Question about the future of Xorg

[Vladimir Dergachev]

On Mon, 9 Jun 2025, Robert Heller wrote:

> At Mon, 9 Jun 2025 17:13:09 -0600 Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>
>> On Mon, Jun 9, 2025 at 8:27??????AM Lyude Paul <lyude at redhat.com> wrote:
>>
>>> X wasn't "badly designed" per-say, for what it was I'll absolutely say it was a wonderful piece of software and it did its job well. But it's also designed for an era of computing that is much different than how most modern desktops work, so for a lot of the functionality we wanted to see in Wayland the only way to have implemented it in X would have required breaking people's setups. So, technically speaking splitting the development off was kind of a given in some sense anyway. Even if we didn't move work to Wayland it's more likely work would have been on an X server that didn't really resemble X11 and wasn't 1:1 compatible.
>>
>> You can list a million reasons why Wayland is superior, but people
>> still use Xorg, and my bet is that's going to continue to be the case
>> for at least a decade, and possibly much more.
>
> The key part of what Lyude Paul wrote is "But it's also designed for an era of
> computing that is much different than how most modern desktops work...". There
> are some of "us" who have no use for "modern" desktop environments.

I think modern desktops work pretty much exactly the same way as the 
original Xerox demo - you got rectangular windows that can be overlapped, 
and you can click with the mouse and type with the keyboard.

Most of the user progress is the development of KDE that allows seemless 
access using "fish://" and drag and drop, and customization that lets you 
turn your KDE desktop in a Mac, NeXT or Windows, or a mixture of those. 
(Yep, I know there was a lot of interesting work in other parts, but it 
not that user visible.)

I think a lot of controversy will disappear if we view Wayland not as a 
successor of X with carefull thought out protocol and lightweight clients, 
but rather as "super-VNC", without the network part.

Though the networking might not be hard to implement on a fast connection
(40Gb/s?)

best

Vladimir Dergachev


>  Maybe we
> actually prefer "old fashioned" desktop environments. So, we will continue to
> use Xorg (X11). Unless/until Wayland develops some kind of whatever that fully
> supports / mimics the "old fashioned" features of X11 in a compaticable way
> (so "standard" X11 Window Managers, like FVWM can work), Wayland is just not
> going to work for us, no matter how spiffy it is -- *I* don't need a spiffy
> GUI subsystem, something that is boring that actually works the way *I* want
> it to work is what I want.
>
> It is worth noting that "Dark Mode" terminal windows look and feel just like
> the 1970s vintage CRT terminals I used 50 years ago. To me *that* is seriously
> "old fashioned" and is commonly the standard default terminal for many
> "modern" desktops... Go figure.
>
>>
>> So if there are some users that will keep using Xorg, I would expect
>> there to be some developers that will keep developing Xorg.
>>
>> But for some reason no one other than Enrico Weigelt has raised their
>> hand and publicly stated so.
>>
>
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