 Over the course of the last three years, I have talked about Wayland many, many times. I've talked about how Wayland isn't ready. I've talked about all of my numerous problems with Wayland when it comes to window managers. I've talked about how Wayland is ready for certain people and how it, you know, is the future and how the future is here for a lot of people, but not for everybody. I've talked about Wayland a lot on this channel, mostly because I have had so many problems with it specifically when it comes to content creation and things like that. So I have talked, Tom Blue in the face about Wayland and the future that is Wayland and how it's going to affect everybody. I've talked a lot about it. So what I wanted to do today was talk about the flip of the coin. What is going to happen to XORG? Is XORG ever going to die? Because a lot of people still use XORG. I still use XORG and I know a lot of people, in fact, most people who still use a tiling window manager or a window manager of some kind still use XORG. A lot of people who use older desktop environments that don't get updated, you know, very quickly use XORG, like XFCE users and, you know, LXQ users and things like that. So, you know, people still use XORG in vast quantities that not everybody uses Gonomar KDE. And even those who use Gonomar KDE, a lot of them still use XORG because they use an NVIDIA card or something. And then NVIDIA stuff just isn't quite there yet or isn't as far along as it needs to be. So a lot of people still use XORG. So when will or will XORG actually die? And that's the question I want to answer today. But before I do, if you'd be so kind as to drop a like on this video, it really does help the channel. So, to answer the question, XORG will eventually die. And I've had people talk to me about this, you know, before, you know, people who are very worried about this transition between Wailand and XORG, or I speak between XORG to Wailand, I should say, and they're worried because they have a workflow and they have a system that just works for them. Maybe they have an NVIDIA card and they've heard all these horror stories about how, you know, if you use an NVIDIA card, your computer is no longer going to work or there's going to have some breakages all the time or whatever. You know, so people are worried about this and they're worried that this transition isn't going to be as smooth as you would like it to be, because it does feel like the momentum to Wailand has picked up over the course of the last two years. Two years ago, maybe it was three years ago, Ubuntu tried to ship Wailand as the default on Ubuntu and it did not go over well. It just was not ready yet three years ago or however long it was. It wasn't, you know, it was like it was like maybe it was before the pandemic. I can't really remember. It was just a few years ago. They tried to do it and then they had to walk that step back because it wasn't ready yet. But since then, it not only has become ready, but it's very much a default on Ubuntu. It's a default on Fedora. It's a default on many distributions, including Debian, which is notoriously slow. At basically everything just recently released Debian 12, which uses Wailand by default on some desktop environments. That's a thing that actually happened. Debian, the notoriously slow distribution has moved to Wailand. And that's when you know that Wailand is not only the future, but the future is now. Right, XFC, which is even slower than Debian when it comes to development, has announced that their next major version will use Wailand as the default. It's insane. So Wailand is here, but not everyone can use it yet. And I've talked about this before and the answer to the question of when will XOR die relies upon the amount of people using it. So the way open source development works, especially for major, major projects, is that it does rely somewhat on the number of people using that software. And the reason why that's the case is because the development work for a lot of projects comes from the people who use it, right? The people who use KDE Plasma, for instance, are the major contributors to KDE Plasma. Yes, there are people outside of it, but for the vast majority of people who develop KDE Plasma, they're also KDE Plasma users. And, you know, you can make that example of basically any piece of software. Usually people who use the software are going to be the ones developing it. If there are fewer people using the software, there are fewer people to develop it. And that's really where we're at with XORG is that it's not really being maintained anymore. It's been in maintenance mode for a long time, many years. And that's the reason why Wayland was first started to be developed on is because they were having a hard time getting XORG into a place where it was not only functional, but also secure. XORG is notoriously insecure and very heavy. It's got a long history behind it. It was first released in 1986, which is just a year after I was born. So that can kind of tell you how long it's been out there. So it has a very heavy code base. And that's the reason why they kind of wanted to start over as a sequel to X11. They decided to create X12, which eventually was kind of kind of became Wayland. But it's not really the way it worked, but Wayland became its own thing. And now we're here, right? We're at the point where the vast majority of people probably are using Wayland, whether they know it or not. If you if you just