"Red Hat's Christian Schaller says it's their belief that X.Org will soon be going into "maintenance mode" in favor of Wayland. Specifically he said:

Once we are done with [their Wayland improvements] we expect X.org to go into hard maintenance mode fairly quickly. The reality is that X.org is basically maintained by us and thus once we stop paying attention to it there is unlikely to be any major new releases coming out and there might even be some bitrot setting in over time. We will keep an eye on it as we will want to ensure X.org stays supportable until the end of the RHEL8 lifecycle at a minimum, but let this be a friendly notice for everyone who rely the work we do maintaining the Linux graphics stack, get onto Wayland, that is where the future is."

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pa...e-Mode-Quickly
https://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2019/...orkstation-31/

"The reality is that X.org is basically maintained by us"...I guess the work of the BSD's and others means nothing to RedHat. Would love to see someone fork X and keep it alive.

Correct.

This is what everybody is doing these days-- gutting POSIX and replacing it with a lot of corporate garbage.

http://techrights.org/wiki/index.php...Database#Redix

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18554333

Ubuntu: we're going to try to deprecate 32-bit support (just one week ago).

Redhat: hold my beer.

I wonder, is "wayland" "waylaid" misplet?

(Sorry, couldn't resist.)

Systemx? Systemw?

X.org has been very Linux centric and focused X development on things like 3D acceleration and the Linux graphics stack for many years. Operating systems like FreeBSD or OpenBSD, etc are very much downstream, porting over X11 and Linux drm/kms drivers once they've matured enough in Linux.

Wayland is being developed by X.org as the X11 replacement. Unless someone forks X11 it will disappear. However, X11 in itself has a lot of problems, so whether anyone will want to fork it and develop it on, rather than just maintaining it, is uncertain.

X.org is made up of and is directed by people from IBM/Red Hat, Canonical, Intel, HPE, AMD and others.

They host annual sponsored "developer conferences" with over 100 corporate reps/sponsors attending.

It’s a freedesktop.org project and that means Linux desktop centric. In effect it's developed by people who only consider a Linux system with systemd and a gnome desktop as viable. This is because as a business, they are only invested in what is relevant to their business.

If the development focus were still “legacy” X11 none of those people would be attending, none of that corporate money / developer time would be forthcoming...

Once free software development gets into the hands of big corporations, this kind of thing is inevitable.

Which is why there really ought to be some kind of lifeboat for when it does.

I dunno, Gentoo? But friendlier? Perhaps just BSD then. Is that where this is going? Serious question, may not sound like one.

Xorg was the lifeboat. From XFree86.

Fair enough, I meant in broader terms-- like an entire operating system that isn't infiltrated and co-opted by corporations.

In olden days it would be called GNU, but the FSF seems fairly apathetic about how much development is co-opted, so long as it is under the right license. It is certainly difficult to define exactly what they (or anybody) should do to prevent that, but if it is possible to define then an anti-monopoly version of GNU (yes, that ought to be a redundant term) should probably be available.

Because what seems to be happening is reduced compatibility with things that matter to users, and increased focus on what matters to these corporations.

There was a balance between these interests, but an increasing number of people seem to be talking about that balance toppling over or at least wobbling.

XFree86 adopted an unpopular licence with credit clauses and brought about their own end. Most of the developers moved to X.org as a I recall.

http://www.xfree86.org/legal/licenses.html

Matter to users is subjective. I don't know how many people are actually using Linux, Xorg, or whatever but it is a safe bet to say that the people that will actually notice and or care about this change are very very few. Same with Systemd. If it was really such a big deal then it would have been derailed by every distro out there. Rather it is being adopted by all but a small handful. And as things progress and diverge, eventually people will walk away from other init systems. It will just be too much work to keep going. As the Red Hat guy said... Inevitable.

