Red Hat has formally confirmed what many were thinking: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 will be doing away with X.Org Server support aside from XWayland.
For those making use of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 in a desktop setting, RHEL10 due for release in H1’2025 will be Wayland-focused. X11 client support will only come via XWayland.
This does also further solidify the X.Org Server in effect being dead upstream. Red Hat engineers were typically the ones managing new X.Org Server releases as well as carrying on with various bits of development.
Wayland will reach feature parity by the right? … Right?
Wayland is just a protocol. The WMs, compositors and applications need to implement the features the X server used to provide.
Those that don’t will become useless when X is gone.
For many uses, Wayland has feature parity now or is even the superior option. That is how it can be the default on so many systems ( including RHEL9 as per the article ).
Compositors that do not provide the features that uses want will fail to compete ( what you mean by become useless I assume ).
That said, different users will want different things and, unlike X, Wayland allows competing compositors to address different communities. Some compositors will lack features some users want while offering features that other users need. A composite targeting embedded use cases may not need multi-monitor or fractional scaling features for example. A security focussed option may think that global hot-keys and external lock-screens are anti-features. I think the Wayland world could be quite interesting.
X11 is also just a protocol, and will live on with or without Xorg.
Right so I guess I should have over specified that I hope ALL the other bits that actually make it function the same will also catch up and for example something as basic as forwarding GUI programs will simply work without jumping through a bunch of tedious flaming hoops with pitfalls on either side. It doesn’t really matter to me that Wayland has decided it’s somebody else problem.
“Forwarding GUI programs” already works. Check out Waypipe.
Its pretty close and is so much better in terms of stability and reliability
I don’t think so. 15 years of using X11 and not a single stability issue. 10 years hearing about Wayland is coming and 1 year of actually using Wayland and I’ve had to switch compositors two times and rely on xorg as a backup because it’s still not ready after years of pushing it.
Well I suppose we have had different experiences then.
I had screen tearing on x11 until fairly recently.
I’ve never experienced such a thing. The only reason I switched to Wayland was because of it’s security improvements. But overall I think that for any regular user it’s a downgrade coming from the robustness of X11.