It's about time. A 10+ year transition from X.org to Wayland is long enough.
X.org is open source, it is does not belong to Red Hat. It's a truly desirable technology, anyone else is welcome to contribute to the maintenance of it or fork it.
When no one else wants to maintain it favor of newer technologies, that's a good sign it's ready for retirement.
In those ten years, clusters in remote datacenters went mainstream, but Wayland has never delivered network transparency except by embedding X. Where are these users who are still running everything on one computer under their desk?
I think the demand for remote GUI apps went down, for several reasons:
- Web apps got better and more common
- Windows (and MS SQL Server etc), which are some of the big OS-level reason for using remote GUI management tools, has improved its command-line management story and added UI-less server editions
- Network improvements (more bandwidth, more clouds and POPs) made existing 'remote desktop' protocols more tolerable on the Internet, all the way back to the venerable VNC and RDP
What kind of remote UI app/workload do you see as common today?
Do you commonly encounter people who use networked X for scenarios that would not be better solved by other protocols? Cause I have basically never seen that in the last decade.
Not true. Chrome OS uses Wayland and has 40% of the Linux desktop market. (Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/218089/global-market-sha... 1.1% Chrome OS vs 1.6% Linux ). Given trends, Chrome OS alone could make Wayland the dominant Linux display server in a couple years.
Chrome OS using wayland is almost as relevant as the fact that Intel uses MINIX in its chipsets is to MINIX's market share, its almost entirely Google internal, with very tight constraints on its environment both in terms of hardware and software, it does not generalize to the general Linux use case, or have much relevance to developers and development outside of Google.
Wayland could just as easily be HypotheticalDisplayFooServ and the result would be the same for everyone that isn't Google.
X.org is open source, it is does not belong to Red Hat. It's a truly desirable technology, anyone else is welcome to contribute to the maintenance of it or fork it.
When no one else wants to maintain it favor of newer technologies, that's a good sign it's ready for retirement.