Red Hat has formally confirmed what many were thinking: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 will be doing away with X.Org Server support aside from XWayland.
For those making use of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 in a desktop setting, RHEL10 due for release in H1’2025 will be Wayland-focused. X11 client support will only come via XWayland.
This does also further solidify the X.Org Server in effect being dead upstream. Red Hat engineers were typically the ones managing new X.Org Server releases as well as carrying on with various bits of development.
This actually makes it sound like Xorg will be supported longer than I thought.
I understood RHEL9 to already be Wayland based and so I was expecting the clock to runout on Xorg when RHEL8 went off support. RHEL9 does default to Wayland but it sounds like Xorg remained a fully supported option for those that wanted it. The move to Wayland only being proposed for RHEL10 did not happen on RHEL9.
RHEL8 goes off support in 2029 but RHEL9 is supported until 2032. The implications of this article are that Red Hat will not put much energy into Xorg after 2025 ( RHEL10 ) but they will still have to support their customers. This at least means security fixes but it likely means continued viability of modern hardware to a certain extent as well.
Regardless, this also highlights one of the “hidden”‘contributions of Red Hat and how much the entire ecosystem relies on them. This can be seen as good or bad but I wish the public debate involving them would at least accurately reflect it.
And even beyond that, because any distro that ships Wayland by default does so because it has XWayland as a backup, which is essentially running an X server inside Wayland.
Agreed ( on the code ). Wayland and Xorg also share libinput, libdrm, KMS, and Mesa.
The biggest difference is that Red Hat will stop bundling this stuff up together, testing it, and created releases. Most of the actual code will still be maintained though.
Xwayland is likely to be with us a very long time. I do not see Motif adding Wayland support anytime soon for example. How long for GNUstep to hop on board?