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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 suppos

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

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.