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ndiddy	Posted on 20-05-27, 02:04 in I have yet to have never seen it all. Hi.
Post: #21 of 23 Since: 12-13-18 Last post: 23 days Last view: 11 days	While we're posting video recommendations this guy's channel is pretty cool, he shows how to see the world on the cheap. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgNqlRGqHdxNRPR6ycynWhw

ndiddy

Posted on 24-03-31, 02:24 in (Mis)adventures on Debian ((old)stable|testing|aghmyballs)

Post: #22 of 23
Since: 12-13-18

Last post: 23 days
Last view: 11 days

Posted by wertigon

Anyone tying themselves to the Xorg ship mast is doomed to go under sooner, rather than later.

Xorg is based on heaps upon piles upon mounds of hacks to get it running on a modern architecture. As soon as Xorg is off the table, you can optimize new drivers to be like one third the size in the active codepath. Xorg support will still remain for a long while as a backwards compatibility option, but I think direct kernel support acceleration could go away as early as 2026 or so. Of course, that means the 2026 LTS kernel will no longer accelerate Xorg on hardware, not that it is completely unbootable.

Xorg as it stands is already a rudderless ship on life support, and is rapidly moving towards legacy status, where it will linger until deemed obsolete. Now, one does not simply delete Xorg, far too many hooks for that. But the work to remove all hooks is more or less completed, so now we can start extracting big chunks of Xorg to Wayland. Are there some vital protocols left, yes, but those are edge cases for the most part. Things like HDR and stuff like that. Old tech, Wayland should handle pretty well now.

I'm not sure that people will switch over that quickly, Wayland is still extremely immature (despite being around for over 15 years at this point). I can definitely see support for most of the DDX backends getting dropped over the next few years (which have been the cause of most of the complaints about Xorg's code quality, the DIX portion is fairly well written), but the xf86-video-modesetting backend uses the same graphics API as Wayland so I highly doubt that accelerated Xorg will ever go away.

Posted by tomman

Time to retire the "Linux gives a new lease in life to older computers" motto, because it's no longer valid. At this point, either stick to old Linux releases you can't probably install anymore because the repos have been shutdown or archived for ages, or just stick to Windows :/

I think that 20 years of support is pretty good, especially compared to Windows, where ATI didn't release a WDDM driver for the Radeon 7500 in your Thinkpad and Microsoft dropped Pentium M support in Windows 8. This is by no means a new thing for Linux, here's a blog post from 10 years ago where the author is disappointed that then-modern Linux had dropped support for the ISA-based hardware in his mid-90s laptop.

ndiddy

Posted on 24-04-02, 03:45 in (Mis)adventures on Debian ((old)stable|testing|aghmyballs)

Post: #23 of 23
Since: 12-13-18

Last post: 23 days
Last view: 11 days

Posted by wertigon
No, it is at the point where distros are basically dropping preinstalled xorg packages. You are simply not keeping up with the (extremely rapid) pace right now:

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Fedora-41-No-GNOME-Xorg-Install

This way they can see how many are still stuck on X11 and will install the package from the servers.

I'm not surprised that Fedora and RHEL are dropping Xorg, as Wayland is part of Red Hat's initiative to "modernize" the Linux desktop. You have to remember that the use case Red Hat is anticipating for RHEL Workstation (their desktop product) is corporations using purpose-specific computers to run one or two programs (graphics rendering, CAD, industrial control software, etc) rather than general desktop usage. You can see this mindset in some of the decisions they've been making recently, like dropping support for LibreOffice, reassigning the employee who maintained support for desktop Bluetooth, power management, and GNOME multimedia software, and laying off the Fedora program manager. Wayland and GNOME meet the needs of Red Hat's customers and I wish them all the best. Similarly, I won't be surprised if GTK5 drops support for Wayland. Given how the GTK developers have been removing features that are needed by non-GNOME software (they took tray icons, custom tooltips, and toolbars out of GTK4), I also won't be surprised if only software in the GNOME ecosystem will be left using GTK by that point.

I think the real test will be whether non-Red Hat distributions drop support for Xorg. Even if Wayland-exclusive software starts popping up, Xorg users will still be able to run it inside a nested Weston session, similar to how Xwayland works on Wayland.

Posted by wertigon
For some it will be a pure WM issue (You can pry Awesome from my dead fingers!) and for some it will be an actual Wayland issue.

You can pry Window Maker from my dead fingers! :)

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