Red Hat has formally confirmed what many were thinking: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 will be doing away with X.Org Server support aside from XWayland.
For those making use of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 in a desktop setting, RHEL10 due for release in H1’2025 will be Wayland-focused. X11 client support will only come via XWayland.
This does also further solidify the X.Org Server in effect being dead upstream. Red Hat engineers were typically the ones managing new X.Org Server releases as well as carrying on with various bits of development.
Most interesting development. This is obviously still into the future but I also always had the impression that Redhat did a lot of work on the XOrg server. With this I think it’s actually dead once they no longer support RHEL 9 and older.
I won’t miss it, granted it’s not a bad implementation, but the design is showing its age. Apart from Wayland that I use, I’m also looking at Arcan’s progress from time to time. Obviously rather niche at the moment but projects like these make the ecosystem interesting.
This honestly still feels premature for a server based OS. I rely on x forwarding and an rdp server for some tasks, and as far as I know Wayland still doesn’t really have support for either of those.
People keep saying this, but X forwarding seems to work just fine with XWayland. I just tried a handfull of X programs between my machines, and neither are running X11. I don’t use it everyday to know the gotchas, but there you go. Programs that use shared memory pixel buffers (everything that isn’t xeyes realistically) even run better than I remember now that I have gigabit. >_< It’s still a way worse experience than VNC or RDP though.
Waypipe addresses forwarding. The major Wayland compositors support either RDP or VNC already I believe.
Gotcha on the forwarding, my issue with rdp forwarding is I want a server like xrdp, so users don’t need to be logged in locally, which I haven’t seen googling yet.
I assume you’re talking about X over SSH? That’s possible with Wayland via Waypipe. Also I’m not sure why RDP would require X, just a compositor being able to forward the video over network (which is perfectly possible with Wayland) and accepting inputs over network as well, which to my knowledge isn’t part of Wayland. Quick check says Gnome already offers RDP and that’s Red Hat’s DE.
That would be 2032.