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posted by chromas on Thursday July 04 2019, @03:41PM   Printer-friendly
from the should've-had-an-X12 dept.

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?


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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by eravnrekaree on Thursday July 04 2019, @09:36PM (2 children)

    by eravnrekaree (555) on Thursday July 04 2019, @09:36PM (#863246)

    With glamor, X isnt going anywhere as it can use the same device drivers as Wayland. Many people will continue to prefer X11 and use it, because of its various unique features.

    The notion that X has intractable security problems is not true and it is astonishing to hear some of the Wayland developers who know better state that. The main issue they talk about is how an X app can access elements of another X application. This can be fixed simply with a protocol extension which would give certain applications with a need to access the contents of windows owned by other processes to do that that, perhaps screen reader applications, screenshotters, etc, and allow certain applications to make certain window properties available to certain other processes such as needed for NETWM. This would not restrict necessary interclient communications but would restrict it to applications that really need it and can be trusted.

    Some of these developers also falsely claim that X is no longer network transparent today. Thats also false, since all well designed applications will fall back to GLX for OpenGL rendering over the wire and will send pixmaps over the wire if shared memory is not available (the case with remote clients). Some of the X.org developers also work for Wayland so have refused to mention this or to keep GLX as up to date as it should be, but thats an implementation issue caused by developer negligence not an X protocol problem.

    As for X12, there was never a need for that because X11 is designed so you can implement or address whatever concern or issue you have with an extension. This is how OpenGL support was done and so on.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 04 2019, @09:53PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 04 2019, @09:53PM (#863253)

    Such a protocol extension already exist, but apparently it is not in wide use because it may break some software (Firefox has been mentioned in the past).

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 04 2019, @10:10PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 04 2019, @10:10PM (#863256)

    Yes another X11 extension that will fix everything? Eh… I feel kinda skeptical about that. It's becoming more and more like magic that works for some reason.