Red Hat has announced it will go all-in on Wayland with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 10, dropping support for Xorg server.

The X Window System has been the default display solution for Linux for three decades. Unfortunately, Xorg and X11 have become a patchwork of code that make it difficult to update and add new features. As a result, Wayland has been in development for the last 15 years as a replacement, with developers eager to avoid the issues that have led to the Xorg dead-end. The road to Wayland has not been without its own challenges, however, which is why it still isn’t the default on my many Linux distros.

Red Hat has been one of the largest maintainers of the old Xorg code. According to Carlos Soriano Sanchez, Software Engineering Manager, that is about to change:

Earlier this year (2023), as part of our RHEL 10 planning, we made a study to understand Wayland’s status, not only from an infrastructure perspective, but also from an ecosystem perspective. The result of this evaluation is that, while there are still some gaps and applications that need some level of adaptation, we believe the Wayland infrastructure and ecosystem are in good shape, and that we’re on a good path for the identified blockers to be resolved by the time RHEL 10 is out, planned to be released on the first half of 2025.

With this, we’ve decided to remove Xorg server and other X servers (except Xwayland) from RHEL 10 and the following releases. Xwayland should be able to handle most X11 clients that won’t immediately be ported to Wayland, and if needed, our customers will be able to stay on RHEL 9 for its full life cycle while resolving the specifics needed for transitioning to a Wayland ecosystem. It’s important to note that “Xorg Server” and “X11” are not synonymous, X11 is a protocol that will continue to be supported through Xwayland, while the Xorg Server is one of the implementations of the X11 protocol.

As Sanchez points out, there are still gaps in Wayland’s functionality, although these are rapidly closely. Those gaps have, however, caused some developers to hold off from adopting Wayland. Red Hat’s announcement should serve as a clear message that Xorg’s days are numbered and Wayland is the future.