16 ms·

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 Plans for Wayland and Xorg Server

49 points by greyw 3y ago

josephcsible 3y ago
The most important part: > we’ve decided to remove Xorg server and other X servers (except Xwayland) from RHEL 10 and the following releases Isn't RHEL supposed to be the distro that gives you long-term support and stability for things? Why are they committing to remove X before Wayland gets full feature parity with it?
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  Given that they say RHEL 10 will be ~2025, perhaps they're merely optimistic about the next year or two
- genmud 3y ago
  I have noticed most software maintenance / engineering decisionmaking over the last decade can be boiled down to “because you suck, and we hate you”.
- cptskippy 3y ago
  X is a moving target, RHEL continuing to support X and push it to customers maintains it's relevance and helps propel it forward. By not channeling resources into supporting and maintaining X, they will simultaneously slow the speed that X is moving, be able to divert more resources to Wayland, and light a fire under the asses of people who haven't transitioned to Wayland. X is 32 years old and Wayland has been the replacement for it going on 15 years! That's insane, it's time for distros to pick a side. Either continue to support X or switch to Wayland.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
    > By not channeling resources into supporting and maintaining X, they will simultaneously slow the speed that X is moving, be able to divert more resources to Wayland, and light a fire under the asses of people who haven't transitioned to Wayland. Ah yes, the time honored "if you can't reach feature parity, just make the old thing worse" strategy. That'll really win hearts and minds.
    - bluGill 3y ago
      Are you working on X? Are you donating to get others to work on X? He who does the work in open source calls the shots. Nobody is working on X anymore as of like 10 years ago, holdouts need to put up and support X, or switch to Wayland. Sure Wayland needs work, but everything I can see says it is a better architecture and people are working on it.
      - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
        Mm, there's a fine line there - people who aren't contributing aren't entitled to demand work from people who are, but that doesn't mean that their complaints about shortcomings are somehow invalid. Or put differently, just because Wayland is given away for free doesn't make it immune to criticism. And > Nobody is working on X anymore as of like 10 years ago is just factually incorrect; it's actively maintained, and it's kind of hard to point at a single changelog because of how Xorg releases components separately, but ex. https://www.phoronix.com/news/Modesetting-TearFree-Merged https://www.phoronix.com/news/Modesetting-TearFree-Merged is a feature release from late last year, and there have been multiple security/bug fix releases this year. In any event, yes, I am donating to drive work on Xorg; am I allowed to call out regressions now?
        bluGill 3y ago
        X is maintained, but only the bare minimum possible. I wasn't aware of TearFree, but looks like someone stepped in to do that work - will that person continue add features to X, switch to Wayland, or go away: I don't know. That work plus security/bug releases is not very much. How much are you donating to Xorg? $200,000 entitles you to one year labor (that is probably a low estimate). If it is $100 (a much more likely donation) you gets you an hours worth of effort. Xorg needs a lot of money just to keep the lights on, so probably you don't even get that hour just because it all goes to web hosting and other overhead (thanks for giving it - they do need that)
    - Vilian 3y ago
      they aren't making it worse, they are only focusing wayland to reach feature parity, and xorg is already death in development, so it don't change too much
  - DonHopkins 3y ago
    X is a moving target only in the vertical Wile E Coyote sense: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRSHzenjiNA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRSHzenjiNA
- pxeboot 3y ago
  This is starting to feel like the arguments against systemd all over again. A few highly vocal people hate it, but it works just fine for almost everybody else.
  - kelnos 3y ago
    As someone who has been working on porting a desktop environment to Wayland for the past year or so, I don't hate Wayland, but I certainly don't love it. After 10-15 years, it still seems pretty half-baked. Some pretty fundamental-feeling protocols have been languishing as merge requests on git.freedesktop.org, some for 3+ years at this point. I get that you don't want to rush standardization of things that need to remain stable and backward-compatible for (hopefully) decades), but c'mon, this is getting to be a bit much. At this point I cannot actually replicate Xfce feature-for-feature in Wayland, not without inventing private protocols of my own, which I'd prefer not to do. My biggest issue right now is xfce4-panel, and embedding surfaces from one process into a parent process. There's no Wayland way to do this, and the Wayland folks have explicitly rejected some sort of XEMBED-workalike Wayland protocol, instead telling people they should write an embedded Wayland compositor. Well, I've been working on that for the past eight months, and it's hard to get right. I have something that "works", but it has a lot of rough edges, and, critically, eventually either the parent app or embedded