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

#321

Post by erik_seaberg » Sun, Jul 07, 2019, 10:14 PM UTC

maxharris wrote: post #157

petschge wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, but a stack overflow answer (that doesn't even seem to be written by you) that give a bad overview over how X11 does it is not an explanation of why it can not be done. Or why it should not be done given that all platforms develop abilities to do exactly what I ask for at some point anyway.

First, I never claimed that the quote was written by me! That's what the quote marks and link are for. Why have ALL of the other major systems - Windows/ReactOS, NeXT/Mac, BeOS/Haiku, iOS, Android, etc. - not bothered with implementing network transparency in the core of their display systems? Mind you, I'm not asking the question of why the people that made these systems all decided against building on X11. (That wa…

Blub paradox. If you habitually confine yourself to a single computer, remoting never becomes a tool you reach for. NeXT had remoting because it was meant for power users in labs full of closely networked workstations.

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

#322

Post by acqq » Sun, Jul 07, 2019, 10:15 PM UTC

logicprog wrote: post #213

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #209

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.

> that lack is a result of designing for security

That still doesn't mean that I don't need screen recorder and screenshot functionality. Everybody wants both security and features.

And it's more that "can't be done" with Wayland, in spite of the needs existing and not going away.

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

#323

Post by snazz » Sun, Jul 07, 2019, 10:17 PM UTC

calcifer wrote: post #282

boudin wrote: 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…

> A lot of very basic features (remote desktop, screen sharing, exclusive fullscreen, keyboard/mouse shortcuts) are still in their infancy.

- remote desktop: good point. Considering that screen recordings work fine, I don't see a technical reason that a Wayland remote desktop setup couldn't work.

- exclusive fullscreen: what do you mean by this? Using Firefox, F11 and Super-F both work in Sway and F11 works with GNOME.

- keyboard/mouse shortcuts: maybe? The fact that a random process can no longer read all of your keystrokes seems like a plus, to me. Otherwise, just add a shortcut to your window manager or DE and run a command of your choice.

- losing all apps on compositor restart: Only an issue with GNOME and KDE. Pressing Super-Shift-C on Sway reloads the compositor and not your apps.

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

#324

Post by p_l » Sun, Jul 07, 2019, 10:17 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?

Multi monitor display worked perfectly for long time, long before "it works on intel, let's call it new standard" crew decided that flat shared framebuffer is the only way to go (apparently because of compositors and nothing else), something that also broke support for multi-gpu and especially heterogenous multi-gpu.

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

#325

Post by noobermin » Sun, Jul 07, 2019, 10:17 PM UTC

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…

Is a complete rewrite needed? Can't you break and fix the parts that make application isolation impossible but keep everything else?

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

#326

Post by makomk » Sun, Jul 07, 2019, 10:18 PM UTC

seba_dos1 wrote: post #67

nextos wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

While I generally understand your sentiment, I can't see how does it apply to Wayland in particular. You can replace Wayland with X11 and basically make the same argument. You can implement Wayland compositor on top of X11 protocol if you wish. You can also implement X11 server on top of Wayland protocol (and that's actually already done and widely used, called XWayland). Given the oddities and architectural baggage…

XWayland isn't a normal Wayland client - it requires special assistance from the compositor. In particular, the compositor acts as the X window manager and there's a special interface between it and XWayland on the Wayland side to make everything work.

I don't think it's possible to even implement something like XWayland as an ordinary Wayland client. By design, ordinary Wayland windows are not permitted to know or control their on-screen position, and X relies heavily on apps being able to do both. This is also a major reason why Wine will never support Wayland in the same way that it does X.

Basically, if your preferred compositor ever gets fed up of maintaining support for running X applications, the only way you'll be able to run apps that haven't been ported to Wayland is in an emulated desktop confined to its own window. Expect this to happen sooner rather than later given the current attitudes to backwards compatibility. (Think about Ubuntu dropping support for 32-bit applications, for example.) On the positive side, at least Windows 10 doesn't suffer from the same limitation...

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

#327

Post by kilburn » Sun, Jul 07, 2019, 10:19 PM UTC

noobermin wrote: post #299

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…

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?

Because X's developers gave up on it: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=x_waylan...

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

#328

Post by p_l » Sun, Jul 07, 2019, 10:20 PM UTC

ekc wrote: post #294

Keyframe wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discrete GPU market share is 80%+ Nvidia, last time I checked.

Discrete GPUs are a write-off of a minority of the total market, last I checked.

It's also significant portion of "people who pay for Linux developer salaries" in the form of few workstation users that use Linux-based software that is often paired with Quadros.

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

#329

Post by arghwhat » Sun, Jul 07, 2019, 10:22 PM UTC

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?

Intel and AMD maintain open source drivers that have supported this for ages. It's only NVIDIA that still tries to shovel outdated proprietary drivers without support for community developed standards down our throats.

Adding that their proprietary drivers are not particularly good, NVIDIA is not a very popular choice for a Linux machine.

Just remember that it took them almost a decade to add KMS support.

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

#330

Post by dmix » Sun, Jul 07, 2019, 10:25 PM UTC

temac wrote: post #301

dmix wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

It wasn’t just Wayland that used GBM, plus every other vendor supports it but Nvidia and it’s well documented in Mesa.

But I personally don’t care as long as Intel and AMD are available, it’s fine. I see Linux like MacOS, it’s an operating system targeted at a limited set of hardware. As long as you buy within this group 90%+ of the problems with Desktop Linux will go away.