this post was submitted on 28 Nov 2023
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So X.Org fully dies on the 31st May 2035 with the end of Extended Life Cycle Support for RHEL 9. We have XOrg's death day. Even if it will likely be on it's death bed taking its final breaths for years before that.
I thought this as well but the more I think about it, the less true this seems. From an engineering point of view, it could last longer.
Xwayland is really just Xorg and Xwayland continues to be supported in RHEL10 and beyond.
Xorg and Wayland compositors have grown together in some ways. Both now use libinput, libdrm, and KMS for example. Those are not going away.
Xwayland is really just Xorg adapted to talk to Wayland instead of KMS and libinput. It is mostly the same code. So, Xorg will continue to benefit from the care and attention that Xwayland gets. Perhaps there may not be many new features but the code is not going to bit rot and security will continue to be addressed. While Xwayland does not use libinput or KMS, the Wayland compositor itself will, so those pieces are also going to be maintained including new features and new hardware support. Mesa is a common component as well.
So, while Red Hat may stop coordinating releases of Xorg at some point, a surprising amount of the code will still be actively maintained and current. It may not take a lot of work for somebody else to take over and bundle it up as a release.
What will probably kill Xorg is lack of demand.
Despite the anti-Wayland chatter, the migration to Wayland looks like it will gain substantial momentum this year and next and not only on Linux. Three to five years from now, the number of people that still care about Xorg ( as the primary display server - not as Xwayland ) may be very small indeed. Obviously it will be running on older systems for a long, long time but, ten years from now, installing Xorg on a new system is likely to be very rare ( like CP/M now rare ).
Red Hat may end up being one of the very last players that cares about Xorg after 2030. My guess is that most of the current never-Wayland crowd will have moved to it long before then.
Yeah, thank you for doing such a good explanation of it. I completely agree. Truth be told, the features I missed with Qtile on Wayland (some bugs that took a while to iron out, and are only fixed in qtile-git, as well as rounded corners, which are a work-in-progress, leaving me with only 1 issue with Qtile, that being how difficult Qtile Wayland is to install and set up, if only there was a working guide for doing so via pip, but pywayland and/or pywlroots via pip are usually broken), were all fixed by Hyprland, so I'm on Hyprland full time now, and I love it! There is only one minor issue I have (drop downs from Waybar's systray are kinda broken on Hyprland, rendering weirdly, with strange black gaps between sections and rendering under, rather than over, windows).