apps run into weird spurious protocol errors and quit. While yes, that's technically my fault and my bugs, working with an under-documented protocol and really bare-bones libraries for building apps (wlroots, sadly, is not suitable for writing an embedded compositor, as it does too much) doesn't make any of this easier. I've written more than 10k lines of code (so far), and, meanwhile, you can do an XEMBED implementation in a few hundred. I get that X11 made certain things impossible. But why not build an "X12" rather than throwing everything out and staring completely from scratch? It seems like people just didn't feel like it, and building something new was more exciting and would look better on their resume. I of all people know it's not cool to tell people what open source software to build in their spare time (though, to be fair, many/most of the people involved in Wayland are employed or at least funded by corporations), but jeez, this has been exhausting.
    - MBCook 3y ago
- IMcD23 3y ago
  They are removing the Xorg server, but not X entirely. They will continue to support X through Xwayland.
- alright2565 3y ago
  "long term support" means you get 10 years of support on each major release. It doesn't imply anything between releases.
- bluGill 3y ago
  Because if they don't remove it now (fot a 2025 release) they are stuck supporting it until 2035. Remove it now and everyone is on notice
- stephen_g 3y ago
  How do you figure they are not supporting things long-term? RHEL 9 (with the current X server) is fully supported to 2027 with maintenance support (i.e. security updates) until 2032... That's an incredibly long time.
- MBCook 3y ago
  > Isn't RHEL supposed to be the distro that gives you long-term support and stability for things That’s why RedHat 9, which still supports Xorg, has support until 2032.
- dathinab 3y ago
  yes long term support for every stable release things can still change between the releases RHEL 9 is supported until 2032, with the right support contract you might get even more years, idk. so you have another ~8 years with Xorg on RHEL and since RHEL made Wayland the default in RHEL8 (released mid 2019) it is clear for 3+ years that you _slowly_ have to start planing migrating to Wayland. Which means customer have around 10 years time to slowly plan and execute the migration.
- vetinari 3y ago
  > Isn't RHEL supposed to be the distro that gives you long-term support and stability for things? Why are they committing to remove X before Wayland gets full feature parity with it? Because they provide long term support. With RHEL10 being released in 2025, that would mean having to support Xorg up to 2035, which they obviously do not want. Additionally, it would slow down the transition. Many would take it, that they have extra time and need not bother yet. By this announcement, it is clear that there are no extra years, clock is ticking, by 2029 the Xorg is dead.
yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
Honestly I kind of assumed that was the future direction, especially with their work on rootful xwayland - I'm surprised that they didn't emphasize that path forward. Edit: Though I do feel obligated to say that > Today, Wayland has been recognized as the de-facto windowing and display infrastructure solution. Is... optimistic. It has been called that, usually by people busy explaining why your use case isn't valid and shut up already about Wayland's shortcomings, but that's not quite the same as it being true.
- dathinab 3y ago
  > Is... optimistic. RHES is looking at their (potential) paying customers, not Linux in general. And a lot of that are in a context where there are many further restrictions to what can be run and how thinks can be setup. For example software whitelists and/or multi device administration where you are not admin on you desktop system. This for example means that for them most windows managers which are not GNOME/KDE did never matter for them at all (and just to be clear most means most, there are some exceptions). And XWayland is also still around in RHEL10 which mean the only problem are applications which 1. for their customers matter, 2. do not work correctly with XWayland, 3. can not be ported to a newer version of their GUI framework which supports Wayland. Which let's be honest aren't that many to begin with and mainly was stuff like e.g. missing HDR support for certain VFX use cases and similar, whist has been fixed by now. So for RHEL this isn't "optimistic" but very realistic and based on facts derived from studies done with their customers, not some "busy people".
  - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
    I really struggle to read "the de-facto windowing and display infrastructure solution" as "for our super narrow usecases" rather than a very general claim. Though yes, if that's the meaning then it's much easier to defend; if RH knows that none of their customers need an actual raw Xorg server without xwayland, then it's really easy for them to say that they can drop Xorg proper.
    - dathinab 3y ago
Filligree 3y ago
So, nvidia users need not apply then.
- shmerl 3y ago
  I think RedHat sponsors some work on Nouveau, so that plus Nvk will be good for Nvidia users in not too distant future.
  - Vilian 3y ago
    isn't nouveau mostly red hat work?
    - shmerl 3y ago
      Yeah, Dave Airlie does a lot of that work.
  - Filligree 3y ago
    Will it support CUDA applications?
    - shmerl 3y ago
      I doubt it. No one is working on implementing CUDA on top of it.
    - arp242 3y ago
