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[Video] Red Hat Is About To End Xorg: Is Wayland Ready?
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this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2023
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Who made Red Hat the arbiter of when xorg should end?
I mean, sure they're a major Linux vendor but their market is servers with hardly any foothold in the desktop market. It would be more interesting to see how long Debian, Ubuntu or Arch will keep xorg alive.
People are completely missing the point here. “Who made Red Hat the arbiter of when Xorg should end?”
I would say nobody but perhaps a better answer is all of us that have left the work of maintaining Xorg to Red Hat. All that Red Hat is deciding is when they are going to stop contributing. So little is done by others that, if Red Hat stops, Xorg is effectively done.
Others are of course free to step up. In fact, it may not be much work. Red Hat will still be doing most of the work as they will still be supporting Xwayland ( mostly the same code as Xorg ), libdrm, libinput, KMS, and other stuff that both Xorg and Wayland share. They just won’t be bundling it up, testing it, and releasing it as Xorg anymore.
We will see if anybody steps up.
Source?
As far as I know the X.org foundation is an independent non-profit organization, and while Red Hat is a sponsor and they have 1 member in the board of directors (out of 8), they don't appear to be the main contributor.
Here's the repo for xserver. It's basically a collective effort between developers who represent certain companies, among them Oracle - and RedHat.
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=x_server_contributors&num=1
"There were eight major software vendors that turned up from our analysis and that included Apple, Debian, FreeBSD/NetBSD/OpenBSD, Gentoo, Mandriva, Novell, Red Hat, and Tungsten Graphics. The biggest software company contributing to the X server has been Red Hat"
"In third place for the number of commits is Adam Jackson, an employee of Red Hat. Adam has just been committing to X.Org since 2004 but he represents over 9% of the total workload. Adam Jackson is serving as the X.Org 7.4 release manager."
In addition to being the largest contributor, the key part of this discussion is that Red Hat manages the release process.
EDiT: In my laziness, I pulled an article from years ago that proves nothing. I will leave it though as what it does show is that Red Hat has been doing the heavy lifting on Xorg for over a decade.
Make up your own mind. Here are the commits to the Xorg project:
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/commits/master
You might notice that a substantial amount of the “Xorg” activity is really XWayland. That both illustrates that X will be actively maintained for a long time yet and that the number of devs that care about Xorg directly is dwindling.
We will see what happens. My guess is that almost everybody migrates to Wayland before 2027. Time will tell.
They're the ones who's engineers worked on Xorg, so yes, they decide it.
Redhat does a lot of testing/patching with Xorg Server.
most of the people who was working on Xorg Server moved to Wayland a few years ago, Ubuntu and Debian have been Defaulting to Wayland, on the main Desktops, and Desktops are dropping Xorg Server support in Development, this is not just Redhat.
No Patches and No $$$,$$$,$$$ = Xorg server dead. if you want to pay 15 to 20+ Software Engineers/Testers to work on Xorg Server got for it.
FreeBSD has Wayland support to.
Even the Xorg mailing list is mostly dead, many of the Xorg Server Dev's moved on, XWayland will be long lived.
and last i was there for all the Crying about XFree86 to I'm old.
Nobody. And it's not like Red Hat runs the X.Org Foundation, either, at most they have one seat on the board. Development will continue.
By whom? Red Hat is pretty much the only one supporting X.Org so that's why. Development will not really continue because there will be nobody to do the development.
As the video points out, a lot of the work in xorg (and Linux in general, fwiw) is done by red hat engineers. So red hat cutting on that investment bears direct consequences for everyone else. Unless of course someone steps up and takes their place in maintenance, but it's not gonna happen, which is literally why Wayland (and not some revamped xorg) is the future of Linux desktop.
Also, red hat's decisions often trickle down on most other distros. E.g.: systemd, pulseaudio, pipewire, gnome, not including proprietary codecs, etc.
So, they technically don't arbiter, but they definitely set the pace.