Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The death watch for the X Window System has probably started

utcc.utoronto.ca

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 518 posts

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

#101

Post by xioxox »

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?

I use this a lot at work. I ssh into a server from my linux desktop and run things there, including GUI applications. Over a local network it works fine. It's much nicer to have local and remote applications displayed in the same way. I can also run things from remote networks, although I have to use the -C compression option on ssh.

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

#102

Post by csande17 »

microcolonel wrote: post #93
csande17 wrote: post #79

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…

> I would use Wayland, but the most actively-developed tiling window manager, sway, doesn't work with the NVIDIA graphics card I own. May I suggest you buy an AMD GPU next time around; not only because they didn't try to impose their "standard" (which virtually nobody other than them implements, as far as I can tell) without implementing the de-facto standard interface, hurting their customers' access to Wayland to t…

> By all means, if you want to do NVIDIA's job, be my guest.

If I wrote an X compositor that supported NVIDIA's proprietary interface, it would work with pretty much every window manager that's ever been written.

If I patch wlroots to support NVIDIA, I'll still only be able to use window managers based on wlroots; I won't be able to use ones that spun the Wheel of Incompatible Wayland Compositor Libraries and landed on Weston, swc, Orbment, or whatever GNOME uses instead.

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

#103

Post by asveikau »

cwyers wrote: post #71
_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.

> Sometimes projects become mature and don't need additional work,

You mean like X?

It seems to me the Wayland thing has a lot of support by people who think lack of changes in and of itself makes X completely unusable. That the software world must exist in a state of perpetual rewrite or it sucks.

I predict my minimal X setup will remain usable for a long time.

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

#104

Post by nextos »

traverseda wrote: post #86
notatoad wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

It seems like a lot of those projects just aren't interested in accepting pull-requests from outsiders. If they were more willing to compromise and cooperate I don't think they'd catch nearly this much flac.

Exactly. And for much smaller organizations and individuals, it is much harder to organize an alternative effort to this set of projects backed up by a big corporation (Red Hat).

I only expect this to happen if Systemd and related efforts become really bothersome. Right now it is a big of a mixed situation. A better init system, and some modern basic userland infrastructure was needed. Systemd has brought some good things, but overall changes are concerning for the reasons outlined in my parent comment.

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

#105

Post by [deleted] »

traverseda wrote: post #86
notatoad wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

It seems like a lot of those projects just aren't interested in accepting pull-requests from outsiders. If they were more willing to compromise and cooperate I don't think they'd catch nearly this much flac.

[deleted]

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

#106

Post by OJFord »

bitwize wrote: post #2

Omae wa mou shindeiru. If the future of X is uncertain, then X is already dead. No one wants to base their OS on something without a clear maintenance and development roadmap.

To save others a search:

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/you-are-already-dead-omae-wa-...

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

#107

Post by wazoox »

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?

I use it constantly (including across different OS/architectures), have been using it for more than 20 years and really can't live without it.

It works great. And Mozilla/Firefox has been working wonders with it (when you open a web link on a remote application, it opens the URL in the local, already opened Firefox and has been doing so since Netscape times).

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

#108

Post by gizmo686 »

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?

I use it regularly with VMs. I find it a much better experience to have a bunch of terminals open on my host that are ssh'ed into the VM and can open new GUI windows on the host (generally meld for either git-merge or git-diff).

The main draw is just that it works so seamlessly. All you have to do is remember to add the "-X" flag when you call ssh and everything just works.

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

#109

Post by imode »

This is troublesome, and it feels like "progress" for the sake of "progress" rather than actual improvements. The X Window System is time-tested technology, while Wayland, from what I've seen and read, is not.

This isn't a good thing to me, especially considering NVIDIA hardware doesn't seem to be well supported. Someone come along and correct me, please.

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

#110

Post by carapace »

RIP

( I don't doubt for a minute that someone will pick up the slack, but that makes me wonder, who's gonna pay for it? Would you contribute to e.g. a Kickstarter for X Windows? FWIW, I'm not sure I would, meaning no disrespect I've been hoping to ditch X for something better ever since Don Hopkins opened my eyes to NeWS, &c. )

So there's Wayland. What else? Arcan?

https://arcan-fe.com/about/

On HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22arcan%22&sort=byPopularity&...

> Arcan is a powerful development framework for creating virtually anything between user interfaces for specialised embedded applications all the way to full-blown standalone desktop environments. Boot splash screen? no problem. Custom Interface for your Home Automation Project? sure thing. Stream media processing? Of course.

> It has been used in a number of both experimental, hobby, academic research and commerical projects and products alike, in areas ranging from VR desktops to industrial computer vision systems for robotic automation.

> At its heart lies a robust and portable multimedia engine, with a well-tested and well-documented interface, programmable using Lua. At every step of the way, the underlying development emphasises security, performance and debugability guided by a principle of least surprise in terms of API design.

Post reply on HN