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When Will the Death Watch for the X Window System (aka X11) Begin?

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

canopic jug writes:

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: 2) by c0lo on Friday July 05 2019, @12:47AM (1 child)

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Friday July 05 2019, @12:47AM (#863295) Journal

    End result, graphical logins on DEs are now dependent on systemd.

    Devuan with LXDE user here - no, they aren't.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 06 2019, @06:12PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 06 2019, @06:12PM (#863886)

    LXDE is slowly dying as the devs behind it has moved to LXQt because they didn't like the Gnome centric direction GTK was going. Meaning that LXDE predates the systemd putch and is unlikely to ever adopt systemd-isms.

    XFCE on the other hand, and maybe LXQt, is rapidly heading that direction.

    There is however a Qt based DE being developed over in BSD land that could be interesting in this regard.

    Note though that all this will be academic if ever Wayland fully supplants X11, as Wayland again depends on systemd-logind to talk to policykit/polkit to mediate access to the /dev entries it uses to draw those frame perfect pictures. A scheme that is becoming more and more "popular" in Freedesktop land, by splitting anything "sensitive" into a server component that communicates via dbus to a frontend. And the chatter between the two parts is again vetted by polkit and logind, to make sure it is coming from a "session" with the proper privileges.