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: 2) by acid andy on Thursday July 04 2019, @09:51PM (1 child)
Makes sense. Those same politics could now cause the banishment of X11 from those major distros.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 04 2019, @10:13PM
and less for those major distros. However, I rather doubt IBM the new owners of RedHat are that careless with the footgun. Maybe if the day ever dawns that Wayland compiles on AIX... no signs of such now but stranger things happened. :)