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Comment by superkuh | Hacker News Reader

> X is deprecated by the community and largely abandoned

Old and functional does not mean deprecated. In most distros and for most users X is not deprecated.

It sounds like you've been living on the bleeding edge for a long time and have lost touch with the reality of linux for most users. The GUI toolkits like Gtk and Qt fully support X. They do not fully support Wayland. When this changes you can call X deprecated.

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Yes, it's weird seeing the X is dead sentiment considering some of the most popular distros are still using X, and Wayland has only recently caught up with comparability for workflows like screen capture. I'm unfortunately stuck on X because of my NVIDIA system, but I hadn't been all that interested in Wayland until recently. AFAIK there is also some work to be done on the gaming side no?

The most popular distros are Ubuntu and Red Hat/Fedora. Both use Wayland by default. Everybody else is part of the long tail.

That is to confuse "long tail" with "doesn't matter", though.

If a supermarket doesn't stock goods in the long tail, its customers shop elsewhere.

Dismiss the "long tail" and we wouldn't have champagne in the supermarket, or classical music on the radio.

The idea that somehow the ever-changing nature of Linux is going to stablise into something that satisfies _everyone_ seems misguided. Open source code means diverse groups can, and will decide themselves what's deprecated, and take on maintenance of the things they want to exist.

If it costs just as much money to support the long tail as it does to support 95% of your user base, guess what? That long tail will go unsupported. This is why the only relevant web standard is "does it work on WebKit (formerly IE)?" And why the only relevant firmware standard is "does it boot Windows?" The major distros ship with Wayland. The major toolkits support Wayland. That's where all the development and maintenance energy is right now. X is still around, but eventually support for it will go away. Once it becomes niche enough that the costs of maintaining an X code path outweigh the benefits of supporting the few users still on X, they will take the X code path out. That's how things go in software.

Well Linux itself is part of the long tail, so by this logic, why bother maintaining such an old fashioned and irrelevant operating system based on POSIX standards from the past?

Good news, Nvidia has granted upon thee a driver that might actually work with Wayland

I agree with you that, "Old and functional does not mean deprecated." but what you asserted is not what deprecation is either. It generally means the developers are giving notice that new development on a feature/feature-set/api is discouraged. That notice was given for X a while ago.

I understand the idea that it would be better if the replacement were 100% ready when that notice was given, but I'm not surprised that wasn't the case with X, it's big shoes to fill.

I can't speak for normal users, but I have seen some reporting, that they have been on a Wayland for a while now without knowing it.

Fact is that Xorg is more or less effectively abandoned, so yes, while distributions don't deprecate them yet because there's still a lot of places where X11 is required this is where it is going.

Hmm, I guess you should let Fedora know that GTK+ and Qt don't support Wayland given they ship with Wayland by default and these... just work.

>GTK+ and Qt don't support Wayland given they ship with Wayland by default and these... just work.

That's not the impression I get watching #gtk on GIMPNet and the bug trackers. There's a lot left to do even if Wayland is enabled now.

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