 1 member in the board of directors (out of 8), they don't appear to be the main contributor.
Redhat does a lot of testing/patching with Xorg Server.
most of the people who was working on Xorg Server moved to Wayland a few years ago, Ubuntu and Debian have been Defaulting to Wayland, on the main Desktops, and Desktops are dropping Xorg Server support in Development, this is not just Redhat.
No Patches and No $$$,$$$,$$$ = Xorg server dead. if you want to pay 15 to 20+ Software Engineers/Testers to work on Xorg Server got for it.
FreeBSD has Wayland support to.
Even the Xorg mailing list is mostly dead, many of the Xorg Server Dev's moved on, XWayland will be long lived.
and last i was there for all the Crying about XFree86 to I'm old.
By whom? Red Hat is pretty much the only one supporting X.Org so that's why. Development will not really continue because there will be nobody to do the development.
As the video points out, a lot of the work in xorg (and Linux in general, fwiw) is done by red hat engineers. So red hat cutting on that investment bears direct consequences for everyone else. Unless of course someone steps up and takes their place in maintenance, but it's not gonna happen, which is literally why Wayland (and not some revamped xorg) is the future of Linux desktop.
Also, red hat's decisions often trickle down on most other distros. E.g.: systemd, pulseaudio, pipewire, gnome, not including proprietary codecs, etc.
So, they technically don't arbiter, but they definitely set the pace.
There's no Red Hat anymore, it was sold to IBM 5 years ago. All their recent shifts in FOSS strategy are a predictable result of that. IBM only cares to streamline RHEL operations not about what's usable or appropriate for Linux in general.
Not until I can have my pretty screensavers. Yes, I care. When my laptops are on battery they don't need to S3 sleep, nor s0idle. They just show pretty animations that prompt for a password and let me in, without waiting ten years for it to wake up from its slumber