Daily Archives: 2020-10-25

It’s time to admit it: the X.Org Server is abandonware

Source: OSNews

Article note: The general problem that Wayland is a "Do it all in extensions" design with an inadequate core of features that is already accreting and churning with novelty-seeking developer habits before it reaches feature parity with the creaking hulk of X11 is pretty disappointing. The fact that it successfully sucked all the air out of the X developer ecosystem while doing so is alarming.

Besides the likes of Red Hat, Intel has been the only other major organization in recent time willing to devote resources to areas like X.Org release management, but even while they let go some of their Wayland folks years ago, they seem uninterested in devoting much in the way of the X.Org Server advancements as we approach 2021. With Ubuntu 21.04 also possibly defaulting to Wayland for its GNOME session, the KDE Wayland support getting squared away, and other advancements continuing, X.Org Server 1.21 may very well prove to be an elusive release.

The transition to Wayland is taking far longer than it should, and a lot of important software simply isn’t ready yet. KDE is still hard at work, and my desktop environment of choice – Cinnamon – has zero support in the works for Wayland. Don’t get me wrong – I’m excited for Wayland – but it feels like we’re counting down by continually multiplying by 0.5 – no matter how many times you multiply, you never quite reach zero.

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