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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, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Friday July 05 2019, @03:55AM
Actually, they're not going to continue doing something that is no longer interesting to them, for whatever various reasons. That will have the eventual side effect of cutting down the available choices if no-one else picks up the baton and moves forward with X.
If X is truly valuable to someone(s) with sufficient resources (on the order of $1M per year), it can continue to be developed and maintained to a good level of modern functionality. If no-one is willing to pony up and do that, it must be because the available alternatives meet their needs well enough.
$1M per year might be in the form of a team of 6 full-time paid devs plus a couple of admin/website types, or it might be part-time volunteer work from 60 devs and another 20-30 open community management types. In the greater scheme, it's not a lot - whether or not it happens is a sort of capitalist / open source reality check on the value of X to the future.
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