RHEL 10 will be Wayland only; what does this mean for X.org? | Hacker News Reader

RHEL 10 will be Wayland only; what does this mean for X.org?

theregister.com

35 pointslproven24 comments

I'm not sure if this is true, but JWZ, "the world's foremost expert on screen savers on Unix-like operating systems", says that "Wayland does not support screen savers: it does not have any provision that allows screen savers to even exist in any meaningful way. If you value screen savers, that's kind of a problem. " [0]

*caution*: links from HN to jwz's blog do, or did show an nsfw picture

[0] https://www.jwz.org/blog/2023/09/wayland-and-screen-savers/

A relevant protocol (https://wayland.app/protocols/ext-session-lock-v1) has been introduced nearly two years ago.

This looks a lot more like a lock screen than a screensaver. A screensaver could be implemented using this API, but it would replace the DE-native lock screen and need to implement everything it used to do.

Xscreensaver is both a lock-screen and a screensaver, so for jwz, that should be fine.

[edit]

It is missing what jwz calls the "blank" state (i.e. screensaver showing, but no password required to unlock).

I quote jwz's reply:

>Well, ext-session-lock-v1 is itself a non-starter. There is no sane reason to perpetuate the old model where screen savers have to read passwords and talk to PAM. Authentication belongs in the display manager. It's already there since they have already implemented screen locking. Not using that same code path would be madness.

So, it is less that "Wayland does not support screensavers", and more of "Wayland supports screensavers that work like they did under X. But the way things worked under X is so stupid that it is not worth considering".

Not knowing anything about Wayland, I feel more than qualified to respond. :)

Under X11, a screen locker wasn't 'secure' in the same way as a login manager. If the screen-locker/screen saver crashed, the user is still logged on. If the login-manager crashes, nobody is logged on, and it probably just restarts. [0]

I think the jist of the article on jwz I linked is that, under X11 anybody can write a screen saver, it doesn't matter what window manager.

Under Wayland, the logic of when to start & make secure a screensaver (as opposed to screen lock) would be in in the display-manager or compositer, and there isn't just one of those, and attempting to get all of them to get together and standardize it would be a PITA.

[0] https://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/toolkits.html

[1] https://www.jwz.org/blog/2023/09/wayland-and-screen-savers/

[2] https://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/man1.html#2

Do people even use screensavers anymore?

Not for any “purposeful” use. Screensavers were used to prevent burn-in. So, unless you’re using a CRT, it’s a waste of power. OLED displays usually have built-in burn-in protection nowadays as well. Again, it is more energy efficient to power off the display.

Apple seems to think so. It's the first 'improvement' mentioned on the macOS Sonoma homepage. https://www.apple.com/macos/sonoma/

I don't care either way about Wayland or Xorg, I just want something that works.

However, I haven't used a screensaver in so long I can't even remember. At least 20 years. I just want the monitor to switch off when it's not in use.

Sorry Jamie, nobody values screen savers anymore.

I need a lock screen though. So far I haven't even been able to get a graphical display manager / login screen working on Wayland.

Does anyone actually run RHEL with an X server?

Many devs targeting RHEL run RHEL as a workstation OS and it works great.

I honestly wish Red Hat sold a prosumer version of RHEL with support

As nice as that would be I can imagine the support staff required would balloon quite a bit and where businesses sometimes make funky choices on how they build their things, prosumers may do that at a higher rate and make for harder to support systems.

What do you, as a prosumer, need paid support for?

You can buy it with phone support for $349 per year.

https://www.redhat.com/en/store/red-hat-enterprise-linux-ser...

They do, https://www.redhat.com/en/store/red-hat-enterprise-linux-wor...

RHE10 anouncement stated that they want that change in 2025 so they count on 2 years of development for Wayland. Becouse Wayland is still not ready.

RHE9 have support to 2032 ? So X Org still have a lot of support.

And you know what ? RHE10 is planned to still have XWayland supported so X Org code is still in play. Can be packaged and supported again any time before 2040 maybe longer. Just remove all that drivers, only 2 are needed :) Plus few for Arm, but that is new code.

OpenBSD has maintained a fork of X.org called Xenocara for quite some time. I wonder if those developers will be the last with a deep understanding of the guts.

Article author/submitter here.

> OpenBSD has maintained a fork of X.org called Xenocara

Did you RTFA? I specifically mentioned that:

« If nobody volunteers to take on the considerable workload of maintaining X.org, it will die. The task of getting OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and DragonflyBSD to all cooperate on maintaining a shared implementation, perhaps based on OpenBSD's Xenocara, is probably even more difficult. Xenocara does run on Linux – Hyperbola used it, but that OS is in the process of moving to a BSD base. »

Huh, no I didn't see that—I think when I read this on my phone that the content cut off at the "More Context" section. I remember thinking that your article had a rather strange ending point, and was a little less deep than I would have wanted. I guess that explains that :-)

EDIT: reading the remainder now, this article does a great job discussing other approaches: Arcan, NeWS, X12. Lovely work.

Thank you!

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