Will Xorg Ever Die?

Today I talk about the future of Xorg and Wayland.
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#xorg #x11 #thelinuxcast

[SphereS]

I will switch to Wayland when it learns to add new functionality without breaking previous ones. Right now it works like this: Wayland breaks compatibility with something, then they say it's not their problem, it's the developer's job to adapt, and finally try to reason how you don't actually need the compatibility they just broke. I understand Red Hat trying it's best to push Wayland because no one wants to work with X anymore, but they will do it outside my user space. And of course, "works on my computer" is not a valid answer. It only shows how much it is not ready for deployment in all kinds of workflows no matter how much propaganda says otherwise.

[tylerdean]

When NetBSD ships wayland X11 will truly be dead

[sweetbabyalaska]

I just switched to Wayland on Hyprland after buying an AMD card and it's awesome. I get it now. I couldn't try it before thanks to Nvidia. People say that there is missing tools or that their old X tools (xset, xclip etc...) dont work with wayland, and I have to say that there is replacements for everything for the most part. At least I found replacements, there are some good git repos that show the good wayland software like wlr-randr, wl-clipboard, gammastep (redshift), rofi, waybar etc... and hyprland lets you set hardware, keyboard, keymaps (and submaps/chords) and mouse settings all in one place.

[damnhatesyou]

This transition has been dragged out, basically because of Nvidia and no one else. If Nvidia release drivers tomorrow, that would work perfectly with wayland, I will not be surprised by the end of this year, or the mid of next year it would be the default and this discussion would finally die.

[the_linux_legend]

The reason they are called compositors is quite simple, it's because they literally are. They effectively do the job of both picom and the window manager itself all in one package.

[dermond]

I think that Arch stoped shipping 32bit, now is a community project. The only ones that I can recall are Debian, Void and OpenSUSE

[schemage]

This is a good point, while xorg is on "lifesupport", it is not going to "die" for years if not a decade or more to come (to borrow the hospital analogy). There is a difference between dead and functionally dead. In the latter we stop using x and move onto newer/better tech. In the former, it is literally impossible, to go back and use x.

[thathappyrat]

It's great. Cpu runs at twice the temp on idle desktop on a fresh install, and Dolphin crashes on launch. Good stuff.

[MENTOKz]

lol i love the funny self talk at the end always a treat matt and your right if nvidia support just works for wayland then xorg will go away with its hacky screen tearing and other problems.

[themroc]

Obviously Debian has a 32 bits iso, they ship an iso for every architecture existing under the sun, but Arch stopped shipping it's 32 bit version years ago. There was an independent project to maintain a 32 bit version of Arch (maybe there still is) but it was not official.

[MarkusHobelsberger]

The comparison with 32bit is good, but also bad. The main reason why 32bit is dying is because of the hard limit to 4 GB RAM which got outlived by hardware development. It's kinda the other way around with Xorg and Wayland considering Nvidia. I think Xorg will stay with us for a very long time.

Wayland is the future. I don't think x11 wms will die. Most of those will got a wayland fork eventually, example dwm>dwl, i3>sway, etc.

[Wonderingax]

Honestly Im fine with any DE or TWM as long as I get to do my things, for now my computer has Fedora with Gnome using Wayland, it does everything I need it to do fast enough for me, if I had to choose, the one I like the most its probably Xfce, I just wanted a Wayland experience. I like KDE but I find it more time consuming to use than Gnome, on Gnome I get the accent colors extention and Im already happy with my system, with KDE customization takes so long, is buggy (Not as much as before I may add) and requires a log out to apply, before that its buggy. For now Im chillin on Gnome, until I find a DE I feel more comfortable using, I just want to use software I dont have to worry much about like I would with X11 (Screw sandboxing X11 if I can simply use a different protocol). If Xfce works using Wayland soon I may switch to the Fedora spin or Arch.

[MichaelWilliams-lrmb]

I think any window manager that is going to survive will move to Wayland over time. Sticking with Xorg will just bring more security issues over time.

As someone else mentioned, on Wayland, window managers and compositors are the same thing in Wayland. On Xorg, they werre two separate compoments. But they're the same thing on Wayland.

We are definitely in an early transitional periodi into Wayland. A lot of people are still using Xorg. A lot of people still can't use Wayland due to Nvidia graphics cards or other reasons.

I'm a regular Wayland user but I still run into some issues. I know for Espanso, I need to use espanso-wayland from the AUR, or on another distribution, build it myself with the flag set to use Wayland. There's still some programs, that for whatever reason, don't have full wayland support. Most of these programs, though not all, can be fixed with XWayland.

It's really hard to say when Xorg will be dead. I mean you still have some businesses and even the government running MS-DOS software, but for the general user, I'd say in the next ten years we should move away from Xorg to Wayland.

[sandeepvk]

Its funny how people who love to learn technology are the most resistant to newer tech

[Linda-]

I'd love to switch to Wayland but (at least in my semi-recent experience) it just isn't ready for gaming yet, which is what I mostly do. I still couldnt figure out a way to play on different resolutions (I like to play some games in a stretched 4:3 resolution), and the input lag was still horrible aswell compared to X11

[cameronmoore]

I just used a floppy disk as a paperweight

[bitterseeds]

I'm going to predict that when the new rusty version of Cosmic comes out that you'll be in love with it since they do a lot of focusing on tiling. Just saying. :D

[mattfromeurope]

I wonder when Emacs will include a Wayland compositor. There *is* already an X Window Manager for quite some time now...

[LonksAwakening]

Debian still supports the m68k architecture, it most certainly also supports x86

Also, yes I did just use a floppy disk the other day (and yes the architecture of the computer happened to be m68k)