from Hacker News

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 Plans for Wayland and Xorg Server

by greyw on 11/28/23, 12:25 AM with 208 comments

  • by wing-_-nuts on 11/28/23, 4:25 PM

    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.

  • by throw0101c on 11/28/23, 4:37 PM

    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

    > 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

    Goes over things from the early 1980s.

  • by bonzini on 11/28/23, 3:38 PM

    > 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

  • by naranha on 11/28/23, 3:54 PM

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

  • by Ologn on 11/28/23, 4:25 PM

    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.

  • by timetraveller26 on 11/28/23, 3:50 AM

    > 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.

  • by yjftsjthsd-h on 11/28/23, 3:41 AM

    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.

  • by motiejus on 11/28/23, 5:01 PM

    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.

  • by Filligree on 11/28/23, 3:42 AM

    So, nvidia users need not apply then.

  • by quyleanh on 11/28/23, 4:13 AM

    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?

  • by vermaden on 11/28/23, 5:36 AM

    Goodbye RHEL.

  • by josephcsible on 11/28/23, 3:39 AM

    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?