The death watch for the X Window System has probably started • Hacker News Board

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

#61

Post by toast0 » Sun, Jul 07, 2019, 6:06 PM UTC

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?

X forwarding seems to work enough for my primary use case. I have some supermicro servers for work with a java applet for KVM. Because of a series of reasonable but unfortunate policies, I can't run the applet directly in the laptop's host OS. The best way is to run it in a VM. It's a lot better experience for me to run the applet over X forwarding despite some issues with window resizing that I suspect are related to hidpi, than to run a full X desktop in the VM. Host is osx, guest is freebsd with linux compat and oracle jre for linux.

It was also useful when I wanted to output some pixel graphics from Erlang to my Windows desktop from a program running on unixy devices. x server windows, x client on linux, freebsd, os x -- occasionally also ran with os x as x server and linux or freebsd as x client.

The key thing for me is the ability to export the gui for a single application on one system to a desktop environment on another --- I think this is possible with other systems, but it's not easily exposed. Performance and fidelity of the experience is usually not that important for me, as long as it's usable.

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

#62

Post by a-wu » Sun, Jul 07, 2019, 6:06 PM UTC

jkaplowitz wrote: post #38

izacus wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mi…

+1 to this. For my first two years the university didn't have student Matlab licenses but the CS department machines had copies so I would ssh -X for my coursework requiring Matlab (needed the GUI to see plots).

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

#63

Post by notatoad » Sun, Jul 07, 2019, 6:07 PM UTC

nextos wrote: post #50

neilv wrote: post #32

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 ev…

My concern at the moment with Wayland (and Systemd, Pulseaudio, DBus and a few others) is that Linux is loosing modularity. All these dependencies seem to be getting more or less mandatory. Running a distribution without them is getting harder. Given that they are all getting pushed by the same group of people at Red Hat, it is concerning as they are effectively gaining control of the Linux userland. And given that t…

>they are effectively gaining control of the Linux userland.

but they aren't gaining control by some dastardly power grab, they're gaining control because they're the only ones actually putting in the work. They're simply doing what they think is best for their product, while at the same time contributing their work back to the open source world. That is good, that's how it's supposed to work.

The only reason they're gaining control is becuase the rest of the linux userbase has decided that although they might complain about Red Hat's work on hacker news and deride it as "not good", it's actually good enough that nobody wants to use any alternative projects to the ones red hat works on.

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

#64

Post by sq_ » Sun, Jul 07, 2019, 6:08 PM UTC

whatshisface wrote: post #14

hyperion2010 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Universal keybinding and screen capture of any kind. Kind of show stoppers for people who actually use their window manager for managing windows.

I use screen capture and remote operation every day. Are those features planned?

swaywm supports screenshots and screen capture for sure [0]. I haven't personally done anything with screen capture on sway, but I can definitely confirm that grim works for screenshots.

[0] https://github.com/swaywm/sway/wiki#taking-screenshots

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

#65

Post by Spivak » Sun, Jul 07, 2019, 6:08 PM UTC

hyperion2010 wrote: post #18

whatshisface wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use screen capture and remote operation every day. Are those features planned?

As far as I know not into the wayland protocol itself. The devs have been pretty adamant that wayland is 'just the compositor' and left the rest as an exercise for the community, or the toolkit developers. So for instance there is https://github.com/foss-project/green-recorder but as far as I can tell on wayland it only works for gnome, and requires dbus to work (wat?!).

* Screen recording is a privileged operation in Wayland which is left to compositors to implement as they see fit.

* Screen recording apps are therefore largely just nice frontends on whatever primitives the compositor exposes to do screen recording.

* GNOME speaks dbus and exposes those primitives as dbus services.

* So you need to speak dbus.

You can't really avoid dbus without going really far out of your way these days. Unless something better comes along it's going to be the Linux messaging passing system.