      Is that needed? Can't you run the GUI (Wayland, or X11) with Nouveau and CUDA with the nVidia driver?
      - shmerl 3y ago
        Yeah, good point. CUDA doesn't depend on the display server anyway. But not sure if it's possible to have Nvidia's kernel module and nouveau enabled at the same time. I remember one was disabling another in the past explicitly.
      - 3y ago
timetraveller26 3y ago
> 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 such a drastic change a "should" it's not enough.
- justahuman74 3y ago
  In theory you could keep using rhel9 till 2032, so theres plenty of road to kick the can down
- dathinab 3y ago
  since when is a change which had been incoming for 10+ years drastic? plus the huge majority of software doesn't directly communicate with either X or Wayland, but instead with some GUI library which does that for them. Which means that instead of porting thousands of applications you need to port a handful of relevant GUI libraries and any software which is keept up to date will "just work". Sure when it comes to some "desktop environment utilities" and similar that won't work, but for most of them there are Wayland compatible ports or alternatives. Also each (major) version for RHEL is supported for many years which means that going in 2 versions through deprecation and removal isn't drastic at all either (RHEL 9 is planned to be "supported" for roughly another 8 years, through mostly security fixes and similar at some point in a few years).
  - brnt 3y ago
    Shifting to Wayland hasn't been incoming since the project never meant to support everything X did. It follows directly that it never could, if you care about supporting all your users and all their uses.
    - dathinab 3y ago
      I'm not sure how to properly response to your comment without it sounding mean because it's pretty much nonsense. Wayland from the beginning was meant to replace X and this was pushed from a lot of sides, including some of the core developers of X at that point in time. So it had been very clear, from the get to go, that X will go and be gone sooner or later. That was clear like 10 years or so ago! Anything wayland didn't support pretty much falls into one of three categories: - its a security issue, so it was meant to be removed and would have been removed from X if that would have been viable - it's somewhat broken and not really properly supported by X either with there being alternative better working approaches (e.g. the whole network transparency thing) - it's not yet supported by wayland, but wayland is designed with extensibility in mind and there is since years a standard group which is standardizing additional wayland protocols and basically stating what any implementation should support. By now the large majority of gaps are filled and it has become often more a question of weather or not the wayland implementation you use has implemented it yet then weather it's supported per-se. Most times that's not too much of an issues but if you are on a distribution which mainly ships outdated software versions or on some niche mostly hobby project wayland implementations that can be an issue. There are some minor exceptions to that 3 categories (e.g. wrt. certain front rendering things) but they in the larger picture don't matter and normal have alternatives in the 3rd category. > if you care about supporting all your users and all their uses. No one does support all users. Or at least no one who doesn't hypocritically claims things they can't long term commit too does. You always should support the majority of users. If you have contributing users with a bias for them. But going from that to all isn't possible without stopping any changes and outside of some (but not even all) bug fixes stopping development. But that would kill your software sooner or later. Times change and resources are limited. What was acceptable security wise 20 years ago today can land you in prison for negligence (well legal troubles then prison, it's a metaphor). Similar requirements change, In the past supporting keyboard is enough, then mouse today controllers and drawing pans and in at most 20 years proper touch support is essential. This means your codebase needs to be changeable, maintainable and secure enough for the resources the maintainers have available. For X non of this was the case and some of the problems where of fundamental architectural nature. So that X needs to die was known even before wayland was a think. I mean if I buy a new car I make it fit my current and coming requirements and if just because it means I can't help some friend of mine with moving something as much as I could before doesn't mean it's not a replacement, because in the end what matter the most is what the person who pays for the car and maintains it needs, not what a friend who doesn't contribute anything to it would prefer it to be.
quyleanh 3y ago
Sorry, about Wayland, I thought it still has some disadvantages and also still not widely supported such as VNC related things? Could anyone enlighten me?
vermaden 3y ago
Goodbye RHEL.
- CoolCold 3y ago
  Mine giving some details? Never used RHEL for GUI apps, servers mostly (well, Centos), why it's goodbye, what kind of blocker it will be for your team and corporate IT staff?
bonzini 3y ago
> 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
- worthless-trash 3y ago
  I read this as "Please report bugs early in the RHEL 10 lifecycle so it can get fixed".
- flohofwoe 3y ago