I'm not saying roll over and take it. I'm simply saying that it isn't as big a problem for the Linux community in general as you think it is. Most people just want it to work like their car. It runs, they drive. Simple. They don't care what type of steel is used in the camshaft. It is irrelevant to the majority as evidenced by the diminishing load of anti systemd posts as time progresses.

At the end of the day it is simply impossible for everyone to be happy. Some group or person will always be upset. You have to cater to the majority and the few on the outside are left to their own devices. Want to keep something out of date going on life support, nothing is stopping them. But it will never make a comeback and will fade eventually. Just delaying it is all.

Threads like this seem to me less about the corporations taking over and whatever but rather "sticking it to the man!" or some nonsense. Relax, have a beer and enjoy the ride. You may actually like the destination, even if you don't like the view in between.

X.org is not just used by Linux. If you look specifically at operating systems which use X.org, they are all very niche and very insignificant when compared to other desktop or phone operating systems such as e.g. MS Windows, Android, macOS and iOS. So the idea that there is this vast userbase of Linux users, all perfectly happy with the status quo of whatever the corporations involved in FOSS development care to throw in there direction, is a myth. If a large gaggle of vocal but not very technically adept Linux users on some fan forum love systemd or wayland or whatever, that says precisely nothing to me.
Argumentum ad populum "everyone is using it, so it must be good..."

This is like saying that if Windows were bad, users, corporations, government departments, etc would have been deserting it in droves. Therefore Windows must be better - and you are most likely using the wrong OS.
The "Red Hat guy", would say that and would have a vested interest in peddling that kind of thing because the company he works for is heavily invested in systemd and paying people to develop it. Red Hat make their money from support contracts, so it makes sense for them to build an infrastructure which generates the need for support. It makes no sense for Red Hat to invest in anything which end users can diagnose, fix and adapt themselves (which is what the KISS philosophy was all about).
It may not be a problem for you, but it may be a problem for others. We cannot assume to understand others' specific needs and requirements or preferences.

"Most people" just don't care about their OS and use the OS which comes preinstalled on the device.

This whole thing looks to me like the windowification of Linux. Or more accurate 'the corporatatizion" of Linux. I do not know why a rather good system cannot be fixed, looks like we who like window managers as opposed to DE will be SOL eventually in Linux.

I set up a new RHEL 7 workstation at work, and I wanted to turn off auto-mount. I discovered I had to execute something that looked to me just like the XP registry editor. That was the first time I saw that, and I was a bit surprised, should not have been though.

To me the same has happened in the past, DOS ---> Windows (yes DOS was rather hackable back then), Old UNIX (V7) --> the various messy corporate versions, now Linux --> who know what.

Seems once the Marketing and Accountant people take over from hacker types, the thing morphs into a overly complex monster. I fear the same is starting to happen to Linux

That is exactly why I didn't like the moves to pulseaudio & systemd, corporations that make money from support contracts making Linux more user unfriendly, just like Microsoft's move to the Registry for everything.

Thankfully, we still have the BSDs, & those of us that don't like the way corporations are taking over Linux, can move over to the freedom of the BSDs. (I keep a foot in the OpenBSD camp, just in case.)

That ship sailed. Many people have not been paying attention. Projects like X.org, Linux kernel and gnome, etc are all corporate owned and controlled, via funding "foundations" and boards of directors, etc. Fortune 500 companies are paying the bills and they're not doing it out of charity or because they think GPL is wonderful, from any conviction that software needs to be "free".
dconf - configuration stored in a binary database. It seems Windows-like because it is. It's developed by people who want to take things in that direction.
Windows is a "black box" designed for an end consumer, so the registry and much of Windows UI, was designed with that in mind. All Windows Management Instrumentation, has the same "here be dragons" in it's inception. The intent is to keep "average joe" out and provide settings accessible to "administrators" only - settings which are confusingly laid out, often not in plain text, not easy to locate in the first place, etc. The registry facilities the "hiding" of settings inside a complex hive to keep "average joe" from messing about. gnome and systemd in particular are close to emulating that kind of thing.