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

#66

Post by kabwj » Sun, Jul 07, 2019, 6:08 PM UTC

snazz wrote: post #53

kabwj wrote: post #37

Can Wayland currently handle several monitors with different DPI? And by “handle” I mean, being able to resize (blurry, I know) windows that are not DPI-aware transparently when I move them between monitors. What Windows has been able to do for years now.

It’s not Wayland’s job, as I understand. GTK3 does it, I think Qt does it, and I’m not sure about anything else. Firefox has issues with menu positioning but works fine. Because X11 applications still talk using the X protocol to XWayland, which doesn’t handle DPI scaling, there’s no guarantee of it working.

Applications (and their toolkits) should be able to signal to Wayland whether they can handle DPI scaling or not, and if they can’t, Wayland should forcibly resize the windows (ie paint them bigger) like Windows does.

If something as basic as this doesn’t work...

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

#67

Post by seba_dos1 » Sun, Jul 07, 2019, 6:09 PM UTC

nextos wrote: post #50

neilv wrote: post #32

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 ev…

My concern at the moment with Wayland (and Systemd, Pulseaudio, DBus and a few others) is that Linux is loosing modularity. All these dependencies seem to be getting more or less mandatory. Running a distribution without them is getting harder. Given that they are all getting pushed by the same group of people at Red Hat, it is concerning as they are effectively gaining control of the Linux userland. And given that t…

While I generally understand your sentiment, I can't see how does it apply to Wayland in particular. You can replace Wayland with X11 and basically make the same argument.

You can implement Wayland compositor on top of X11 protocol if you wish. You can also implement X11 server on top of Wayland protocol (and that's actually already done and widely used, called XWayland). Given the oddities and architectural baggage of X11, designing a new protocol from scratch is really welcome there.

(of course you can argue whether some decisions made while designing Wayland core and its extensions are sensible, but that's a completely different discussion)

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

#68

Post by zzzcpan » Sun, Jul 07, 2019, 6:09 PM UTC

PlutoIsAPlanet wrote: post #30

okasaki wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where do we even begin? Windows managers? Consistent window decorations? Thousands of applications? Consistent performance? Redshift? Global keybindings?

> Windows managers? Sway/wlroots. > Consistent window decorations? This is up to individual compositors and toolkits. > Thousands of applications Like what? Any that rely on X specific behaviour run via XWayland. > Consistent performance Wayland in theory should be faster than X, but again, this depends on compositor. > Redshift Gnome has night-light on Wayland already. KDE I think just added it. > Global keybindings…

I always wonder how people use their linux desktops when they claim that wayland works. Why aren't you using anything like wmctrl, xdotool, xprop, xbindkeys, xterm? Or non-Gnome DE? Don't you need custom keybindings for multiple keyboard layouts with caps/scroll led indication? Don't use wacom devices or anything like it?

Wayland ecosystem is literally decades away from being usable and it's very unlikely to survive those decades beyond maybe being a niche project for some special purpose devices, not linux desktop though.

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

#69

Post by jarfil » Sun, Jul 07, 2019, 6:11 PM UTC

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?

With a 500Mbps internet connection and a 10ms ping to the server, the performance is quite usable. There is some lag when updating large bitmap areas, but for anything not graphic intensive, it works just fine.

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

#70

Post by simion314 » Sun, Jul 07, 2019, 6:12 PM UTC

PlutoIsAPlanet wrote: post #30

okasaki wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where do we even begin? Windows managers? Consistent window decorations? Thousands of applications? Consistent performance? Redshift? Global keybindings?

> Windows managers? Sway/wlroots. > Consistent window decorations? This is up to individual compositors and toolkits. > Thousands of applications Like what? Any that rely on X specific behaviour run via XWayland. > Consistent performance Wayland in theory should be faster than X, but again, this depends on compositor. > Redshift Gnome has night-light on Wayland already. KDE I think just added it. > Global keybindings…

>But I think it's a bonus that applications can't listen into keys when they're not in focus.

There are applications that do not run as a window, in present I have a global shortcuts that run a bash or python script, I know I am a power user so I will need a way to whitelist my use case.