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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

#221

Post by tambourine_man »

claudiawerner wrote: post #163
Sebb767 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html <- works for me

Well that's because if you click on that link from HN it uses the referrer details provided by your browser to show quite a rude message and picture ;)

Wow, never seen this before.

I don’t get the animosity HN sometimes revives.

I don’t really care for startup stuff and I just ignore it, but the average level of discussion here is extremely high. One of the best in the web.

Compare HN to Twitter or Reddit and it’s night and day, and it has been for years.

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

#222

Post by sprash »

soulofmischief wrote: post #202
rspeele wrote: post #155

I can't say it any better than JWZ did over 15 years ago. This is the result of the Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers model and is why Linux will not approach Windows or OSX in usability. Cannot link to his site: JWZ dot org /doc/cadt.html A complete teardown and rebuild of the whole ecosystem (because X succccckkks) is fun! Making something backwards-compatible, or standardized, or polished that "last 90%" so i…

X does suck, it's incredibly insecure and the workarounds for regaining some sense of application isolation are obtuse and resource-draining. I could go into all the little technical details but the fact is, X has been around for decades and its core was made for much simpler machines. It's time for something new. This isn't attention-deficit developers at play. People have spent a lot of time on the Wayland ecosyste…

> it's incredibly insecure

I hear this all the time. But so far there was not even one incident where major hack was done via X11.

The reason for that is that people who use X also exclusively use trusted apps. The Wayland security model makes many generic tasks insanely complicated. The real world security gains will be zero. Security through obscurity never worked.

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

#224

Post by SwellJoe »

zzzcpan wrote: post #68
PlutoIsAPlanet wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I haven't touched any of those tools in a decade or more. I just haven't needed to? The Linux desktop is so much less demanding than it was through the 90s and early 2000s. You don't need to know about any of that stuff to make it work, to customize things, set your favorite key settings (e.g. making Caps Lock useful), to have reasonable hotkeys, etc.

I would argue that not having to use those tools to have a happy working environment makes it further advanced, rather than behind.

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

#225

Post by pmlnr »

chrisseaton wrote: post #175
emersion wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NVIDIA doesn't support GBM, which is the standard for buffer allocation. Use nouveau. >The last issue could be solved with a reusable library that provided basic compositor functionality for window managers. This is pretty much what wlroots is.

> NVIDIA doesn't support GBM If Nvidia don't support it, how much of a useful standard can it really be?

a standard supported by nothing, that reminds me of xhtml2...

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

#226

Post by shmerl »

I'm all for switching to Wayland session, but it has a long way to go to become usable.

The biggest issues for me:

* KWin still has major bugs like flickering windows due to broken subsurfaces clipping.

* No Wayland compositors support adaptive sync yet and according to KWin developers it will take "several years to arrive".

* No support for drawing tablets (Wacom).

So all this "X11 is dead" is way premature, as much as I want Wayland to take its place.

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

#227

Post by makomk »

csande17 wrote: post #216
makomk wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GBM is a very useful standard if you only ever want to request buffers from drivers that use the Linux kernel's GPU buffer management code and modesetting code. (Preferably only Mesa-based drivers too.) NVidia doesn't use this and probably can't for licensing and other reasons. If you want to talk to any graphics driver that isn't correctly and intimately entwined with the right parts of the Linux kernel, GBM is basi…

I'm not super familiar with the details of this stuff -- does this mean that there's basically no hope of any wlroots-based window manager ever working on non-Linux operating systems like BSD?

Most of the BSD variants have some (generally outdated) port of the Linux kernel graphics stack, sometimes even with a wrapper layer to try and make the BSD kernel internals look enough like Linux for it to run unmodified. So it's probably not completely hopeless, but that's mainly because the best shot at getting the graphics accceleration it needs is a straight port of the Linux kernel drivers. (At least for non-NVidia users.)

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

#228

Post by therein »

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…

Yup, I did this in college all the time as well. It was usable for most applications.

Even wireshark is usable this way.

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

#229

Post by phs2501 »

PlutoIsAPlanet wrote: post #81
simion314 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Then that should be done through a mechanism provided by the desktop environment. GNOME and I'm pretty sure KDE too has a method to set custom keyboard shortcuts that can execute commands.

I don't run a desktop environment in X. I run xmonad and terminals. I don't want a desktop environment in wayland, but it seems like that's the only way to get reasonable functionality because it can't be added piecemeal, only monolithically via the compositor.

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

#230

Post by phkahler »

DonHopkins wrote: post #154
carapace wrote: post #110

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.algoli…

Thank you, I hadn't heard of it before so I'll check it out! I'm not optimistic about Wayland, since early on they decided not to use an extension language, and that's not something you can have a change of heart about later, and then just nail onto the side. It would be interesting to see how Arcan uses L ua, which is a great language for that kind of stuff. It's a lot smaller and sleeker and better designed than Ja…

>> I'm not optimistic about Wayland, since early on they decided not to use an extension language, and that's not something you can have a change of heart about later, and then just nail onto the side.

I don't see a need for an extension language for a compositor. A miminum of DE features will be implemented in Wayland compositors and everything else will be other programs - write them in what you like. Or am I wrong about the partitioning on Wayland?

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