The Trinity Desktop Environment, the continuation of the final KDE 3.x release updated and maintained for modern times, consists of more than just the KDE bits you may think of. The project also maintains a fork of Qt 3 called TQt3, which it obviously needs to be able to work on and improve TDE itself, which is based on it. In the beginning, this fork consisted mainly of renaming things, but in recent years, more substantial changes meant that the code diverged considerably from the original Qt 3. As such, a small name change is in order.
TQt3 was born as a fork of Qt3 and for many years it was little more than a mere renaming effort. Over the past few years, many changes were made and the code has significantly diverged from the original Qt3, although still sharing the same roots. With more changes planned ahead and with the intention of better highlighting such difference, the TDE team has decided to drop the ‘3’ from the repository name, which is now simply called ‘TQt‘.
↫ TDE on Mastodon
The effect this has on users is rather minimal – users of the current 14.1.x release branch will still see 3s around in file paths and package names, but in future 14.2.x releases, all of these will have been removed, completing the transition.
This seems like a small change, and that’s because it is, but it’s interesting simply because it highlights that a project that seems relatively straightforward on the outside – maintain and carefully modernise the final KDE 3.x release – encompasses a lot more than that. Maintaining an entire Qt 3 fork certainly isn’t a small feat, but it’s kind of required to keep a project like TDE going.
Sad thing is, that with such big project and few devs, there is near 0 chance, that there is someone, who is able to provide even base security. 🙁 That’s why it’s better to keep KDE or GNOME on machines where people use bank account or even important mail accounts. 🙁
Maintaining TQt is one thing but who is going to maintain Xorg so that Trinity has something to run on?
The GNOME analog to Trinity is MATE which continues the GNOME2 desktop. However, MATE has been ported to GTK3 and, as such, it can run on Wayland. All the GTK desktops are well along in their Wayland support including MATE, Cinnamon, and XFCE. Qt desktops like LXQt run on Wayland already. Generally, even niche toolkit support is good. Even FLTK has Wayland support. But not TQt.
Trinity is already very niche I guess. While Xorg will be with us for some time to come, I do expect distros like Fedora and Ubuntu to drop it at some point. Distros like Mint and PopOS too. It will be a shame if Trinity is among those left behind.
Arch and Debian will probably hang-on to Xorg longer. Since Q4OS is Debian based, Trinity may be ok.
LeFantome,
Well, it already works. It’s not just going to break on it’s own. Something/someone would need to cause it to break. If the devs are careful not to break what works then it shouldn’t be a huge burden to keep it working even for a smaller team.
IMHO the biggest threat to X going forward is not really maintaining it, but applications dropping support for X over time. We’re not there yet, X software is still in the majority, but to me it’s an open question how long this will remain so.
@Alfman
I largely agree with you. It is all about the apps.
You are right, Xorg is not going to stop working I do not expect. First, it shares most of its code with Xwayland which will continue to be maintained. Second, Xorg no longer needs its own hardware drivers as it use DRM / KMS which of course are also used for Wayland. Just keeping the lights on may not be much work and, as I said above, a distro like Q4OS that wants to maintain an X11 only desktop like Trinity may be able to do so for a long time to come. Unless something like DRM changes…
Two questions though:
1) Will Xorg continue to run the apps people want to run
2) Will Xorg be useful enough to include as an optional package in a Linux distro
Wayland only features will emerge. We are seeing this with HDR, VRR, scaling, and other things already. These will be optional at first but, at some point, they will become essential. Today we sometimes have the Wayland and the X11 version of something. Take Waydroid and Anbox as an example. In a world where more than 90% of Linux desktop users use Wayland, what incentive will their be to create or even maintain the X11 specific version? As Wayland only apps appear with compelling features, people will want to run them and Xorg will stop being a equivalent “preference” and instead have to justify itself with its unique utility.