  Ugh, "...that won't be immediately ported..." sounds like they want to get rid of XWayland too at one point. Why don't they simply accept that some programs will never be ported to native Wayland APIs since Wayland implementations don't offer required features for some types of programs (like universal support for rendering consistent window decorations). With XWayland, X11 is just another client-side window system API, why not simply support that forever and why should it matter for application developers what happens below the X11 API shim? Especially since it is more feature complete and much less hassle than writing code directly against Wayland APIs?
  - m4rtink 3y ago
    Well, someone would still have to maintain a huge chunk of X indefinitely for that to work. :P
    - flohofwoe 3y ago
      It can't be much more than a thin "translation layer" on top of Wayland similar to how xcb or xlib are two different flavours of the same thing right? The most important feature of XWayland is that it knows how to render the window chrome so that it looks consistent with other apps.
      - 3y ago
naranha 3y ago
Remote desktop is not quite there yet it feels. It's the only reason to still use X imho.
- shmerl 3y ago
  freerdp has some integration with Gnome and KDE, but yeah, it's work in progress still.
- pmontra 3y ago
  Last time I tried to use Wayland on my NVidia laptop it didn't work well, both with the proprietary driver and with Noveau. I can't remember the details and I have too many open apps to logout and try again now. I switched back to Xorg and forgot about it. It was January this year, Debian 11.
  - nolist_policy 3y ago
    Software in Debian 11 is now 2 years old as far as features and bugfixes are concerned.
  - Caligatio 3y ago
    I had weird flickering and micro screen freezes with my 2070 on Arch using Wayland on my new desktop build 3 weeks ago. Switching to Xorg fixed everything.
  - NullPrefix 3y ago
    >NVidia laptop didn't work well on linux closing as WONTFIX, everything working as expected
    - wing-_-nuts 3y ago
      [flagged]
    - pmontra 3y ago
      I know, but it works well with X11.
Ologn 3y ago
I use X11 as opposed to Wayland with my Ubuntu desktop. One reason is that if I open a Gnome terminal and start to expand or shrink its size, a tooltip appears showing its size as I am modifying it. IIRC, wayland does not do this, out of the box any how. I remember that there are other things that break for me as well, but I can't recall them off the top of my head.
- audidude 3y ago
  There is an overlay now in gnome-terminal git that will give you this on wayland. I added it last month.
  - Ologn 3y ago
    Great, I will check it out.
wing-_-nuts 3y ago
I was initially excited for wayland, and was an early adopter. I soon soured on the entire thing. It's very clear to me that wayland was an 'ivory tower' display server that had little respect for users or wm devs. You can't just go and break tons of things for security's sake when the harm is clearly higher than the benefits. Disabling screen and input capture should have been an 'opt in' feature for the truly paranoid. They should have also shipped a fully working bare bones desktop wm instead of a 'toy' implementation meant to run on a car entertainment center. Frankly I can't believe it got as much traction as it has, but we're all stuck with it now as it's clearly 'the future'. This and systemd really showed me that the linux ecosystem is far more vulnerable to the interests of a few corporate sponsored devs than the general community.
- prmoustache 3y ago
  > Disabling screen and input capture should have been an 'opt in' feature for the truly paranoid. You can do screen captures on wayland. I've seen tools that were used to share a mouse and a keyboard to multiple computers kvm like that supported wayland so input capture seems to be possible to me. My only gripe with wayland is that we seems to be lacking a common top level interface that is compatible with any compositor. Right now if some feature is not managed by the toolkit's wayland backend, devs need to have to implement compatibility with gnome's mutter, wlroots based compositor and kwin independently which doesn't seem to be a sane way of doing things. I wish all projects would converge into a common library like wlroots.
  - wing-_-nuts 3y ago
    You can, now, but it's still not up to the level of polish that we had in x11, and nearly all of these are janky workarounds to a self inflicted problem
    - bitwize 3y ago
      That will change, and you can expect support in Wayland to eventually surpass X11 because guess where all the developer effort is.
throw0101c 3y ago
Perhaps of some interest is "A Political History of X" by Keith Packard from the 2020 Linux Conference Australia (LCA): * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cj02_UeUnGQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cj02_UeUnGQ > Packard is responsible for many X extensions and technical papers on X. He has been heavily involved in the development of X since the late 1980s as a member of the MIT X Consortium, XFree86 and the X.Org Foundation. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Packard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Packard Goes over things from the early 1980s.
motiejus 3y ago
I am upset by this. I have used awesome for >10 years now, and the way awesome does multi-monitor support has grown into me. No other WM, wayland or X11, has offered it. I am upset not because of X "deprecation" (still not convinced it will happen, hopeful it won't), but rather that I will, again, need to invest time and energy into something that had worked just fine for more than a decade.
bitwize 3y ago
[flagged]

