One thing I saw in comments about the removal of xorg server is that some might not see how much work is/was to maintain xorg server. I understand is hard to see from outside, but maintaining xorg server with the standards we have in RHEL is not a small beast. Let me share some:
The sense of entitlement in some of the replies on that post are absolutely awful
As for me personally, I want to love Wayland. It has great performance on ALL my devices, (except one with a nvidia GPU) and is super smooth compared to X11!
However... the secure aspect of Wayland makes it very difficult, if not impossible to easily get a remote desktop going. Wayvnc doesn't support the most popular desktop environments depending on how Wayland was compiled, and the built-in desktop sharing on distros that have switched over to Wayland often require very specific Linux-only VNC and RDP clients, otherwise you run into odd errors.
I really hope the desktop sharing situation improves because it's a pretty big showstopper for me. On X11 you just install & run x11vnc from a remote SSH session and you have immediate session access with VNC from Linux, Android, and Windows. If you want lockscreen access too then you run as root and provide the greeter's Xauth credentials. But Wayland's not so simple sadly AFAICT...
Waypipe is something I've found out about recently though, so need to check that out and see how well it works at the moment. If anyone has any helpful info or pointers please share, I'm completely new to Wayland and would appreciate it!
I honestly don't get these posts, there's a couple of things that is super weird.
Why does every discussion about Wayland include trashing xorg?
Isn't the solution pretty obvious, stop mainting xorg if you don't like to maintain xorg, who is forcing you to maintain xorg?
I really don't care if I'm using xorg or wayland, I just want something that works, and I have tried wayland and that isn't the case as of the moment. And I don't care about the why, because I can't be like yeah I use Wayland that's why I can't be on this video conference.
Just stop mainting it if you don't want to maintain it, problem solved, move on.
Seems like a redhat problem, so why is he complaining. It wasn't the developer who signed an agreement to maintain xorg, so I don't get the argument. Either you do it for the money you get paid, and if you don't feel like it's enough, then don't do it. The developer can just quit and do something else, ask for another project. The only one who is making him work on xorg is redhat.
But why even mention m it in the same context as Wayland, make Wayland work for the end user and 90% of people would not care if thier Linux machine was using Wayland or xorg.
Yes I've had multiple issues with video conferencing on Wayland, but my experience is 1 - 2 years old. I just use what works, I don't have any technical problems with xorg and that is why I use it.
I don't get the issue with "maintaining Xorg". Like, I get that it has a "cost", I just don't understand why that cost would be an issue since it's basically fixed, marginal cost (and has been since like 2015): the software is already mature, so it's unlikely to see relevant changes, or even minor changes (if that's what we want to mean with "dead"). That means, it can be affixed to a specific toolkit and environment to build (if this isn't being done already - which any mature project like RedHat should be!) basically guaranteeing it'll build forever. You can just set a virtual button or a yearly crontab to do it. Fixed, marginal cost.
Contrasted to that, what Wayland is doing is kinda a representation of the worst ways of capitalism: centralize the profits, socialize the costs and the externalities (redesign, recode, rebuild), and blame society (the Linux communities) for it, all for a variable cost that is unbounded in time and space because you never know what's gonna cost a small project like a text editor to reimplement the entire desktop stack "just" for Wayland.
I think he explains it pretty well, he even gives some examples and mentions there are many others. For a company to support such a large component for its commercial customers has a lot of work and verification we wouldn't consider as end users. His comment also explains why you can't just maintain a status quo with it and make an automatic build and forget...
As a third party, my understanding is that both the implementation and the protocol are really hard, if not next to impossible to iterate on. Modern hardware doesn't work like how it did when X did, and X assumes a lot of things that made sense in the 90s that don't now. Despite that, we cram a square peg into the round hole and it mostly works - and as the peg becomes a worse shape we just cram it harder. At this point no one wants to keep working on X.
And I know your point is that it works and we don't need too, but we do need too. New hardware needs to support X - at least the asahi guys found bugs in the X implementation that only exists on their hardware and no one who wants to fix them. Wayland and X are vastly different, because X doesn't make sense in the modern day. It breaks things, and a lot of old assumptions aren't true. That sucks, especially for app devs that rely on those assumptions. But keeping around X isn't the solution - iterating on Wayland is. Adding protocols to different parts of the stack with proper permission models, moving different pieces of X to different parts of the stack, etc. are a long term viable strategy. Even if it is painful.
But keeping around X isn’t the solution - iterating on Wayland is. Adding protocols to different parts of the stack with proper permission models, moving different pieces of X to different parts of the stack, etc. are a long term viable strategy. Even if it is painful.
The problem is, that's always used as an excuse to force people to be gratis beta testers. I've been around for the wrecks that were (and still are) Pulseaudio and Systemd. Wayland is even worse: it doesn't even fully start a session in my machine. If as devs you want to "iterate", sure, go ahead; but leave it in the dev branch; as a user, don't try to sell me Wayland again until it's actually over.
Also I see "Red Hat" thrown around a lot. There's no Red Hat anymore, it's IBM, and IBM's target user is a RHEL customer.
I'm willing to bet most people commenting on Mastodon (and here for that matter) have very little in common with a RHEL customer. IBM, like Valve with the Deck, have very specific use cases in mind and can afford to support a Wayland-based desktop for those particular circumstances.
But does IBM care about the desktop needs of the average Linux user? I doubt it.
Great point. IBM has a long history of squeezing every penny from their customers. At one corner job, IBM had to come onsite a few times a year to perform system updates. We were not allowed by IBM to upgrade the OS ourselves.