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

#71

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

_emacsomancer_ wrote: post #48

One of the comments on the article ( https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/XDeathwatchSta... ) is also possibly of interest, suggesting possible technical routes for using existing windows managers on Wayland: > There is XWayland, and apparently it will support handling the root window, not just application windows: https://wayland.freedesktop.org/xserver.html > The missing piece of the puzzle is Xweston, whi…

I can't help but notice that Xweston and wwlnest are both projects that seem to have gone years without an active contribution. Sometimes projects become mature and don't need additional work, but I would be stunned if anything to do with Wayland had reached that point yet.

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

#72

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

ip26 wrote: post #60

nextos wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If they are gaining control of the Linux userland because they are the only ones willing & able to put in the development effort, then IMO we can hardly complain. "Decisions are made by those who show up"

Additionally, no alternative project is even providing close to the set of features that i.e. systemd or pulseaudio does, not even via modules. sysvinit for example is only an alternative to systemd the same way a SUV is an alternative to F1.

(watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_AIw9bGogo if you don't know why)

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

#73

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

_emacsomancer_ wrote: post #48

One of the comments on the article ( https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/XDeathwatchSta... ) is also possibly of interest, suggesting possible technical routes for using existing windows managers on Wayland: > There is XWayland, and apparently it will support handling the root window, not just application windows: https://wayland.freedesktop.org/xserver.html > The missing piece of the puzzle is Xweston, whi…

Again -- XWayland is Xorg. The xorg-server codebase contains a number of components, one of which is a front end called DIX (Device Independent X) that handles protocol-level stuff, another of which are several backends collectively called DDX (Device Dependent X) that handle drawing to the actual video hardware or other graphics layer. One of these DDX backends is 'xwayland'. So the XWayland server incorporates the entire Xorg server code base except for the hardware-specific back ends. And so if Xorg languishes unmaintained... well, sucks to be an XWayland user.

So your best bet is to commit now to switching, entirely, to Wayland. The aim is to get everyone off of X altogether as quickly as possible, and then stop shipping X (including XWayland) altogether.

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

#74

Post by iso-8859-1 » Sun, Jul 07, 2019, 6:14 PM UTC

hyperion2010 wrote: post #24

My take home from this thread now with a few weeks to reflect is that if we want a real window manager that is maintained, then it will have to be a community effort. This will be hard because training an involvement with x11 has been left entirely to Red Hat too long. It will be a lot of work and money to transfer knowledge from the few who do know it. With this in mind, are there other projects that are at risk due…

> How can we prevent this in the future?

Software is dependent on hardware. If the hardware changes, as it did since X11 was invented, the software stack has to change too. You cannot prevent progress in technology.

Xorg is in a better state now that it has ever been. Therefore it makes no sense to consider Red Hat some villain that adopted Xorg and ruined it. And had Red Hat not been there, Wayland would still have been invented.

Xorg developers switched to Wayland. Why? Because they know it is the future. There is no need to train Xorg developers.

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

#75

Post by phkahler » Sun, Jul 07, 2019, 6:14 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…

Wayland is actually more sensible than X. People used to say X had become an OS itself, having memory management, font management, a full drawing API (not used by modern GUI toolkits), and more.

One thing transitions like this do is cause the death of unmaintained programs. In some cases that's good, others bad. But ultimately if no one cares enough to modernize it that says something. But we also shouldn't keep developers on an endless train of changes to keep up with. Wayland is like 10 years in the making, so there really is no excuse not to be there already.

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

#76

Post by mort96 » Sun, Jul 07, 2019, 6:14 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…

It sounds weird to me to claim the Wayland ecosystem is less modular than the X ecosystem. With X, you're depending on one huge monolithic display server implementation; with Wayland, you can switch display server at will and they all conform to a common protocol.

I get the concern that most of the functionality which used to be in separate programs is now bundled with the Wayland compositor, and I used to share it, but after getting more involved with Wayland stuff, I don't think it's really that big of a deal. The wlroots people have been really good at introducing new common protocols for stuff people actually need. The Wayland ecosystem, at least outside of Gnome, is actually really nice and improving.

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

#77

Post by fortran77 » Sun, Jul 07, 2019, 6:14 PM UTC

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…

They don’t ignore consumer wishes. They have the best GPGPU toolchain around. That’s why I only use NVIDIA. Nobody supports developers for High-Performance GPU computing like they do. They also support PC gamers very well.

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

#78

Post by darkpuma » Sun, Jul 07, 2019, 6:16 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…

I don't understand the ojection to dbus in particular. Are there not multiple implementations of the dbus spec?

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

#79

Post by csande17 » Sun, Jul 07, 2019, 6:17 PM UTC

I would use Wayland, but the most actively-developed tiling window manager, sway, doesn't work with the NVIDIA graphics card I own.

And come to think of it, isn't that a really weird problem to have? On X, the compositor (responsible for actually drawing all the windows on the screen) and the window manager (responsible for deciding how to arrange the windows and what their title bars/borders should look like) can be separate components, so I use i3 to arrange my windows and compton to draw them without tearing.

On Wayland, my impression is that the compositor and the window manager have to be built into the same program, so you run into silly situations where you can run GNOME on your graphics card but you can't run a basic tiling window manager. This also makes it a lot harder to create a new window manager, since you also have to write a compositor and test it on every graphics card.

That last issue could be solved with a reusable library that provided basic compositor functionality for window managers. Except every member of the Wayland community has independently had that idea and written their own, each with a different, incompatible interface and support for different graphics cards. So either we need a meta-library that abstracts away all the different libraries, or we need a standard compositor interface like X had.

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

#80

Post by nvrspyx » Sun, Jul 07, 2019, 6:18 PM UTC

ch_123 wrote: post #27

johnklos wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except for those who pave the way. Not all OSes are products.

I'm not sure that use of X11 could be considered "paving the way"

I think they might have meant “pave their way”. Like they said, not all OS’s are products and some people have specific use cases in which X11 is the only viable option, whether that’s personal or experimental.

I wouldn’t know what those use cases might be. That’s just my interpretation of the comment.