49 points by greyw 3y ago

The most important part: > we’ve decided to remove Xorg server and other X servers (except Xwayland) from RHEL 10 and the following releases Isn't RHEL supposed to be the distro that gives you long-term support and stability for things? Why are they committing to remove X before Wayland gets full feature parity with it?

yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
Given that they say RHEL 10 will be ~2025, perhaps they're merely optimistic about the next year or two
genmud 3y ago
I have noticed most software maintenance / engineering decisionmaking over the last decade can be boiled down to “because you suck, and we hate you”.
cptskippy 3y ago
X is a moving target, RHEL continuing to support X and push it to customers maintains it's relevance and helps propel it forward. By not channeling resources into supporting and maintaining X, they will simultaneously slow the speed that X is moving, be able to divert more resources to Wayland, and light a fire under the asses of people who haven't transitioned to Wayland. X is 32 years old and Wayland has been the replacement for it going on 15 years! That's insane, it's time for distros to pick a side. Either continue to support X or switch to Wayland.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  > By not channeling resources into supporting and maintaining X, they will simultaneously slow the speed that X is moving, be able to divert more resources to Wayland, and light a fire under the asses of people who haven't transitioned to Wayland. Ah yes, the time honored "if you can't reach feature parity, just make the old thing worse" strategy. That'll really win hearts and minds.
  - bluGill 3y ago
    Are you working on X? Are you donating to get others to work on X? He who does the work in open source calls the shots. Nobody is working on X anymore as of like 10 years ago, holdouts need to put up and support X, or switch to Wayland. Sure Wayland needs work, but everything I can see says it is a better architecture and people are working on it.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
      Mm, there's a fine line there - people who aren't contributing aren't entitled to demand work from people who are, but that doesn't mean that their complaints about shortcomings are somehow invalid. Or put differently, just because Wayland is given away for free doesn't make it immune to criticism. And > Nobody is working on X anymore as of like 10 years ago is just factually incorrect; it's actively maintained, and it's kind of hard to point at a single changelog because of how Xorg releases components separately, but ex. https://www.phoronix.com/news/Modesetting-TearFree-Merged https://www.phoronix.com/news/Modesetting-TearFree-Merged is a feature release from late last year, and there have been multiple security/bug fix releases this year. In any event, yes, I am donating to drive work on Xorg; am I allowed to call out regressions now?
      - bluGill 3y ago
        X is maintained, but only the bare minimum possible. I wasn't aware of TearFree, but looks like someone stepped in to do that work - will that person continue add features to X, switch to Wayland, or go away: I don't know. That work plus security/bug releases is not very much. How much are you donating to Xorg? $200,000 entitles you to one year labor (that is probably a low estimate). If it is $100 (a much more likely donation) you gets you an hours worth of effort. Xorg needs a lot of money just to keep the lights on, so probably you don't even get that hour just because it all goes to web hosting and other overhead (thanks for giving it - they do need that)
  - Vilian 3y ago
    they aren't making it worse, they are only focusing wayland to reach feature parity, and xorg is already death in development, so it don't change too much
- DonHopkins 3y ago
  X is a moving target only in the vertical Wile E Coyote sense: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRSHzenjiNA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRSHzenjiNA
pxeboot 3y ago
This is starting to feel like the arguments against systemd all over again. A few highly vocal people hate it, but it works just fine for almost everybody else.
- kelnos 3y ago
  As someone who has been working on porting a desktop environment to Wayland for the past year or so, I don't hate Wayland, but I certainly don't love it. After 10-15 years, it still seems pretty half-baked. Some pretty fundamental-feeling protocols have been languishing as merge requests on git.freedesktop.org, some for 3+ years at this point. I get that you don't want to rush standardization of things that need to remain stable and backward-compatible for (hopefully) decades), but c'mon, this is getting to be a bit much. At this point I cannot actually replicate Xfce feature-for-feature in Wayland, not without inventing private protocols of my own, which I'd prefer not to do. My biggest issue right now is xfce4-panel, and embedding surfaces from one process into a parent process. There's no Wayland way to do this, and the Wayland folks have explicitly rejected some sort of XEMBED-workalike Wayland protocol, instead telling people they should write an embedded Wayland compositor. Well, I've been working on that for the past eight months, and it's hard to get right. I have something that "works", but it has a lot of rough edges, and, critically, eventually either the parent app or embedded apps run into weird spurious protocol errors and quit. While yes, that's technically my fault and my bugs, working with an under-documented protocol and really bare-bones libraries for building apps (wlroots, sadly, is not suitable for writing an embedded compositor, as it does too much) doesn't make any of this easier. I've written more than 10k lines of code (so far), and, meanwhile, you can do an XEMBED implementation in a few hundred. I get that X11 made certain things impossible. But why not build an "X12" rather than throwing everything out and staring completely from scratch? It seems like people just didn't feel like it, and building something new was more exciting and would look better on their resume. I of all people know it's not cool to tell people what open source software to build in their spare time (though, to be fair, many/most of the people involved in Wayland are employed or at least funded by corporations), but jeez, this has been exhausting.
  - MBCook 3y ago
IMcD23 3y ago
They are removing the Xorg server, but not X entirely. They will continue to support X through Xwayland.
alright2565 3y ago
"long term support" means you get 10 years of support on each major release. It doesn't imply anything between releases.
bluGill 3y ago
Because if they don't remove it now (fot a 2025 release) they are stuck supporting it until 2035. Remove it now and everyone is on notice
stephen_g 3y ago
How do you figure they are not supporting things long-term? RHEL 9 (with the current X server) is fully supported to 2027 with maintenance support (i.e. security updates) until 2032... That's an incredibly long time.
MBCook 3y ago
> Isn't RHEL supposed to be the distro that gives you long-term support and stability for things That’s why RedHat 9, which still supports Xorg, has support until 2032.
dathinab 3y ago
yes long term support for every stable release things can still change between the releases RHEL 9 is supported until 2032, with the right support contract you might get even more years, idk. so you have another ~8 years with Xorg on RHEL and since RHEL made Wayland the default in RHEL8 (released mid 2019) it is clear for 3+ years that you _slowly_ have to start planing migrating to Wayland. Which means customer have around 10 years time to slowly plan and execute the migration.
vetinari 3y ago
> Isn't RHEL supposed to be the distro that gives you long-term support and stability for things? Why are they committing to remove X before Wayland gets full feature parity with it? Because they provide long term support. With RHEL10 being released in 2025, that would mean having to support Xorg up to 2035, which they obviously do not want. Additionally, it would slow down the transition. Many would take it, that they have extra time and need not bother yet. By this announcement, it is clear that there are no extra years, clock is ticking, by 2029 the Xorg is dead.

yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago

Honestly I kind of assumed that was the future direction, especially with their work on rootful xwayland - I'm surprised that they didn't emphasize that path forward. Edit: Though I do feel obligated to say that > Today, Wayland has been recognized as the de-facto windowing and display infrastructure solution. Is... optimistic. It has been called that, usually by people busy explaining why your use case isn't valid and shut up already about Wayland's shortcomings, but that's not quite the same as it being true.

dathinab 3y ago
> Is... optimistic. RHES is looking at their (potential) paying customers, not Linux in general. And a lot of that are in a context where there are many further restrictions to what can be run and how thinks can be setup. For example software whitelists and/or multi device administration where you are not admin on you desktop system. This for example means that for them most windows managers which are not GNOME/KDE did never matter for them at all (and just to be clear most means most, there are some exceptions). And XWayland is also still around in RHEL10 which mean the only problem are applications which 1. for their customers matter, 2. do not work correctly with XWayland, 3. can not be ported to a newer version of their GUI framework which supports Wayland. Which let's be honest aren't that many to begin with and mainly was stuff like e.g. missing HDR support for certain VFX use cases and similar, whist has been fixed by now. So for RHEL this isn't "optimistic" but very realistic and based on facts derived from studies done with their customers, not some "busy people".
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  I really struggle to read "the de-facto windowing and display infrastructure solution" as "for our super narrow usecases" rather than a very general claim. Though yes, if that's the meaning then it's much easier to defend; if RH knows that none of their customers need an actual raw Xorg server without xwayland, then it's really easy for them to say that they can drop Xorg proper.
  - dathinab 3y ago

Filligree 3y ago

So, nvidia users need not apply then.

shmerl 3y ago
I think RedHat sponsors some work on Nouveau, so that plus Nvk will be good for Nvidia users in not too distant future.
- Vilian 3y ago
  isn't nouveau mostly red hat work?
  - shmerl 3y ago
    Yeah, Dave Airlie does a lot of that work.
- Filligree 3y ago
  Will it support CUDA applications?
  - shmerl 3y ago
    I doubt it. No one is working on implementing CUDA on top of it.
  - arp242 3y ago
    Is that needed? Can't you run the GUI (Wayland, or X11) with Nouveau and CUDA with the nVidia driver?
    - shmerl 3y ago
      Yeah, good point. CUDA doesn't depend on the display server anyway. But not sure if it's possible to have Nvidia's kernel module and nouveau enabled at the same time. I remember one was disabling another in the past explicitly.
    - 3y ago

timetraveller26 3y ago

> 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 such a drastic change a "should" it's not enough.

