Red Hat has published a plan to deprecate X.org Server in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10. X.org Server was originally deprecated and slated for removal in a future branch of RHEL a year ago in the RHEL 9.1 release notes. The ability to run X11 applications in a Wayland session, provided by the XWayland DDX server, will be retained. The first release of the RHEL 10 branch, in which X.org Server will be discontinued, is scheduled for the first half of 2025.
The transition from the X Window System, which turns 40 next year, to a newer stack based on Wayland has been going on for 15 years, and Red Hat has been actively involved in it from the very beginning. Over time, it became clear that the X11 protocol and the X.org server had fundamental problems that needed to be solved, and Wayland became that solution. Today, Wayland is recognized as the de facto windowing and graphics rendering infrastructure for Linux.
While the community was implementing new features and fixing bugs in Wayland, development of the X.org server and X11 infrastructure was winding down. Wayland is improving significantly, but this leads to an increase in the burden of maintaining the two stacks: there is a lot of new work to support Wayland, but there is also the need to maintain the old X.org-based stack. Ultimately, this fragmentation of efforts began to lead to difficulties and a desire to focus on solving core problems.
As Wayland has evolved and expanded its capabilities, Red Hat has worked with various hardware vendors, software vendors, customers, the visual effects (VFX) industry, and others to understand and develop the necessary projects to address existing limitations and expand the Wayland stack. Among similar projects:
- High dynamic range (HDR) and color management support;
- Development of Xwayland as a basis for backward compatibility with X11 clients;
- Development of infrastructure to support modern remote desktop solutions;
- Analysis and development of support for explicit synchronization in the Wayland protocol and related projects;
- Creation of the Libei library to provide emulation and input capture;
- Participation in Wakefield's initiative to make OpenJDK work with (X)Wayland.
In early 2023, as part of planning for RHEL 10, Red Hat engineers conducted a study to understand the state of Wayland not only from an infrastructure perspective, but also from an ecosystem perspective. As a result of the assessment, it was concluded that, despite the fact that there are still some shortcomings and there are applications that require some adaptation, in general the Wayland infrastructure and ecosystem are in good shape and the remaining shortcomings can be eliminated by the release of RHEL 10.
In this regard, it has been decided to remove the X.org server and other X servers (except Xwayland) from RHEL 10 and subsequent releases. Most X11 clients that won't be immediately ported to Wayland should be handled by Xwayland. If necessary, the company's customers will be able to stay on RHEL 9 for its entire life cycle while issues of transition to the Wayland ecosystem are being resolved. The announcement specifically notes that "X.org Server" and "X11" should not be taken as synonyms: X11 is a protocol that will continue to be supported through Xwayland, and X.org Server is one implementation of the X11 protocol.
Removing X.org Server will allow, starting with RHEL 10, to focus solely on the modern stack and ecosystem, which will address issues such as HDR support, provide increased security, the ability to work simultaneously with monitors with different pixel densities, and improve hot-plug graphics cards and displays, improve gesture control and scrolling, etc.
Source: opennet.ru