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Chris Siebenmann, a UNIX herder at the University of Toronto CS Lab, asserts that the death watch for the X Window System (aka X11) has probably started:
I was recently reading Christian F.K. Schaller's On the Road to Fedora Workstation 31 (via both Fedora Planet and Planet Gnome). In it, Schaller says in one section (about Gnome and their move to fully work on Wayland):
Once we are done with this we expect X.org to go into hard maintenance mode fairly quickly. The reality is that X.org is basically maintained by us and thus once we stop paying attention to it there is unlikely to be any major new releases coming out and there might even be some bitrot setting in over time. We will keep an eye on it as we will want to ensure X.org stays supportable until the end of the RHEL8 lifecycle at a minimum, but let this be a friendly notice for everyone who rely the work we do maintaining the Linux graphics stack, get onto Wayland, that is where the future is.
X11, for all its advantages, also has several incurable design flaws relating to security. However, the major distros have not yet been in any hurry to replace it. Wayland is touted as the next step in graphical interfaces. What are Soylentils thoughts on Wayland or the demise of X11?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 04 2019, @07:49PM
My first encounters with X11 were in the pre-Linux era. You prayed it stayed up for 20 seconds, and if you prayed really hard you might finish the demo or task at hand. It crashed. A lot. Spectacularly.
By the time Linux came around, X11 was actually working. An edifice of number 8 wire, duct tape, patches and bits, held together by dust and gravity. But working.
The last 2 decades of Linux have improved X11, cleaned out many cobwebs, flushed and scrubbed, made it faster, shinier and so on.
Wayland is principle is a good idea. Start from a clean slate. But we are what, a decade or more into Wayland and it is currently looking like pre-Linux X11. Buggy, ugly, and all those things. I think development should continue. We have so many better techniques and practices now in the industry than way back then. But it could still take 5-10 years before Wayland is able to displace X11.
What will actually happen is a major distro, like unfortunately RedHat Poettering, will force the change.