justahuman74 3y ago
In theory you could keep using rhel9 till 2032, so theres plenty of road to kick the can down
dathinab 3y ago
since when is a change which had been incoming for 10+ years drastic? plus the huge majority of software doesn't directly communicate with either X or Wayland, but instead with some GUI library which does that for them. Which means that instead of porting thousands of applications you need to port a handful of relevant GUI libraries and any software which is keept up to date will "just work". Sure when it comes to some "desktop environment utilities" and similar that won't work, but for most of them there are Wayland compatible ports or alternatives. Also each (major) version for RHEL is supported for many years which means that going in 2 versions through deprecation and removal isn't drastic at all either (RHEL 9 is planned to be "supported" for roughly another 8 years, through mostly security fixes and similar at some point in a few years).
- brnt 3y ago
  Shifting to Wayland hasn't been incoming since the project never meant to support everything X did. It follows directly that it never could, if you care about supporting all your users and all their uses.
  - dathinab 3y ago
    I'm not sure how to properly response to your comment without it sounding mean because it's pretty much nonsense. Wayland from the beginning was meant to replace X and this was pushed from a lot of sides, including some of the core developers of X at that point in time. So it had been very clear, from the get to go, that X will go and be gone sooner or later. That was clear like 10 years or so ago! Anything wayland didn't support pretty much falls into one of three categories: - its a security issue, so it was meant to be removed and would have been removed from X if that would have been viable - it's somewhat broken and not really properly supported by X either with there being alternative better working approaches (e.g. the whole network transparency thing) - it's not yet supported by wayland, but wayland is designed with extensibility in mind and there is since years a standard group which is standardizing additional wayland protocols and basically stating what any implementation should support. By now the large majority of gaps are filled and it has become often more a question of weather or not the wayland implementation you use has implemented it yet then weather it's supported per-se. Most times that's not too much of an issues but if you are on a distribution which mainly ships outdated software versions or on some niche mostly hobby project wayland implementations that can be an issue. There are some minor exceptions to that 3 categories (e.g. wrt. certain front rendering things) but they in the larger picture don't matter and normal have alternatives in the 3rd category. > if you care about supporting all your users and all their uses. No one does support all users. Or at least no one who doesn't hypocritically claims things they can't long term commit too does. You always should support the majority of users. If you have contributing users with a bias for them. But going from that to all isn't possible without stopping any changes and outside of some (but not even all) bug fixes stopping development. But that would kill your software sooner or later. Times change and resources are limited. What was acceptable security wise 20 years ago today can land you in prison for negligence (well legal troubles then prison, it's a metaphor). Similar requirements change, In the past supporting keyboard is enough, then mouse today controllers and drawing pans and in at most 20 years proper touch support is essential. This means your codebase needs to be changeable, maintainable and secure enough for the resources the maintainers have available. For X non of this was the case and some of the problems where of fundamental architectural nature. So that X needs to die was known even before wayland was a think. I mean if I buy a new car I make it fit my current and coming requirements and if just because it means I can't help some friend of mine with moving something as much as I could before doesn't mean it's not a replacement, because in the end what matter the most is what the person who pays for the car and maintains it needs, not what a friend who doesn't contribute anything to it would prefer it to be.

quyleanh 3y ago

Sorry, about Wayland, I thought it still has some disadvantages and also still not widely supported such as VNC related things? Could anyone enlighten me?

vermaden 3y ago

Goodbye RHEL.

