Question about the future of Xorg

[Felipe Contreras]

On Tue, Jun 10, 2025 at 1:11 AM Carsten Haitzler <raster at rasterman.com> wrote:
>
> On Mon, 9 Jun 2025 19:23:02 -0600 Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras at gmail.com>
> said:
>
> > On Mon, Jun 9, 2025 at 5:49 PM Robert Heller <heller at deepsoft.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > At Mon, 9 Jun 2025 17:13:09 -0600 Felipe Contreras
> > > <felipe.contreras at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > > > 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.
> > > Maybe we actually prefer "old fashioned" desktop environments. So, we will
> > > continue to use Xorg (X11).
> >
> > Of course, but the issue is who is "us". Clearly there's many _users_
> > that will stick with Xorg, but some _developers_ need to ensure that
> > it keeps working. Who is going to do that in the years to come?
> >
> > That's what I'm trying to find out.
>
> well the way it used to work back in the 80's and 90's is ... this is where you
> stop waiting for someone else to do it and get up and do it yourself.

Of course, and that's what I've done with multiple projects. But then
political nonsense kicks in and meritocracy is thrown out the window.
Maintainers end up believing they are my boss and are entitled to my
free time.

Why would I go through that pain again if there isn't a **single**
developer on the project committed to the Xorg server? It does seem
Enrico Weigelt was the only one, so why wouldn't I contribute to
XLibre instead? 1 developer is infinitely more percent than 0.

> while in my other mails here i'm explaining how wayland works.. i'm doing it
> because i also have fingers in that pie a bit and i know how it works and there
> is a lot of misunderstanding and spreading of misinformation. there is bad AND
> good about wayland. anyone preaching all "bad" is almost likely wrong. there is
> much it improves and does better - sometimes a lot better.

The only misinformation I see comes from Wayland advocates.

You are right that Wayland is not all bad. I was part of the team that
developed the Nokia N9, which shipped with Wayland, and probably was
the first commercial device with it (2011). Daniel Stone was part of
the team. For that use case Wayland was great.

But for my laptop it's not, Xorg is superior in every way. That's my
opinion, and that's the opinion of many people who still use Xorg and
are not going to stop any time soon.

> anyway - my point is... if xorg just goes into maintenance only mode - at
> best, you're going to just keep a system that needs work on life support. if
> you want to truly keep it alive it has to not just be maintained but moved
> forward. new extensions, re-jigging of old extensions and even core protocol
> with the understanding that you WILL break some things as you go and you are
> judicious about how you do that, then x has a chance to really survive.

I personally don't need new features, I just need it to work as it has
always worked on top of newer linux kernels. That's it.

But yes, newer generations are going to want new features and if those
aren't implemented Xorg is going to become more and more obscure.
That's not something I particularly care about, I just need it to
work.

Cheers.

-- 
Felipe Contreras