Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a Linux distribution that targets its products primarily for businesses.
Red Hat unveiled a few days ago the announcement about some of the significant changes in its next release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 10. And in the announcement they share the plan to phase out use of X.org server (which was marked as obsolete since the RHEL 9.1 branch and was scheduled to be removed), in favor of Wayland marking the end of an era for the traditional 30-year-old X Window System.
This is undoubtedly a fundamental movement by Red Hat, since the transition to Wayland is not something that is new, since Red Hat has been involved in it for 15 years and over time it became clear that the old X11 protocol and its server counterpart were facing inherent problems that needed a forward-thinking solution. This transition ensures continued support for X11 customers through Xwayland while facilitating the shift to a Wayland ecosystem.
The measure was promoted due to the confirmation that the protocol X11 and the Xorg server were plagued with problems that Wayland could solve, because while the community was advancing in the implementation of new functions and the resolution of errors in Wayland, the development of the X.org server and the X11 infrastructure was approaching its conclusion.
Although Wayland was experiencing significant improvements, This progress created an additional burden of having to maintain both stacks at the same time, although Red Hat has supported the Xorg and Wayland stacks, time and The resources divided between them have become increasingly difficult to maintain. Over time, this fragmentation of efforts began to pose difficulties, resulting in the desire to concentrate on solving the fundamental problems.
Red Hat's collaboration with hardware and software vendors, customers and the visual effects industry has been instrumental in the development of crucial projects, including HDR and color management support, Xwayland for backward compatibility, infrastructure for modern solutions remote desktop, explicit synchronization in the Wayland protocol, Libei Library for emulation and input capture, and OpenJDK compatibility with (X)Wayland.
The transition from the more than 30-year-old X Window System to the new Wayland-based system has been going on for about 15 years, and Red Hat has been involved from the beginning. Over time, it became clear that the X11 protocol and the Xorg server had fundamental problems that needed to be fixed, and Wayland was the solution. Today, Wayland is recognized as the de facto solution for window and display infrastructure.
Throughout this transition, Red Hat has supported the X.org and Wayland stacks. This divides the time we and the upstream community have to support new features and fix bugs.
However, It seems that Xorg is living its last days, Since more and more Linux distributions and desktop environments have made the leap towards Wayland while many other projects are about to abandon it in favor of Wayland.
And with the displacement from the X.org server on RHEL 10, will allow you to focus on infrastructure and the ecosystem, in addition to being able to address issues such as compatibility, providing greater security, and all remaining shortcomings.
As for applications that do not migrate from Xorg to Wayland, It is mentioned that in RHEL 10, will be run using XWayland and that for users who depend on applications that run exclusively on Xorg they will need to remain on RHEL 9 throughout their lifecycle, switch applications or migrate to Wayland before upgrading.
Last but not least, it is worth mentioning that RHEL 10 should not arrive until 2025, so there is time now to work on this migration.
Finally if you are interested in knowing more about it, you can check the details in the following link