X.Org is dead, Wayland lives on

Asahi Linux founder Hector Martin published a post on mastodon urging users of the Asahi Linux distribution to stop using X.Org because Wayland is the future of Linux.

Asahi Linux is a crowdfunding project initiated by Hector Martin (net name Marcan), a senior operating system transplant expert, with the goal of porting Linux to Mac devices equipped with Apple Silicon chips.

The goal of Asahi Linux is not just to get Linux to run on these devices, but to eventually polish it to the point where it can be used as an everyday operating system, Marcan said.

Marcan said that the team has no time and resources to solve the problems on X.Org, and X.Org is almost unmaintained, and it is completely unsuitable for modern display hardware. In addition, large Linux distributions and major desktop environments have abandoned X.Org support .

For example, Red Hat announced that RHEL 10 will not include the X.org display server by default - the official RHEL documentation states that the X.org display server is deprecated and will be removed in future major RHEL releases (starting with RHEL 10). Red Hat did not explain why X.org was deprecated. The current RHEL 9 still includes the X.org display server and will provide 10 years of support until 2032.

As a compatibility layer between Wayland and X11, although XWayland can continue to support the old X.Org applications, it is also limited to "displaying" the content of X11. For things beyond the display window (such as synthesizers, IME, input Management, desktop environment, etc.), you still need to use native Wayland applications, because XWayland basically does not integrate these components.

The only reason Asahi Linux used Xorg by default before was that the Wayland compositor was slow for software rendering. But now that Asahi Linux has a GPU driver, it will switch from using X.Org by default to Wayland by default in an update soon (while boosting the GPU driver to the default version).

About three years ago, an open source developer at Intel pointed out that X.Org Server had become de facto "Abandonware" and that Wayland was the future.

Because at that time X.Org had not released a major version for more than two years, and the development activity was the lowest level in the past ten years. In addition, the main maintainers of X.Org - Intel and Red Hat are no longer willing to continue to invest resources in X.Org Server.

This, combined with the fact that more and more mainstream distributions are dropping X.Org Server, makes it "obsolete software".