Christian Schaller, Head of the Desktop Development Team at Red Hat and the Fedora Desktop Team, , concerning desktop components in Fedora 31, mentioned Red Hat's intention to stop actively developing the X.Org server functionality and limit itself to maintaining the existing codebase and fixing bugs.
Red Hat is currently a key contributor to the development of the X.Org server and maintains it, so it is unlikely that major releases of the X.Org server will continue in the event of a derailment. At the same time, despite the termination of development, maintenance of X.Org by Red Hat will continue at least until the end of the life cycle of the RHEL 8 distribution, which will last until 2029.
X.Org server development is already stagnatingβdespite the previous six-month release cycle, the last significant release of X.Org Server 1.20 was published 14 months ago, and the preparation of the 1.21 release is stalling in place. The situation may change if some company or community takes over the continued growth of the functionality of the X.Org server, but, given the widespread shift of significant projects towards Wayland, it is unlikely that there will be those who wish.
Red Hat's current focus is on improving the Wayland-based desktop experience. The transition of the X.Org server into maintenance mode is expected after the task of completely removing the dependency on X.Org components and making GNOME Shell run without using XWayland, which requires refactoring or removing the remaining bindings to X.org. These bindings are almost gone from the GNOME Shell, but still remain in the GNOME Setting daemon. In GNOME 3.34 or 3.36, it is planned to completely get rid of bindings to X.Org and organize the launch of XWayland , when there is a need for components to ensure compatibility with X11.
It also mentions the need to solve a number of with Wayland, such as working with proprietary NVIDIA drivers and tweaking the XWayland DDX server to run X applications well in a Wayland-based environment. Of the work carried out as part of the preparation of Fedora 31, the implementation in XWayland of the ability to run X applications with root privileges is noted. Running like this is questionable from a security point of view, but necessary to ensure compatibility with X programs that need to run with elevated privileges.
Another goal is to improve support for Wayland in the SDL, for example to solve scaling issues when running older games running at low screen resolutions. It is also noted the need to improve support for Wayland in systems with proprietary NVIDIA drivers - if Wayland has been able to work on top of such drivers for a long time, then XWayland in this configuration cannot yet use tools for hardware acceleration of 3D graphics (it is planned to provide the ability to load the x.org driver NVIDIA for Xwayland).
Additionally, work continues to replace PulseAudio and Jack with a multimedia server. , which extends the capabilities of PulseAudio with low-latency video streaming and audio processing for the needs of professional audio processing systems, and also offers an extended security model for controlling access at the level of individual devices and streams. As part of the Fedora 31 development cycle, work is focused on the use of PipeWire for organizing screen sharing in Wayland-based environments, including using the protocol .
In Fedora 31 also add the ability to run Qt applications in a Wayland-based GNOME session using the Qt Wayland plugin instead of the XCB plugin using X11/XWayland.
Source: opennet.ru