Some interesting Linux industry news for you here, as the long road towards Wayland by default everywhere is taking another big step with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) removing the Xorg server and other X servers (except Xwayland) from RHEL 10 and the following releases.
From their announcement by developer Carlos Soriano Sanchez posted November 27th:
We want to recognize the significant effort all these organizations and individuals have made, especially the rest of the upstream community, without whom this project would never be so mature. This effort gave us the confidence to first make Wayland default for most use cases in RHEL 8, followed up with the deprecating of Xorg server in RHEL 9, with the intention of its removal in a future release. Earlier this year (2023), as part of our RHEL 10 planning, we made a study to understand Wayland’s status, not only from an infrastructure perspective, but also from an ecosystem perspective. The result of this evaluation is that, while there are still some gaps and applications that need some level of adaptation, we believe the Wayland infrastructure and ecosystem are in good shape, and that we’re on a good path for the identified blockers to be resolved by the time RHEL 10 is out, planned to be released on the first half of 2025.
With this, 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 to a Wayland ecosystem. It’s important to note that “Xorg Server” and “X11” are not synonymous, X11 is a protocol that will continue to be supported through Xwayland, while the Xorg Server is one of the implementations of the X11 protocol.
Red Hat and their engineers have their fingers in many pies across the Linux space, so this is a pretty big move, and one they say will enable them to "tackle problems such as HDR, increased security, setups with mixed low and high density displays or very high density displays, better GPU/Display hot-plugging, better gestures and scrolling, and so on" — which of course will end up benefiting everyone because that's how open source works.
Have you fully switched over to Wayland yet?
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Quoting: whizseQuoting: NezchanSeems like the creator of Xscreensaver is rather upset about this development, given Wayland has no way to implement screen savers at all.Another win for Wayland?
In its way. Since the passing of CRT monitors there hasn't been that much point having screensavers at all, so it's just a niche enthusiast thing now.
BlackBloodRum Nov 28, 2023
Quoting: NezchanSeems like the creator of Xscreensaver is rather upset about this development, given Wayland has no way to implement screen savers at all.Not directly, no.
But, you can "sort of" get it working, as discussed here:
https://www.linux.org/threads/xscreensaver-under-wayland.43543/
Quoting: CyrilWhat about people who likes XFCE (like me)?
Is there anyone else in the same case?
Same here
Arch with XFCE
Will stick to PulseAudio and Xorg for now and leave Pipewire and Wayland for later use when i feel it is more ready for prime time.
Also , I'm on an Nvidia GPU
https://dudemanguy.github.io/blog/posts/2022-06-10-wayland-xorg/wayland-xorg.html
Quoting: NezchanQuoting: whizseQuoting: NezchanSeems like the creator of Xscreensaver is rather upset about this development, given Wayland has no way to implement screen savers at all.Another win for Wayland?
In its way. Since the passing of CRT monitors there hasn't been that much point having screensavers at all, so it's just a niche enthusiast thing now.
OLEDs would benefit from screensavers for the same reasons as CRTs did.
1. Reportthe bugs you are experiencing. Developers often don't know all issues with the platform, so help them. I have found most are extremely responsive.
2. How long ago has it been that you have tried? I have used Wayland for a year now and it has noticably improved in just the last few months, and that is with Plasma 5.
If you don't want to do that, I understand as well. On the KDE side, Plasma 6 will probably be the end-all-be-all for major Wayland issues (not saying for all users, some people need more niche APIs).
Quoting: CatKillerOLEDs would benefit from screensavers for the same reasons as CRTs did.I was about to post exactly that. I've seen flatscreens with horrible burn in. Also, CRTs still exist and are still being used. Sure, it's a niche – but if I'd go through the trouble and the costs of using one, I am pretty sure I wouldn't want to ruin it.
Quoting: artixbtwGiven that most of what I do on Linux is gaming, a lot of the time I would be using XWayland, so there's no point in using Wayland
Made an account just to agree here, there is a performance hit of xwayland that is hard to see just by looking at game fps, its like xwayland has microstutters that aren't measured.
See my post here on the issue: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/17ipxp6/dota_2_x11_vs_xwayland_weird_results/
Valve and wine devs, bless them, need to finish making steam, proton, Vulkan games etc Wayland native
Quoting: razing32Also , saw something interesting on a blog post a while back :They make a few good points, but it's mostly stuff that everyone already knows is a problem and a whole lot of old man yelling at cloud. The addendum on the "Wayland's lack of feature parity with Xorg cripples it." section sort of underlines my point earlier in the thread; the feature made it through because it was needed, otherwise Steam Deck wouldn't be a product.
https://dudemanguy.github.io/blog/posts/2022-06-10-wayland-xorg/wayland-xorg.html
They're particularly wrong about apps managing their own windows. They shouldn't, not just because of security but as a form of future proofing. What happens when there's no longer a two dimensional desktop and an application asks to position itself absolutely in 2D within a 6D co-ordinate system, like in an XR desktop? The very concept of a position of a "window" on a "desktop" is too nebulous to treat in an absolute way. But even in a more general sense I prefer that my apps do, through the desktop environment, what I tell them to do rather than leaving aspects of desktop management to the whims of every application developer.
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