Some interesting Linux industry news for you here, as the long road towards Wayland by default everywhere is taking another big step with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) removing the Xorg server and other X servers (except Xwayland) from RHEL 10 and the following releases.
From their announcement by developer Carlos Soriano Sanchez posted November 27th:
We want to recognize the significant effort all these organizations and individuals have made, especially the rest of the upstream community, without whom this project would never be so mature. This effort gave us the confidence to first make Wayland default for most use cases in RHEL 8, followed up with the deprecating of Xorg server in RHEL 9, with the intention of its removal in a future release. Earlier this year (2023), as part of our RHEL 10 planning, we made a study to understand Wayland’s status, not only from an infrastructure perspective, but also from an ecosystem perspective. The result of this evaluation is that, while there are still some gaps and applications that need some level of adaptation, we believe the Wayland infrastructure and ecosystem are in good shape, and that we’re on a good path for the identified blockers to be resolved by the time RHEL 10 is out, planned to be released on the first half of 2025.
With this, we’ve decided to remove Xorg server and other X servers (except Xwayland) from RHEL 10 and the following releases. Xwayland should be able to handle most X11 clients that won’t immediately be ported to Wayland, and if needed, our customers will be able to stay on RHEL 9 for its full life cycle while resolving the specifics needed for transitioning to a Wayland ecosystem. It’s important to note that “Xorg Server” and “X11” are not synonymous, X11 is a protocol that will continue to be supported through Xwayland, while the Xorg Server is one of the implementations of the X11 protocol.
Red Hat and their engineers have their fingers in many pies across the Linux space, so this is a pretty big move, and one they say will enable them to "tackle problems such as HDR, increased security, setups with mixed low and high density displays or very high density displays, better GPU/Display hot-plugging, better gestures and scrolling, and so on" — which of course will end up benefiting everyone because that's how open source works.
Have you fully switched over to Wayland yet?
Quoting: GuestWayland will never be usable for productive software, such as DAWs, since the wayland devs refuse to support the necessary protocols to make them work.
What's DAWs and what protocols are missing?
Quoting: ShmerlQuoting: GuestWayland will never be usable for productive software, such as DAWs, since the wayland devs refuse to support the necessary protocols to make them work.
What's DAWs and what protocols are missing?
Digital Audio Workstations. And this is pretty funny, seeing as I just read a while back that PreSonus Studio One recently added Linux support and requires Wayland.
Quoting: tuubiDigital Audio Workstations. And this is pretty funny, seeing as I just read a while back that PreSonus Studio One recently added Linux support and requires Wayland.
Heh? What kind of issues can be missing then? Pipewire can work very well for audio and can be integrated with Wayland compositors properly. Wayland is a display / graphics protocol, what does audio have to do with it anyway?
Last edited by Shmerl on 28 November 2023 at 5:42 pm UTC
Quoting: RenardDesMersI was shopping for a new monitor for black Friday and was debating with myself about how useful would HDR and Freesync features be since Wayland can't support those yet and I don't really know when they'll get decent support.
Hopefully the wayland folks remember about the gamers when prioritizing the missing features.
I am in a similar boat.
You can ALREADY use HDR to a degree in Linux, but largely its not practical yet.(on AMD and possibly Intel GPU you can use mpv player to watch videos in HDR)
Most Linux native don't have and probably won't have HDR. With proton its a different story. It emulates Windows environment. And does it pretty good too. I imagine within year or so we will have HDR on Gnome/KDE. Then we need HDR support in Web Browsers + more Media Players.
I don't care about whole environment HDR, I just need it in games, browsers, video players. Some will care for Blender, etc.
![](https://www.gamingonlinux.com/templates/default/images/emoticons/unsure.png)
![](https://www.gamingonlinux.com/templates/default/images/emoticons/happy.png)
Is there anyone else in the same case?
Quoting: CyrilWhat about people who likes XFCE (like me)?
Is there anyone else in the same case?
https://wiki.xfce.org/releng/wayland_roadmap
Doesn't look like they have an ETA yet.
Quoting: CyrilWhat about people who likes XFCE (like me)?Unless you use XFCE on RHEL why worry?
Is there anyone else in the same case?
Quoting: ShmerlYeah I saw, that's why I asked...Quoting: CyrilWhat about people who likes XFCE (like me)?
Is there anyone else in the same case?
https://wiki.xfce.org/releng/wayland_roadmap
Doesn't look like they have an ETA yet.
Quoting: whizseI use XFCE.Quoting: CyrilWhat about people who likes XFCE (like me)?Unless you use XFCE on RHEL why worry?
Is there anyone else in the same case?
![](https://www.gamingonlinux.com/templates/default/images/emoticons/wink.png)
Quoting: CyrilI use XFCE.
But not on RHEL? Meaning other distros aren't removing xorg yet, which could make it an issue.
Last edited by Shmerl on 28 November 2023 at 6:15 pm UTC
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