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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

#311
post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> Expect supporting wayland properly Doing what everyone else does != doing it properly > I wouldn't call this excellent at all So far Wayland support is most further in Gnome and even there a lot of features are still missing/broken despite Wayland being well over a decade old at this point. A lot of very basic features (remote desktop, screen sharing, exclusive fullscreen, keyboard/mouse shortcuts) are still in the…

I would like to see the approach your pronning of "not doing like others" applied to some other protocols like TCP. Networking would be really fun and Internet a great success. The very concept of a protocol is that everybody does the same, the underlying implementation is different.

Wayland and its current limitations have nothing to do with, and does not excuse neither, nvidia's non-compliant implementation.

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

#312
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does XWayland not solve your issues? It’s a pretty good (seamless) compatibility layer. Of course, it still involves running an X server, but applications can switch to Wayland one at a time and you can use both simultaneously.

Imho XWayland is "too good". There's little incentive for software like Chrome to port over to Wayland if it runs on it seamlessly via a compatibility layer.

Nitpick: Chrome, or at least ChromeOS, already uses Wayland, in order to run Android and Linux apps.

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

#313
post #181
post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Then since no one else can justify spending the resources to replace the entire Linux userland Well that's just it, though. Red Hat is spending the resources to maintain and build much of the Linux userland. And they are no longer willing to do so in a way that helps support the userlands for the BSDs or the buffet mentality of building the Linux userland. If people don't want to use the Red Hat userland, then they…

>Red Hat >Red Hat >Red Hat is not the owner of Wayland, of the repositories, of the protocols, and is not the biggest contributor base

It is run by an ex redhat employee though, it seems to be a cultural thing.

I wouldn't be surprised if his paycheck is ultimately being paid for by redhat, even if it's through a level of abstraction.

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

#314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which video card/driver do you use? I have used Wayland for two years now without any noticeable problems. Before that, bugs in GNOME would often bring the whole graphics stack down. (This is on amdgpu and later intel. I had a lot of problems with nouveau.)

It's some AMD Radeon with 8G so reasonably beefy. Not sure about the driver, I choose AMD for Linux graphics to not have to think about that I suppose, Nvidia used to be (still is?) a headache on Linux.

>Nvidia used to be (still is?) a headache on Linux.

AMD was worse, the Linux driver had like half the performance of the Windows one. So if you were asking who has better Linux drivers for Linux the answer was NVIDIA (for desktops not latops)

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

#315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are the technical problems documented anywhere where non-NVIDIA-driver-developers can learn about them? Most of the discussion I've read online argues that to support NVIDIA's solution, everyone would need to add if(nvidia) checks to their code and maintain them forever. But this argument only really holds in Wayland's bizarro-world where all programs that arrange windows must also bake in code that interfaces direct…

https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/bdip8a/nvidias_patch...

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

#316

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 made a comment on this below, X already exists, why can't people live with X/fix X and thus utilize the already existing code vs recreate all the interfaces that X already has?

X is a dated mess at this point. Its core architecture assumes a model for drawing graphics that is more than teo decades out of date. There have been extensions - plenty of them - to drag it along and these have added substantial bloat. Also, some extensions where also awfully half-baked, turning the X11 protocol into nightmare to program against.

Wayland has some good ideas to modernize the stack based on passing GPU buffers between the compositor and applications, so that applications can use GPU acceleration and actual 21st century graphics technology to the fullest. But the non-graphics part of a desktop GUI are hard (e.g. event routing, clipboard, drag and drop, screenshots/capturing...). Wayland suffers from two things in this regard: first, it needs to catch up to a 30 year headstart thatball other DEs have with implememting that. Second, it is artificially hobbling itself by declaring absolutely trivial information privileged like the screen resolution and absolute coordinates of any window on the screen. This is a list of stumbling blocks and showstoppers that have to be worked around.

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

#317
post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waypipe does this in a really similar way to x forwarding. https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe/

No not really similar. It is basically a raw video that transfers the full window content over the wire. X11 is capable of drawing primitives. Even though the most popular toolkits (Gtk, QT) sadly did not use them, those who did (e.g. Athena, Tcl/Tk) worked perfectly over the network, even modem lines. If Wayland would contain modern drawing primitives like those that Cairo offers which could easily be serialized, we…

I would be careful about describing cairo’s Primitives as modern. Cairo-style rendering apis and implementations are struggling to keep up with modern user interfaces and modern resolutions. It isn’t super clear which way 2d rendering apis will go in future. It seems silly to me to bake such an assumption into a protocol

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

#318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As for the people complaining about Wayland possibly missing some of X's features, remember that it takes time for something to mature, to accrete features and fixes, and Wayland hasn't had that time yet. It has been a decade, precisely how long does it need to catch up? I ask because from what I can tell it is still missing features that were standard in Windows Vista in 2008, when that OS switched to DWM and WDDM…

If you're talking about screen recording and screenshots, fair point, except that that lack is a result of designing for security.

Hum, you can as well reach perfect security by keeping your computer powered off.

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

#319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are the technical problems documented anywhere where non-NVIDIA-driver-developers can learn about them? Most of the discussion I've read online argues that to support NVIDIA's solution, everyone would need to add if(nvidia) checks to their code and maintain them forever. But this argument only really holds in Wayland's bizarro-world where all programs that arrange windows must also bake in code that interfaces direct…

> Most of the discussion I've read online argues that to support NVIDIA's solution, everyone would need to add if(nvidia) checks to their code and maintain them forever.

This is a severe misunderstanding of NVIDIA's solution.

NVIDIA's solutions is so fundamentally different that you'd basically maintain two compositors internally: One that handles every sane driver, and one that handles NVIDIA.

Nothing in wayland is incompatible with NVIDIA's approach. GNOME supports it, and KDE recently gained support. However, the NVIDIA approach exists for only one reason: Because NVIDIA does not want to play along with the open source world, and doing the least amount of work to their proprietary driver.

Unless NVIDIA turns their ship around, supporting NVIDIA is harmful to our community. Although, if they'd just keep up with our standardized APIs, maybe we could somehow accept their ridiculous proprietary drivers which has no place in this decade.

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

#320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> May I suggest you buy an AMD GPU next time around This doesn't help anyone. I bought an expensive Nvidia GPU 6 years ago, when AMD support on Linux was really bad. What do I do, throw out a perfectly good powerful graphics card and spend another $500 to satisfy the needs of some newfangled software which doesn't solve any of my problems? I've had 6 years to experience the horrors of Nvidia, on multiple machines. I'…

> What do I do, throw out a perfectly good powerful graphics card and spend another $500 to satisfy the needs of some newfangled software which doesn't solve any of my problems? If you want to replace a card which was expensive six years ago, you can spend a hell of a lot less than five hundred dollars to do so. Even a brand-new RX 570, which will outperform a GTX 770 (the highest performance GPU for $500USD or less…

Not OP, but you are missing this points:

1 the expensive(this is relative) card works fine, do I throw it or donate it without any good reason(switching to wayland could wait IMO until this card is too obsolete)

2 Buying a new GPU is a big investment for some people,those money could be used to replace an old low quality display or other stuff.

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