Wayland is said to be a superior replacement to X and is gaining adoption. Will it in fact completely replace X at least in Debian GNU/Linux, so that X is no longer provided in the official repository of the release by the Debian maintainers?
Resolves to the current state of rolling release if Debian ceases to provide releases.
Resolves N/A if Debian effectively ceases to exist.
1,000
1.00An interesting question! 2030 sounds like the distant future, but 6 years isn't very long in the grand scheme of things and I think there's going to be a long tail of things that still don't work under wayland, meaning xorg has to stay hanging around. The debian repos contain a lot of old software that not many people actually use.
@Rucker all the development moved from X to Wayland because X reached the point that it couldn't be further improved without breaking backward compatibility. Even if you think wayland is still not stable, it will keep improving progressively while X remains stagnant. and will definitely get replaced at some point
@a2bb Xwayland is an X server, just one that talks to Wayland rather than to hardware. (There are various other non-hardware X servers as well, such as Xvnc, Xvfb, and Xephyr.) And for that matter, Xwayland talks to kernel graphics drivers for acceleration purposes, as part of bridging from X to Wayland for X clients that want hardware acceleration.
Could you please clarify in the question itself whether you specifically mean the removal of any standalone Xorg X server that's capable of displaying graphics on a real local screen without using Wayland?
@josh Now that's a hard question. I was meaning Xorg server, but it could be renamed or stubbed, so including it descendants, but Xwayland is technically a Xorg server descendant too. Would "removal of full featured hardware-backed X servers" be a good wording? Then one could argue about whether mesa or linuxfb is "hardware-backed"...