Xorg development effort slowing in favour of Wayland
 

Two related trends happening :

1. "Xorg isn't going to be receiving much more development effort in favour of Wayland" ( from
https://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-de...er/059054.html
)


2. desktop environments switching to Wayland : e.g.
"change in KDE Plasma 6.0 is the strong push for Wayland to be the default session type. While the X11 session will still be available, the Plasma team highly recommends the adoption of Wayland as the go-to choice. However, distributions will be free to override this recommendation and continue defaulting to X11 if they find it more suitable for their needs."
( from
https://debugpointnews.com/plasma-6-may-update/
)
Also see Redhat Enterprise plans :
https://who-t.blogspot.com/2023/12/x...this-mean.html


Are any slackers concerned about this? Well as you can guess, I am.
The way I setup my my various laptops and workstations to share one monitor requires use of Xorg, and (correct me if wrong) Wayland cannot do such client-server networking things in the same way.


Xorg is calling for volunteers for various tasks. (see the thread in lists.x.org/archives). Is it in the Slackware project's general interest to help out? Or do slackers on the whole welcome the trend and are happy to see Xorg dwindle and eventually (I suppose) go to extras and pasture as KDE and others phase it out? What does our BDFL think?


And did I miss this already being discussed somewhere else here in this linuxquestions Slackware?


Cheers, John Lumby

that does not belong to slackware, it is a "global" trend. It was already discussed several times, also on LQ. Just look for them. But anyway, it looks like you are right. Somewhat similar to the other war (to systemd or not to systemd, started a few hundred years ago by a famous slacker, named Slakspeare).

Well, the X.ORG base is available for anyone who wants to spin it off and maintain an alternate.
I expect X.ORG to work for a long time yet, although the codebase may go stale. (IT HAS been pretty slow for a LONG time now anyway.)
Perhaps something based upon updated DirectFB code would be smaller, faster, simpler, and (for Slackware) better?
I recall TinyX was integrated into X.ORG, but if we can pull the old source and update it that can provide an X base for a GUI desktop.

We just need to decide if we NEED and option, and if we do which one we want to develop.

Yes, this is an upstream issue which may impact Slackware at some point. I'm not sure that this topic belongs in the Slackware forum here at LQ. Perhaps in a general Linux forum?

I'm afraid there is no other choice in the long run. If everyone were to move to wayland, the slackers would also have to do it.

You mean like they did with PAM and Rust?

Arcan! We will always have Arcan! :D https://www.phoronix.com/news/Arcan-0.6.3-Released


Are "we" protected by the Wayland license from it being moved behind a paywall? Isn't IBM the owner?

I picked up somewhere that the Xorg code is a mess, which for me is enough to scrap the thing (eventually)....

It would be nice if someone wrote a how-to for Wayland. I searched just now with "wayland on slackware" and it's all people confused about what to do, claiming they got Plasma working, or talking about X11/Wayland internals. How, exactly, do I start with Wayland? I have an AMDGPU, and run NsCDE (themed FVWM2), started with "startx" from the command line.

• How to switch to something almost no one on Slackware seems to know how to use?
• What binary do I run?
• What config file(s) do I edit?
• Do I have to compile something? There's some stuff with name *wayland* in /usr/bin.
• Do I have to give up my xclients? Some? Many? All?
• Does Xephyr/Xnest still work?

Plasma is just too heavy for my environment.

It's possible to run an Xorg window manager in Xwayland on top of a Wayland compositor; I tried it with fvwm3 and labwc early last year. Haven't really looked at it since then, but apparently there have been Xwayland improvements that make the experience a little better. I could ask for a SlackDocs account and do a write-up there in the near future if anyone's interested.

EDIT: Here's the page: https://docs.slackware.com/howtos:wi...ts_in_xwayland

Technically true, but my reason for raising it here in slackware (other than my own self-interest) was that, slackware itself being an atypical distribution, maybe slackware users might not share the view of linux users in general.

That seems to be becoming truer day by day, but the Xorg developers are calling for practical help to keep it going. Will that make much difference in the long run? Hard to say, but one factor in that bet is the expected loss (measured in units of "Oh @#$% I can't get this wayland thing to work the way I want, and now I have no choice") to slackware users.

Yes, please!

It is possible to run any DE or WM based on X11 in Xwayland, using Xweston.

https://github.com/ackalker/Xweston

It's actually a set of scripts that need Weston to work.

For those who want to try Xweston: it works great, but it needs to be adapted for Slackware. LuckyCyborg made this adaptation of Xweston for Slackware a year or so ago. So, look for the past threads on this forum.

As far as Wayland and Slackware, it's already here. Optional of course. I've tried Wayland a couple of times. Admittedly a while ago, it was ugly both times. I am now gun-shy regarding Wayland. When Pat decides it is time, then I will accept that Wayland is ready. For now I will stick with Xorg. Disclaimer, I may give Wayland another try.

At work we see changes that have the least considerations for stability and robustness creating expected issues.
In essence, quality is more and more degraded.
Additionally people think it takes too much time to do things with a long term quality focus.

Have they considered the robustness of this display protocol that is wayland ? why is it necessary with recent hardware(s) ?

Thankfully Slackware is pro-active by having it built in 15.0.