install Ubuntu and you don't pay attention to any of this nonsense, chances are you're using Wayland because that's what's default, right? You're just going to use the default, whatever it happens to be, whatever distribution slash desktop environment you're using. If it defaults to Wayland, that's probably what you're using. And that's what that's the vast majority of people. That's the the normies, as we call them. It's for the people who know that Wayland exists and has have some kind of interest in going one way or the other. Those are the people who are making the choices. But XORG itself will not officially die until there are a lot of people who just never use it again. And there's just a very small minority of people who use it. And when I'm talking about it, and actually, what I should say as a good example of this is 32-bit. 32-bit distros out there are slowly diminishing in number. There are very few distributions out there that still offer 32-bit. And the major distributions, none of them do. The only one that I know does for sure. Actually, the only two that I know for sure are ARCH and GEN2. I think those are the only two that still offer 32-bit. Maybe wrong about that, but I'm pretty sure that those are the only two. There are many smaller distributions that still offer 30. Actually, now I think about it, Debian probably does too, given that Debian is Debian. But the point is that there are very few distributions out there that offer 32-bit support. And that was a change that just came across just a few years ago. It was only maybe four or five years ago that 32-bit was the norm to be offered by every distribution. Ubuntu had it, you know, Fedora had a 32-bit, you name the distribution. They all had 32-bit versions. Nowadays, it's much more rare. And that's the way Xorg is going to die, I think. I think that eventually there are going to be Wayland only ISOs out there. Maybe they continue to just have it be the way it is now. And it just kind of slowly fades until it's no longer offered at all. But I think that I think there's a good possibility that eventually we have like just the normal ISO. And then if you need the Xorg version, you can go download an ISO with that on it if you want to do that. Because eventually the maintenance mode that Xorg is in right now will become so untenable for actual maintenance. Like there's going to eventually be absolutely no one to develop on it whatsoever to fix any zero days that come across to fix anything whatsoever. And that the maintenance then will fall on the distributions. And that's going to be something that not a lot of them are interested in doing. But they're still going to want to offer a version of their distribution that has Xorg in case people actually have to have it. So I foresee a future where we do kind of splinter off where we have ISOs that are just the normal regular ISOs and those use Wayland. And then we have the 32 bits, you know, idea where you have an Xorg version of the ISOs. And those can be for people who still need Xorg. And then eventually slowly over time, more and more distributions will just not offer that ISO option at all. Right. It'll be left or left to the smaller distributions, the niche distributions that are more catered towards people who are using older hardware or people who are more protesty. If you want to use a word that doesn't exist, people who are interested in using things like a run it or some other in the system that isn't system deep, people who are completely anti-Wayland will just go search out these more niche distros that still offer an Xorg version. I think that that's the future that we're heading towards. Now, the question, of course, is when will this happen? It's going to be slow Linux moves fast when it comes to new features. A lot of times not always, but at least in more recent history, changes from this technology has moved faster than it used to. But when it comes to depreciating things that are older, it's going to take a lot. For example, the floppy disk support in the Linux kernel was just recently removed, or at least it was talked about. They were going to remove it. Right. And nobody in their right mind has used a floppy drive in ages. But there are probably six people out there. All of them probably are furiously typing in my comment section. And I just used the floppy disk the other day. You prove him a point. There are people out there as long as there are some people out there that are using something that support is going to continue, or at least people are going to talk about that support for a long, long time. And Xorg is going to be the same way. It's going to be supported. And by supported, I mean offered for a very, very long time. And I think that that support probably will fade out faster than things like the floppy disk because support for hardware tends to last longer because hardware doesn't die as fast as people think that it does. But in terms of Xorg, I think it will probably go faster than the hardware thing does. But there's no specific timeline. The things that I'm worried about when it comes to this transition, which is basically over as we talk about the major desktop environments. So GNOME is fully Wayland compatible now, right? And it seems to have done a fairly good job of getting NVIDIA to work on GNOME. Now, that's not 100 percent across the board. So if you have had problems with NVIDIA in the past or recently, I should say, you know, obviously it's still not 100 