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The death watch for the X Window System has probably started

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Re: The death watch for the X Window System has probably started

#31

Post by atemerev »

daenney wrote: post #10
atemerev wrote: post #4

So, RedHat decided that they do not want nvidia users anymore? I’d be more than happy to switch to Wayland, but I can’t.

GNOME, which is what powers the RedHat desktop, supports nvidia on Wayland just fine, and KDE got nvidia/EGLStreams support since KWin 5.16. So at least 2 major DEs do, though quite a few others don't, and have taken a principled stand not to (Sway for example won't). When it comes to RedHat though, they're all-in on GNOME anyway so keeping X around for nvidia users isn't really a concern for them when their desktop…

No, just checked it with the latest Fedora 30, it defaults to X when it detects an Nvidia card.

Re: The death watch for the X Window System has probably started

#32

Post by neilv »

Quoting a quote from the article:

> The reality is that X.org is basically maintained by us and thus once we stop paying attention to it there is unlikely to be any major new releases coming out and there might even be some bitrot setting in over time. We will keep an eye on it as we will want to ensure X.org stays supportable until the end of the RHEL8 lifecycle at a minimum, but let this be a friendly notice for everyone who rely the work we do maintaining the Linux graphics stack, get onto Wayland, that is where the future is.

The fair warning is appreciated. Anytime we hear something like this in open source (sometimes after the fact), I try not to prejudge, but I definitely pay attention. Linus Torvalds notwithstanding, the parties with the development resources effectively make the decisions. Sometimes such decisions turn out to still be controversial even years after being pushed onto Linux (like GTK3 or Systemd). I haven't yet used Wayland enough to guess how it will turn out.

Re: The death watch for the X Window System has probably started

#33

Post by arendtio »

atemerev wrote: post #4

So, RedHat decided that they do not want nvidia users anymore? I’d be more than happy to switch to Wayland, but I can’t.

Actually, I wouldn't bother if Nvidia would go out of business, as I find it disgusting how they ignore consumer wishes since ages. I mean, in the past I have bought GPU hardware from Nvidia, AMD, and Intel but for a Linux desktop, the experience has been so much better when not using Nvidia, that I try to avoid their products nowadays.

This won't help current owners of Nvidia hardware (as myself), but you shouldn't blame RedHat for issues that obviously have been caused by Nvidia.

Re: The death watch for the X Window System has probably started

#34

Post by atemerev »

jcranmer wrote: post #15
atemerev wrote: post #4

So, RedHat decided that they do not want nvidia users anymore? I’d be more than happy to switch to Wayland, but I can’t.

For as long as X is considered to be a reasonable alternative to Wayland, NVidia is unlikely to suffer as a result of its drivers being unable to support Wayland. If Wayland becomes the only practicable option for graphics in Linux, then NVidia is going to be forced to support it to keep their Linux market share.

But that is the point of the post -- X maintainers will abandon X and it will not be considered "a reasonable alternative" anymore. Nvidia supports Wayland just fine with their Eglstreams API, but some WM/drivers developers make a principled stand of not using it.

Re: The death watch for the X Window System has probably started

#35

Post by PlutoIsAPlanet »

jcranmer wrote: post #15
atemerev wrote: post #4

So, RedHat decided that they do not want nvidia users anymore? I’d be more than happy to switch to Wayland, but I can’t.

For as long as X is considered to be a reasonable alternative to Wayland, NVidia is unlikely to suffer as a result of its drivers being unable to support Wayland. If Wayland becomes the only practicable option for graphics in Linux, then NVidia is going to be forced to support it to keep their Linux market share.

NVIDIAs drivers do support wayland, they just don't support a separate (not part of Wayland) protocol that the in-kernel mesa drivers support.

Whilst it's currently disabled by default, GNOME on Wayland with NVIDIA does run, just badly.

Re: The death watch for the X Window System has probably started

#36

Post by atemerev »

arendtio wrote: post #33
atemerev wrote: post #4

So, RedHat decided that they do not want nvidia users anymore? I’d be more than happy to switch to Wayland, but I can’t.

Actually, I wouldn't bother if Nvidia would go out of business, as I find it disgusting how they ignore consumer wishes since ages. I mean, in the past I have bought GPU hardware from Nvidia, AMD, and Intel but for a Linux desktop, the experience has been so much better when not using Nvidia, that I try to avoid their products nowadays. This won't help current owners of Nvidia hardware (as myself), but you shouldn't…

Unfortunately, there is only one CUDA, and OpenCL is not an alternative.

Re: The death watch for the X Window System has probably started

#38

Post by jkaplowitz »

izacus wrote: post #26
beowulfey wrote: post #16

Is there any plan by Wayland to incorporate ssh forwarding? Last I heard it wasn't in the cards, and I think that feature is useful enough; it's probably the only feature I really would miss.

I see this a lot and now I need to ask: do you actually use it and find it usable? Every time I've tried it, it was plagued with problems (fonts, HiDPI issues, different environments) and horrible performance. I mostly had to resort back to NX, which is okish, but not better at all than Windows' RDP or better VNC solutions. So what's the big draw here?

It was pretty great when I was a university student using X forwarding within the campus network between my dorm and the CS department (in either direction). Certainly not as fast as local, but extremely usable when not trying to do graphics-centric things. (Even using Eclipse was viable.)

Your mileage may vary by use case and bandwidth, especially over the public internet. But if someone has a similar use case to mine in 2019, it's still probably usable.

Re: The death watch for the X Window System has probably started

#40

Post by atemerev »

CaptainBern wrote: post #19
atemerev wrote: post #4

So, RedHat decided that they do not want nvidia users anymore? I’d be more than happy to switch to Wayland, but I can’t.

I'm under the impression it's more like NVidia does not want Linux users, or at least has turned some WM developers against them[0]. [0] https://drewdevault.com/2017/10/26/Fuck-you-nvidia.html

Nvidia is mostly used on Linux, as most of their GPUs are installed in datacenters for deep learning acceleration purposes. More than that, Nvidia is the only major video hardware manufacturer that keeps up to date drivers for other free UNIXes, e.g. FreeBSD.
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