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> That is a odd statement since the people that designed Wayland are, by and large, the same people that maintained Xorg. I keep reading this -- sometimes, ver
by lproven 1y ago
> That is a odd statement since the people that designed Wayland are, by and large, the same people that maintained Xorg.
I keep reading this -- sometimes, verbatim. I don't know if you are just posting the same stuff everywhere you can, or it's in the database of some LLM bot, but it wasn't true the first time I saw it a week ago, and subsequently incorporated my response into my article here:
https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/12/ubuntu_2510_to_drop_x11/ https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/12/ubuntu_2510_to_drop_x...
It's still not true.
The same mostly Red Hatters who maintain X.org on Linux are the same people designing Wayland, but there is a lot more to X11 than X.org.
As I replied to someone -- you? -- last time:
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There's a crucial but often overlooked distinction here. Yes, X.org develops the reference implementation of X11, but it's not the only implementation, and it never was. X.org was forked from XFree86 around 2004, and although development is dormant, XFree86 still exists.
There are or have been multiple active forks of X.org. OpenBSD uses Xenocara, developed independently. The FreeBSD X11 server and NetBSD X11 servers are their own forks, too. Although it's very different, the X11 server for Apple macOS, XQuartz, is also still around – even if it's not bundled any more.
The proprietary UNIX variants that are still in maintenance also have their own ports. Solaris 10 offered a choice of three but Solaris 11 has only its own version of Xorg. AIX has AIXwindows with its own X server. HP-UX offers two [PDF], one for HP Visualize graphics cards and another based on XFree86 for other GPUs. Before XFree86 was mature, there were a number of proprietary commercial X11 servers for Linux, such as Metro-X and Xi Accelerated-X.
Windows has its own GUI, of course, but it's been possible to run UNIX binaries on Windows NT ever since the first version, Windows NT 3.1 in 1993 – and since X11 runs over the network, the machine running an X11 app (the "client") can be a different computer to the one displaying the app (the "server"). As such there are multiple X11 servers for Windows, both for local and remote apps. Some are proprietary commercial servers, such as OpenText Exceed, X-Win32, Netsarang Xmanager, MobaXterm, and X410, among others. There are also multiple FOSS X servers for Windows, including VCXsrv, Xming [note, HTTP site], and Cygwin/X.
Many of these use code from X.org, but that's the whole point of FOSS. They aren't written by or maintained by X.org, and even if it and all Red Hat staff stop work on X11 completely, that doesn't mean these downstream projects will suddenly cease to exist.
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