this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2024
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X Windowing System is used in XWayland still. ~~X11~~ Xorg is no longer needed. RIP ~~X11~~ Xorg, you served us well.
Edit: Thanks to the note in the comments. I obvously meant Xorg is no longer needed, which is the widely used implementation of X11 protocol. This always confuses the hell out of me.
Wayland kinda is an x.org project in the first place. AFAIK it's officially organised under freedesktop but the core devs are x.org people.
x.org as in the organisation and/or domain might not be needed any more, but the codebase is still maintained by exactly those Wayland devs for the sake of XWayland. Support for X11 clients isn't going to go away any time soon. XWayland is also capable of running in rootfull mode and use X window managers, if there's enough interest to continue the X.org distribution I would expect them to completely rip out the driver stack at some point and switch it over to an off the shelf minimum wayland compositor + XWayland. There's people who are willing to maintain XWayland for compatibility's sake, but all that old driver cruft, no way.
Wayland is freedesktop's project and freedesktop is Xorg's project. But you are kinda correct.
Not really. Wayland is fundamentally different from Xorg. Otherwise we would not need Wayland and create X12. It's like saying mechanical hard drives are kind of Solid State Drives, just because they allow to do something similar. Even if the developers are the same, does not mean the technology is.
I'm not sure if this is correct. But let's assume this is correct. Why does it matter? If Wayland was developed by different people than those who maintain Xorg at the moment, would not change the fact that we need Wayland, because it is different and solves issues that cannot be solved with Xorg without rewriting it. And nobody wants to rewrite Xorg or understand the code (other than very basic security maintenance).
That's precisely the point: All the devs got tired of it and started wayland instead.
X12 might happen at some point when wayland is mature, as in a "let's create and bless a network-transparent protocol so we might have a chance of getting rid of XWayland in 50 years" kind of move.