percent. They're still working on it. It's not as good as the AMD support, but it's way better than it was a year ago. And I think a year from now, it'll be even better. I think that's the future way that that's going to go. KDE has also made huge strides in getting Wayland being the thing that they are focused on the most, right? It has become the default for them as well. And the vast majority of people, the vast, vast majority of people use GNOME or Plasma. Those are the two major desktop environments. So Xorg itself will continually get smaller in terms of usage as more and more desktop environments switch to Wayland. And that's just, you know, eventually, once that number gets small enough, I think that's when we'll start seeing the division of the ISOs, which I talked about earlier, where we'll have the main ISO and then we'll have like an Xorg version for a little while. And then eventually those ISOs won't be offered. The thing that I'm worried about, as I mentioned the most about this transition is window managers. I've talked about this before, some of your favorite window managers. If you're a window manager user, a lot of them are never ever going to switch to Wayland. OK, it's just I don't foresee a future ever that DWM switches to Wayland. I just don't. I think that it will be forked. I think it has been forked to switch to Wayland. And I think that that's probably the direction that it goes, is that someone, someone, maybe even the developers themselves will fork it and then create something a little bit different that works on Wayland. Qtile does have a Wayland version. I haven't still haven't tried that yet. I definitely should. And I think that some window managers will go that route and they will create a Wayland versions. BSPWM is at this point is BSPWM even being still maintained. I'm not even sure. I think the last minute on it has been a long, long time ago. If I remember right, I might be mistaking it with a different window manager, but the point is that I don't think when BSPWM is going to go Wayland anytime soon, if ever. And the more niche your window manager, the less likely it is that the Wayland support is ever going to come. So window managers is the place where I'm a little worried because I have favorites, right? Qtile is my favorite. And I'm lucky that it does have a Wayland version. So the future there seems to be assured. But other window managers like DWM, like awesome window manager, I'm actually not sure what they've talked about in terms of Wayland, but, you know, like, you know, Xmonad, Xmonad has X right in the name, you know, so it'd be interesting to see if they've just started to discuss what the future is going to look like once Xorg is literally totally abandoned where, you know, so the existing window manager infrastructure as we know it now is going to change over the course of the next 10 years. I foresee a future where a lot of the window managers that we know and use now either are no longer maintained or are significantly lessened in terms of actual usage, simply because there's going to be a brand new batch of window managers out there. And we're not going to call them window managers anymore. Apparently, we've decided to call them compositors because whatever reason why. And I'm sure there's some technical reason why we've decided to call Wayland compositors what they are, but they're window managers to me, and I'll always call them window managers because that's the way I'm just stuck in my ways, I guess. So the there's going to be a new batch of window managers that show up on the scene over the course of the next 10 years. We've already started to see it. River, DWL, Hyperland, any number of brand new shiny window managers that have come up over the course of the last year, we're going to see a flood of those over the course of the next 10 years. And those will replace the ones that we've been using now for 30 years, you know, the open boxes and the DWMs and X-Mone ads and BS PWMs. And, you know, you get the idea, right? In some ways, it's exciting because it means that we're going to have a whole bunch of new things to try out. In other ways, you know, as an old, a crotchety old man, don't take away my window manager and I'm going to really, really mad, you know. Anyways, that's it for this video. I hope that I've kind of shed some light on the situation such as it is, because Wayland is no longer the future. It's here, whether we like it or not. So we have to start thinking about how this transition affects the people who are going to be kind of left behind. And I think that that is an important discussion for us to have. So that's it for this video. If you haven't already, hit the thumbs up button. I'd really appreciate it. It really does help the channel. You can follow me on Massive Honor Odyssey. Those links will be in the video description. You can support me on Patreon at patreon.com slash the Linuxcast. Thanks for Liberapay and YouTube will be in the video description as well. Thanks to everybody who does support me on Patreon. You guys are all absolutely amazing. Without you, the channel, amazing, absolutely amazing. I don't know really where that went. Anyways, thanks to everybody who does support me on Patreon and YouTube. You guys are all just fantastic. Thanks for your support so very, very much. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time. Definitely did not do very well on the ending. Wow. Did not stick the landing as they say.