Red Hat Migrates RHEL from Xorg to Wayland
If you've been wondering when Xorg will finally be a thing of the past, wonder no more, as Red Hat has made it clear.
With the release of RHEL 10, Red Hat plans on making the migration from Xorg to Wayland, thereby closing the door on the out-of-date Linux windowing service for good.
On November 27th, developer Carlos Sanchez posted this in the official announcement:
"...we’ve decided to remove Xorg server and other X servers (except Xwayland) from RHEL 10 and the following releases. Xwayland should be able to handle most X11 clients that won’t immediately be ported to Wayland, and if needed, our customers will be able to stay on RHEL 9 for its full life cycle while resolving the specifics needed for transitioning to a Wayland ecosystem."
The announcement continues, "It’s important to note that ‘Xorg Server’ and ‘X11’ are not synonymous, X11 is a protocol that will continue to be supported through Xwayland, while the Xorg Server is one of the implementations of the X11 protocol.”
This move will help Red Hat (and other distributions) take care of numerous issues, especially those regarding security (as Xorg cannot meet today's heightened needs for a more secure windowing protocol). Beyond security, Wayland also addresses things like better GPU/Display hot-plugging, improved gestures and scrolling, better support for high-density displays, and more.
Although not every distribution has made the switch, when Red Hat finally migrates to Wayland, it would come as no surprise that those distributions that have hesitated will make the jump as well. And given that Xorg development has gone nearly stagnant, this shift should come as no surprise.
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