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

#271

Post by majewsky » Sun, Jul 07, 2019, 9:08 PM UTC

sprash wrote: post #203

emersion wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of what you're saying seems due to a particular Wayland compositor, not to Wayland.

That is the problem right? Whenever there is a functionality that you could get with X11 by tweaking configurations files you have to write you own complete new Display Server in Wayland to have that functionality. This is especially true for people that prefer low latency over tear-free rendering.

I don't get this thread. On one hand, people complain (wrongly) about Wayland being too monolithic. Now, people complain about there being competing Wayland implementations with different feature sets. What's it gonna be, guys?

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

#272

Post by southerndrift » Sun, Jul 07, 2019, 9:09 PM UTC

xorcist wrote: post #169

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…

The CADT development model is very real, but it's not really a good description of the Xorg situation. The most active Wayland developers are not only also Xorg developers but have been so for a very long time. They know their history. X11 has some fundamental problems. It's not fun using a modern desktop where it is impossible to sandbox individual applications. Firefox frequently processes untrusted data and is run…

Can't you use ssh and connect to localhost with the -Y option to sandbox an X app?

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

#273

Post by ddevault » Sun, Jul 07, 2019, 9:10 PM UTC

calcifer wrote: post #266

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A downstream compositor which wishes to implement Nvidia support could do so and integrate it with wlroots. However, there are more reasons than political not to "support" Nvidia. Their alternative has genuine technical problems that would render large parts of wlroots broken.

> Their alternative has genuine technical problems that would render large parts of wlroots broken. If this is indeed true (and I have no reason to doubt you) then I wish you and the rest of the Sway folks would focus on those issues, instead of the political arguments because from the outside it all looks very petty when you write stuff like "Nvidia doesn't support Sway". Nvidia doesn't even know about you.

I've personally spoken at length with Nvidia graphics driver developers. They know who we are and they know the technical problems. If you have no reason to doubt me, then perhaps you shouldn't.

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

#274

Post by majewsky » Sun, Jul 07, 2019, 9:11 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?!).

The wlroots developers have proposed protocols for screen grabbing etc. which are already supported by some window managers (e.g. Sway) and by some applications.

https://github.com/swaywm/wlr-protocols

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

#275

Post by boudin » Sun, Jul 07, 2019, 9:12 PM UTC

calcifer wrote: post #245

robert_foss wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NVidia has a horrible history of Linux support. GBM works just fine, they've simply chosen not to support it.

Nvidia has excellent support, I think you are conflating Linux with open source. For decades, Nvidia had (and arguably still has) excellent support for the former, without really caring for the latter.

Expect supporting wayland properly, which all other major vendors have been doing for quite a while. I wouldn't call this excellent at all...

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

#276

Post by t0astbread » Sun, Jul 07, 2019, 9:13 PM UTC

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…

Maybe a dumb question but why do people want to use Wayland if it's that horrible?

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

#277

Post by calcifer » Sun, Jul 07, 2019, 9:14 PM UTC

ori_b wrote: post #269

calcifer wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nvidia has excellent support, I think you are conflating Linux with open source. For decades, Nvidia had (and arguably still has) excellent support for the former, without really caring for the latter.

How long did it take to get multiple monitors working with xrandr, again?

Funnily enough, this is exactly what I was talking about. Nvidia supported multiple monitors on Linux for decades using TwinView, they simply didn't add support for the open source xrandr for 4-5 years, but even that has been supported for ~7 years now.

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

#278

Post by llukas » Sun, Jul 07, 2019, 9:14 PM UTC

boudin wrote: post #246

rat9988 wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a standard problem. You can't be a standard if the market does't care about you. You are just a specification and guidelines.

Intel and AMD cares about it. If the Linux desktop market would grow, Nvidia would quickly change their mind. Now, this market growing is another question... But for me, nvidia gpu are just not a possibility because they lack good drivers on Linux.

So how do you want to grow Linux market share if you say FU to a significant part of the potential market? Steam hardware survey is pretty clear about AMD:Nvidia GPU ratio.

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

#279

Post by majewsky » Sun, Jul 07, 2019, 9:14 PM UTC

sprash wrote: post #187

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 would have been possible if Wayland decided to include drawing primitives. They religiously decided against it. Now every toolkit has to somehow manage dpi scaling by itself. Actually it is a huge mess.

> They religiously decided against it.

They decided against it because no one (except maybe xterm) was using X11's drawing APIs anymore. The whole point of Wayland is to get rid of all the unused legacy that lingers in X11.

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

#280

Post by wott » Sun, Jul 07, 2019, 9:15 PM UTC

hedora wrote: post #196

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…

I think they are gaining control via a “dastardly power grab”, as you put it. Software that I have relied on for decades no longer runs, and it is invariably because someone at RedHat consciously decided to break compatibility with the existing Linux ecosystem in some functionality regressing way. This has happened with the Linux kernel, pulse audio, dbus, systemd, logins, systemd logger, wayland, gtk2->3, and countl…

Also the main issue I see with 'modern' Linux ecosystem actors, is that they usually do not put on the 'market' a new product that they developed (from scratch or after forking a traditional one); instead they first take control of a an existing piece of software or project, and then they change the way it works, or the direction it takes, or make it un-portable just because.

I wouldn't mind if they released new software, new concepts, new OSes and let the users (the competition? the free market?) choose. If they take the market share, good for them, but they didn't have to come and screw with the ecosystem I picked years (decades, actually) ago. Let the different ecosystems leave their lives. I chose this one 20 years ago especially because I wanted to avoid those things which, now, are put down my throat!

Would changes (switching) take a longer time to occur? Yes, probably, and I don't think it is a problem, considering today's tendencies in software development which exhibit more problems because of going too fast.

For example, I never read any user saying "I moved to a Redhat distribution because it has systemd, that's so much better" before a couple of distro maintainers (soon to be hired by Redhat) decided it had to be imposed on a distro and then another. Nobody really cared about the supposed advantages brought to the table by systemd, nobody demanded it. And yet...

Same thing for major changes of/in GUI toolkits. If they want breaking changes (as toolkit devs), if they want a complete redesign (as toolkit users), just fork the existing project and name it something else at least a little bit distinctive. Let the project as it is a chance to survive (no matter how small that chance is).

But no, they want a monoculture, they want to spread it as much as they can, and force everyone to follow their way, their idea of the day.

In fact it is a bit like globalisation, where a single culture, a single economic system, a single social system is supposed to eat the world and leave it with a single boring monoculture, the same everywhere.