as some of you have seen in the news, in general, the state of the X server in the Linux ecosystem is not in a good shape. This problem is worse if you have newer bits in the distro (new mesa, etc etc) so Clear Linux has been suffering various intermittent “X does not work with hardware Y” issues at times.
I want to post to make clear where things are at in this regard for Clear Linux. It should be of no surprise that Wayland is the future of the desktop Linux ecosystem – and it is for us as well. At this point, X is not installed by default for new installs, but we do ship the X stack as an optional bundle.
Now to the part that might be less popular: Our gui testing is all on Wayland, and all our efforts to fix or improve things are towards the wayland ecosystem – in line with where the whole industry is going.
The state of the X ecosystem is very dire – almost no commits to X (outside of xwayland) or the drivers… and nobody really looks at in a “new source base” world (only in a “RHEL keep it cve free” sense). We plan to keep X in our OS as long as we can – which means, as long as it keeps reasonably working without lots of effort, and as long as there are no critical CVEs that aren’t getting fixed upstream.
But also lets be clear, there will be a day where the “as we can” will no longer be true. It’s not today. It’s not likely tomorrow. But that day is very clearly coming, just as it is for any other open source ecosystem that no longer is actively developed upstream. Saying otherwise would be dishonest and not set a realistic expectation for you, our user.
This is not unique to Clear Linux, but given all the recent press articles (and reactions in their comments), I figure I should clarify where things stand for us.
Thank you very much for this information. In fact, I do really believe this is the correct choice to make. Along time, the things that work only on X server are becoming rare and it makes sense to allocate resources on developing and improving CL instead of making it compatible with frameworks that, as you said, “nobody really looks at in a “new source base” world”.
I’m using systematically xorg on CLR and on my SuSE SLED 15 and RHEL 9.2 installations
I can’t make TeamViewer working correctly on Wayland it always asks to work on Xorg
All my FreeBSD runs on Xorg
Then I’ll try to still work as long as possible with CLR on Xorg
Let’s hope that Xorg will commit again new dev …
Hopefully nothing is really sure in computer’s world, I remid myself when IT’s Reporters said that Laptops where ‘finished’ … we have bought about 2’000 Laptops in my company and all the providers where out of stock concerning Laptops
Thanks a lot for your efforts to still maintain Xorg on CLR for me and my family CLR and FreeBSD are our favorite and exclusive OS.
Only reason keeping me from switching to Wayland is that Synergy -software is not supported yet.
The Synergy 3.0 RC1 “works” in Wayland, mouse can be moved around, it is not visible and you can’t click things. Keyboard does not work at all. If only there would be a solution to use 1 mouse and keyboard between Win10<->Wayland…