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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

#111

Post by izacus »

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.

> It seems like a lot of those projects just aren't interested in accepting pull-requests from outsiders.

What kind of pull requests though? Minor fixes or big architectural decisions like ssh forwarding and security features?

Because there's a difference between just accepting PRs and public ownership of future project direction. The second usually doesn't result in a successful project.

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

#112

Post by microcolonel »

csande17 wrote: post #102
microcolonel wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

This is why it was so infuriating when NVIDIA refused to implement the stanadrd interface: they made the ecosystem "fragmented" for their users, and the PR cost of that bears on the compositor writers, rather than NVIDIA.

Having different compositors at the level they're at allows a lot more interesting innovations to be made, and aside from NVIDIA's tomfoolery, it has not caused significant inconsistency. Everyone uses libinput, almost everyone uses colord, and everyone implements GBM.

Wayland is substantially different from X, and the ways in which it is different are good. NVIDIA did the one thing we needed people not to do.

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

#113

Post by emersion »

ilovecaching wrote: post #12

Sway has become one of my favorite pieces of software. The only issue is that Sway or Wayland seems to have trouble implementing an easy to use redshift/nightlight. Based on my research into eye strain and talking to my optometrist I keep redshift on 24/7 and I can’t go back.

Redshift works with this patch: https://github.com/jonls/redshift/pull/663

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

#114

Post by hyperion2010 »

iso-8859-1 wrote: post #74
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…

To be clear, I am not in any way faulting RH for this, the excellent state of X11 is indeed due almost entirely to their technical and financial support. This should be celebrated.

My point is that having such support can lead the community to assume that such support will always be there an neglect the need to maintain a robust multi-party collaboration around such vital projects.

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

#115

Post by petschge »

maxharris wrote: post #57
petschge wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I use remote operations all day every day. As does the entire department with hundreds of people. Don't dismiss other peoples works flows without understanding them.

(I ran Linux + X11 as my sole desktop from 1996-2000. And then on and off again for years in VMs.) I'm not dismissing the need. I'm just saying that the other systems work pretty well, and this is not something that needs to be baked into the core of the display system. I used and loved Screenhero on the Mac for years before Slack swallowed them up. (Now there's tuple.app, made by some of the same people.) Prior to t…

Sorry if I misread your comment and thanks for editing it to make it clearer.

But why are you so opposed to having this featured backed into the display system? After all you point out yourself that all display systems and up with solutions for this work flow. Why not do it right and build it into the display system instead of adding it after that fact (and usually in an inferior qay)?

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

#116

Post by rrss »

dmix wrote: post #85
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…

Which NVIDIA graphics card do you own? I’m surprised Sway doesn’t support certain graphics cards. I believe the goal of wlroots is to solve this problem: > wlroots provides backends that abstract the underlying display and input hardware https://github.com/swaywm/wlroots

Last I checked, sway detects if nvidia.ko is loaded (even if the nvidia gpu has no display) and errors out with some message to the effect of "f you for buying nvidia."

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

#117

Post by badsectoracula »

bitwize wrote: post #73
_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…

> 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.

Ah, it is the "32bit isn't needed anymore" all over again. Yeah, this will happen around the same time you wont need to ship 32bit support on Linux :-)

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

#118

Post by traverseda »

izacus wrote: post #111
traverseda wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> It seems like a lot of those projects just aren't interested in accepting pull-requests from outsiders. What kind of pull requests though? Minor fixes or big architectural decisions like ssh forwarding and security features? Because there's a difference between just accepting PRs and public ownership of future project direction. The second usually doesn't result in a successful project.

>PRs and public ownership of future project direction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar

That's kind of the point of open-source, public ownership. Sure, you need someone to be in charge and reject outright bad ideas, but when you're refusing to add options that support other people's personal preferences that's when it's starting to become a problem.

It's all these authoritarians that think they need to own the direction of the project that are causing these issues. I'm sure dirty info-hippies who believe in communal project ownership have their own problems too, and that there's a balance, but it seems like we've over-swung.

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

#119

Post by rjsw »

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…

> My concern at the moment with Wayland (and Systemd, Pulseaudio, DBus and a few others) is that Linux is loosing modularity.

I don't have any of those things on the system I'm using to type this. It is BSD not Linux though.

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

#120

Post by nwallin »

voldacar wrote: post #7

Are there any major x11 features that wayland lacks other than remote operation over a network? I think at one point it locked the refresh rate to 60hz, has that been changed?

HiDPI. It's somewhat unusual for a top end laptop to have 1920x1080 screens these days, and Wayland doesn't support 4k very well. You can upscale, but it looks like garbage, or it has a 2x mode, which draws image and such slightly too large, or you can deal with everything being tiny.

For gaming, the latency is bad and always on vsync is horrible. They've fixed the 60Hz lock though, fortunately. This only applies to gaming though.

My primary issue with Wayland isn't quite so much that it lacks these things, it's that they seem to be of the opinion that there's only one way to do things, and any other use of the visual display system is wrong. I just have this weirdly oppressive feeling about my inability to configure it the way I want it, the same feeling I get from using Windows. Just... let me be me. I get that this is a non-technical complaint, and that it ultimately boils down to "it gives me the heebie jeebies" which isn't an argument, but it's still how I feel about it.

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