X.Org being phased out
For four decades, the X Window System has endured despite competition, but major OSes are bowing out.
In late November, Red Hat engineer Carlos Soriano Sanchez posted on the company’s blog to confirm that as of RHEL 10, X.Org server and other X servers (except Xwayland) will be removed.
Sanchez also uploaded a number of posts to his Mastodon channel detailing the work involved in maintaining the X11 infrastructure, which requires a full-time dedicated engineer. He justified Red Hat’s decision because of the extra burden on the quality engineering team, which currently has to test both Wayland and X.Org Server.
This news was hardly surprising, given that Wayland has been used by default in most cases of RHEL 8 and that X.Org Server was officially deprecated as of RHEL 9.
Still, it marks a wider move away from X11. In November, developer Nate Graham also confirmed on the KDE blog that the new Plasma 6 desktop will also default to Wayland sessions, with preliminary support for playing HDR-capable games on compatible screens. Naturally, this will affect any OS that deploys Plasma 6, such as Fedora 40. Graham used the blog comments section to clarify that X11 sessions will be available in the near future, however support will definitely be “thrown away at some point in the next 10 years”.
Merge requests and developer conversations suggest that Gnome also seems to be taking steps towards dropping X11. Since 2016, Gnome sessions have defaulted to Wayland. Developers also argue that X11 has received less testing in recent years and that removing support would reduce the desktop’s code by several thousand lines.
X.Org continues to be actively developed. For the latest news, visit https://lists.x.org/mailman/ listinfo/xorg-devel.