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

#301

Post by temac » Sun, Jul 07, 2019, 9:48 PM UTC

dmix wrote: post #148

Boulth wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sway generally doesn't support NVIDIA, or it's rather NVIDIA that doesn't support common kernel modes that Wayland needs. Details here: https://drewdevault.com/2017/10/26/Fuck-you-nvidia.html

> Every GPU vendor but Nvidia supports these APIs. > About a year ago Nvidia announced “Wayland support” for their proprietary driver. This included KMS and DRM support (years late, I might add), but not GBM support. They shipped something called EGLStreams instead, a concept that had been discussed and shot down by the Linux graphics development community before. That’s pretty damning for Nvidia. I can see why the d…

> Looks like AMD is the way to go for desktop Linux boxes going forward.

Problem is: desktop Linux has an irrelevant market share, and the trivial workaround (use intel IGP or go buy and AMD graphics card) do not work when you don't just manage your one PC but actually maintain a system that is produced in series...

And honestly being upset at nVidia leads nowhere. The architecture of Wayland is complete bullshit to begin with and I'm not sure any other graphic stack of competing systems went that way, EVEN for systems that have a single window manager (well, that's most of other systems... -- so the situation is strangely kind of reversed). So hopefully wlroots will eventually improve the situation or something like that, but is it even convenient to build something that does not link the graphics session to the low level graphics stack with that? I hope it is, because if not, that is hopeless... :/

And I've not even talked about extra deps like Cuda, or the general lead nVidia still have in perf/W and/or perf/price (IMO AMD is close, but no cigar)

The X proto was maybe shit, but at least the general approach did not lead to the kind of insanity we are currently seeing. And people discussing the Death of X when Wayland ecosystem is maybe still 5 years away from decent quality and some reasonable feature completeness... (remoting, anybody? anything good enough for Wine?)

Oh well, we will see...

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

#302

Post by chungy » Sun, Jul 07, 2019, 9:50 PM UTC

llukas wrote: post #278

boudin wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Steam is a pretty niche userbase and not at all representative of the desktop market at large.

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

#303

Post by bitwize » Sun, Jul 07, 2019, 9:50 PM UTC

phkahler wrote: post #247

bitwize wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 the XWayland server incorporates the entire Xorg server code base except for the hardware-specific back ends. Well doesn't that mean XWayland will be easy to maintain since it has no hardware dependencies? X can completely stagnate so long as the Wayland back-end is kept up to date with any changes there - and no, people don't want to be changing Wayland protocols because every compositor would have to be updat…

Ostensibly, yes, but that would clash with the official narrative ("X is broken and bloated and needs to be deprecated"). If they can maintain Xwayland indefinitely, they can maintain a stub DDX that works with kms indefinitely also. What they are telling us is that they want to get rid of the entire thing. Pointing out that Xwayland would be relatively easy to maintain would be stating the emperor has no clothes.

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

#304

Post by mindcrime » Sun, Jul 07, 2019, 9:51 PM UTC

I'm totally not impressed with the so-called "successor" to X... Wayland.

It might be unrelated, but I just upgraded to F30 and I'm seeing all sorts of weird graphics / screen drawing related bugs using Wayland. And while it looks like somebody is finally making some meaningful headway on a remoting story for Wayland, it's still not truly on par with X in this regard.

So sure, kill X... but we should probably have a replacement that actually works, first.

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

#305

Post by ggreer » Sun, Jul 07, 2019, 9:56 PM UTC

neilv wrote: post #296

segmondy wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no Red Hat. They got by IBM for $34 billion, I keep seeing a lot of reference to Red Hat in this post. Please call it, what it is. IBM. It's all about money. Much can be said about this, but money has really corrupted and polluted OSS.

Of course the possibility of Red Hat being ruined has been on everyone's minds since the acquisition. But things akin to the Wayland push happened before that, so I wouldn't attribute that to post-acquisition. I won't call it IBM, so long as Red Hat retains some autonomy to exercise their know-how, and distinct identity (not kill some of the golden goose for which they paid serious gold), and so long as most of the t…

In the short time I worked at Red Hat (as part of the CoreOS acquisition), several of the redhatters in Raleigh mentioned how much they enjoyed working at Red Hat and how much they hated previous jobs at IBM. This was before the IBM purchase was announced.

I predict a mass exodus as golden handcuffs come off and employees start to chafe under new management.

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

#306

Post by jcranmer » Sun, Jul 07, 2019, 9:57 PM UTC

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…

Windows and OS X are well-known for constantly deprecating APIs and replacing them with new ones. So clearly the best way to compete with them is to insist on dogmatic adherence to 30-40-year old APIs that are known to be horrible matches for how modern software stacks (including competitor OSes) actually work.

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

#307

Post by bojanz » Sun, Jul 07, 2019, 9:58 PM UTC

makomk wrote: post #227

csande17 wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-NV…

Thankfully, getting less and less outdated (thanks to FreeBSD's wrapper layer, and OpenBSD Foundation sponsoring its own work).

FreeBSD 12.0 has Linux DRM 4.16 code (April 2018), while -current has Linux DRM 5.0 code (March 2019).

OpenBSD -current (next release) has Linux 4.19 DRM code (October 2018, LTS), with initial AMDGPU backports from 4.20 (AMD Picasso & Raven 2 support).

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

#308

Post by simion314 » Sun, Jul 07, 2019, 9:59 PM UTC

majewsky wrote: post #271

sprash wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

>I don't get this thread. On one hand, people complain (wrongly) about Wayland being too monolithic

? what? you mixed systemd with wayland maybe, everyone knows that wayland is a protocol, this is repeated 100 times in each thread , everyone also knows that most of X features are not part of wayland

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

#309

Post by Aardwolf » Sun, Jul 07, 2019, 10:01 PM UTC

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?

How is gaming in it? Steam games? 3D accelerated games? Games in wine? Fullscreen games? Different resolutions? Alt tabbing between game and desktop? Old games and new games? WebGL?

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

#310

Post by IshKebab » Sun, Jul 07, 2019, 10:02 PM UTC

t0astbread wrote: post #276

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?

X is horrible in many other ways.