What will that utility be? X11 based apps will run on Xwayland. So, you will not need Xorg for that. Will it be to run window managers or X11 only apps that almost nobody uses? Sure, if you are a distro that cares about that audience.
You say that “X software is still in the majority” but I only partially agree. Most popular Linux GUI software is written using toolkits like GTK, Qt, wxWidgets, or FLTK. Today we think of that as “X software” but they all support Wayland as well and, on a Wayland compositor, they run as native Wayland applications. That is today. As above, some of these may become Wayland specific enough that they do not even work fully on X11 anymore. Look at the status pages of even “still X11” desktops like XFCE, Cinnamon, or MATE. They all show that all their apps already run natively under Wayland. It is things like panels and window managers slowing these transitions, not the apps. When 80% of Linux desktops are Wayland, 95% of Linux GUI apps will be Wayland too. Take a look at Haiku OS. It runs GTK and Qt apps today not by emulating X11 but via Wayland. Because they are already Wayland apps really. Is Krita running on Windows an X11 app? GIMP on macOS? They are both Wayland native on my system. X11 is quickly becoming the least common way to run these apps.
There are very few X11 only apps that matter even now. How many essential apps are written in Athena or Motif? The most popular are the window managers themselves. And Wayland equivalents to those are appearing. X11 only software is becoming a historical footnote even now. I do not celebrate this by the way. I would love Trinity and CDE to run on Wayland. But they likely will not.
When GTK, Qt, and the rest drop support for X11, the number of X11 apps will drop too to the point that most Linux desktop users will not be able to name any. Xwayland will still exist for what remains. It has already been announced that GTK5 will be Wayland only. GNOME itself will be Wayland only this year. Qt will follow.
The question is, will distros ship Xorg for the people that want to run FVWM, Trinity, Xeyes, or Anbox? Development has slowed or completely stopped on all this stuff. Wayland Maker is more actively developed than WindowMaker.
I think distros will stop shipping Xorg. I do. In about a month or so, RHEL10 will probably be the first. The likes of Fedora, Ubuntu, and Mint will follow. This will happen long before Xorg stops working.
New Desktop Environments will be Wayland only. COSMIC is the first. New distros will be Wayland only too. Why pull in all that complication and controversy for no benefit? A distro with no Xorg can still run nedit and xv on Xwayland.
I know many on this site will disagree with me. You have said that Wayland is not ready. However, the top 10 desktop environments either default to Wayland or have made it clear Wayland. is their future. The very next GNOME will be Wayland ONLY. KDE has already split Kwin into two back-ends so that X11 can be dropped or individual distros can choose not to ship it. People said these things would not happen but they are. These things are happening now. Not years from now. Today.
GNOME 49 may not hit Debian Stable for years but it will land in Arch a week after release. Debian and Arch may still have Xorg in the repos for a long time. But it will move from core to extra and, someday, the AUR.
The BSDs can say they will maintain Xorg. But desktops will need to run apps and they will have the same problem and so will add Wayland support. They already are. Once they do, all of the above will apply to them.
Headless servers do not need Wayland but, one last crazy prediction. The next generation of NetBSD maintainer will realize that Wayland is a better fit for their mission. I recently compiled velox on Chimera Linux and had a full Wayland session in a couple of megabytes of RAM. Why pick Xorg when you can do that?
I am an X11 fan. I used to run DesqView/X on DOS. I will never forget the first time I got Xfree86 running on Linux. But this is the way it is.
LeFantome,
I know X is old, bloated, and creaky. I’m not attached to it emotionally, only pragmatically. For all of the arguments made that we should switch because X will break and wayland is the future, the messaging gets lost when wayland is the broken one. It’s not my intention to avoid wayland, but every time I’ve tried it I’ve hit a show stopper. Let’s spend less time saying wayland is better and more time actually making wayland better. Anyway my fingers are crossed that when KDE 6 reaches deb stable, it will finally be ready to do everything I need, I genuinely hope so, but if not I’ll keep using X distros until wayland works for me.