CoolCold 3y ago
Mine giving some details? Never used RHEL for GUI apps, servers mostly (well, Centos), why it's goodbye, what kind of blocker it will be for your team and corporate IT staff?

bonzini 3y ago

> 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

worthless-trash 3y ago
I read this as "Please report bugs early in the RHEL 10 lifecycle so it can get fixed".
flohofwoe 3y ago
Ugh, "...that won't be immediately ported..." sounds like they want to get rid of XWayland too at one point. Why don't they simply accept that some programs will never be ported to native Wayland APIs since Wayland implementations don't offer required features for some types of programs (like universal support for rendering consistent window decorations). With XWayland, X11 is just another client-side window system API, why not simply support that forever and why should it matter for application developers what happens below the X11 API shim? Especially since it is more feature complete and much less hassle than writing code directly against Wayland APIs?
- m4rtink 3y ago
  Well, someone would still have to maintain a huge chunk of X indefinitely for that to work. :P
  - flohofwoe 3y ago
    It can't be much more than a thin "translation layer" on top of Wayland similar to how xcb or xlib are two different flavours of the same thing right? The most important feature of XWayland is that it knows how to render the window chrome so that it looks consistent with other apps.
    - 3y ago

naranha 3y ago

Remote desktop is not quite there yet it feels. It's the only reason to still use X imho.

shmerl 3y ago
freerdp has some integration with Gnome and KDE, but yeah, it's work in progress still.
pmontra 3y ago
Last time I tried to use Wayland on my NVidia laptop it didn't work well, both with the proprietary driver and with Noveau. I can't remember the details and I have too many open apps to logout and try again now. I switched back to Xorg and forgot about it. It was January this year, Debian 11.
- nolist_policy 3y ago
  Software in Debian 11 is now 2 years old as far as features and bugfixes are concerned.
- Caligatio 3y ago
  I had weird flickering and micro screen freezes with my 2070 on Arch using Wayland on my new desktop build 3 weeks ago. Switching to Xorg fixed everything.
- NullPrefix 3y ago
  >NVidia laptop didn't work well on linux closing as WONTFIX, everything working as expected
  - wing-_-nuts 3y ago
    [flagged]
  - pmontra 3y ago
    I know, but it works well with X11.

Ologn 3y ago

I use X11 as opposed to Wayland with my Ubuntu desktop. One reason is that if I open a Gnome terminal and start to expand or shrink its size, a tooltip appears showing its size as I am modifying it. IIRC, wayland does not do this, out of the box any how. I remember that there are other things that break for me as well, but I can't recall them off the top of my head.

audidude 3y ago
There is an overlay now in gnome-terminal git that will give you this on wayland. I added it last month.
- Ologn 3y ago
  Great, I will check it out.

wing-_-nuts 3y ago

I was initially excited for wayland, and was an early adopter. I soon soured on the entire thing. It's very clear to me that wayland was an 'ivory tower' display server that had little respect for users or wm devs. You can't just go and break tons of things for security's sake when the harm is clearly higher than the benefits. Disabling screen and input capture should have been an 'opt in' feature for the truly paranoid. They should have also shipped a fully working bare bones desktop wm instead of a 'toy' implementation meant to run on a car entertainment center. Frankly I can't believe it got as much traction as it has, but we're all stuck with it now as it's clearly 'the future'. This and systemd really showed me that the linux ecosystem is far more vulnerable to the interests of a few corporate sponsored devs than the general community.

prmoustache 3y ago
> Disabling screen and input capture should have been an 'opt in' feature for the truly paranoid. You can do screen captures on wayland. I've seen tools that were used to share a mouse and a keyboard to multiple computers kvm like that supported wayland so input capture seems to be possible to me. My only gripe with wayland is that we seems to be lacking a common top level interface that is compatible with any compositor. Right now if some feature is not managed by the toolkit's wayland backend, devs need to have to implement compatibility with gnome's mutter, wlroots based compositor and kwin independently which doesn't seem to be a sane way of doing things. I wish all projects would converge into a common library like wlroots.
- wing-_-nuts 3y ago
  You can, now, but it's still not up to the level of polish that we had in x11, and nearly all of these are janky workarounds to a self inflicted problem
  - bitwize 3y ago
    That will change, and you can expect support in Wayland to eventually surpass X11 because guess where all the developer effort is.

throw0101c 3y ago

Perhaps of some interest is "A Political History of X" by Keith Packard from the 2020 Linux Conference Australia (LCA): * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cj02_UeUnGQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cj02_UeUnGQ > Packard is responsible for many X extensions and technical papers on X. He has been heavily involved in the development of X since the late 1980s as a member of the MIT X Consortium, XFree86 and the X.Org Foundation. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Packard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Packard Goes over things from the early 1980s.

motiejus 3y ago

I am upset by this. I have used awesome for >10 years now, and the way awesome does multi-monitor support has grown into me. No other WM, wayland or X11, has offered it. I am upset not because of X "deprecation" (still not convinced it will happen, hopeful it won't), but rather that I will, again, need to invest time and energy into something that had worked just fine for more than a decade.

bitwize 3y ago

[flagged]