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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

#361

Post by microcolonel »

simion314 wrote: post #320
microcolonel wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> Not OP, but you are missing this points:

No, I'm not missing these points. It's just that nobody except NVIDIA can do anything about that, so I'm suggesting things you could do. If you can't get an AMD or Intel or Qualcomm (unofficial) or Broadcom (or soon ARM) GPU, and you won't (or can't, again because of NVIDIA being antisocial) run Nouveau instead of the NVIDIA proprietary drivers, and you're not willing to port wlroots to EGLStreams, then you simply will not be running wlroots-based compositors on your machine. That's just how it is.

If you bought a 2019 MBP hoping to run Linux with full support for all the hardware, you would be making a mistake; just because I say that it's a mistake, doesn't mean I think you can afford to replace all your computers again once you've made that mistake.

I don't get these replies. I go to specific effort to couch everything I say, I say "next time around", I say "if possible"; and everyone reads it as though I'm somehow out of touch with the fact that not everyone can spend hundreds of dollars on GPUs every year. I know, I'm just saying that steering clear of NVIDIA in the future is an option that will give you a good experience with standard Wayland compositors.

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

#362

Post by carapace »

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 had no idea Lua was that old. The world that might have been, eh?

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

#363

Post by michaelmrose »

emersion wrote: post #88
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…

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.

I know it's not the devopers fault that they can't reverse engineer nvidias closed source crap but nouveau has always been garbage. Nvidia should adopt and fix it or at least help.

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

#364

Post by saghm »

michaelmrose wrote: post #363
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.

I know it's not the devopers fault that they can't reverse engineer nvidias closed source crap but nouveau has always been garbage. Nvidia should adopt and fix it or at least help.

> Nvidia should adopt and fix it

Or even better, just open source their own driver

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

#365

Post by michaelmrose »

csande17 wrote: post #334
arghwhat wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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. If Wayland had a standard compositor interface like X has, this wouldn't be a problem at all, would it? You could write your compositor that talks to the hardware using your "sane" interface, and someone else could write a compositor that uses th…

Yes

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

#366

Post by cwyers »

konqi wrote: post #181
cwyers wrote: 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

Given that the blog post in question quotes from "On the Road to Fedora Workstation 31," I think Red Hat's adoption of Wayland is germane here.

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

#367

Post by michaelmrose »

arghwhat wrote: post #329
chrisseaton wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It's an interesting position to suggest that nvidia which has no obligation to support you in any way shape or form is shoveling anything down your gullet by not supporting the standards you prefer.

You could vote with your wallet but there aren't enough Linux users to move anyone's needles as far as gpus.

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

#368

Post by michaelmrose »

arghwhat wrote: post #337
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.

Are you referring to the small decade it took them to support KMS so that their driver behaved even remotely like a modern one? Or perhaps their marvelous installation methods of running a random script as root that rewrites configuration files, and its configuration interface that likewise also rewrites configuration files in attempts to get multi-monitor setups working that until recently hardly ever worked? Maybe…

Most distros have a nvidia driver package that aligns with the kernel version shipped. This also means updating one updates the other automatically.

Furthermore lag time for supporting newest kernel normally lags what 30 days?

In brief what you are describing is self inflicted wounds.

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

#369

Post by BearOso »

arghwhat wrote: post #331
calcifer wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

This would be a great idea if NVIDIA was open to suggestions so that things could be fixed. However, they mostly refuse to play ball. They did seem to be preparing an alternative suggestion, but they seem to have dropped it entirely in favor of just dumping EGLStream patches on KDE and GNOME, hoping every one else will be forced to follow.

The alternate suggestion would work like EGLStreams. The current Nvidia driver can’t handle any more.

EGLStreams works by having children pass ownership of the surface they want to display to their parent for compositing. This invalidates said surface.

GBM is a coherent model. Handles are passed around to prevent the need for copying, but ownership isn’t transferred.

Nvidia’s driver is a black box, but I don’t think they can do things that way without some significant driver refactoring. Obviously that’s costly, so they’re trying to avoid doing it.

AMD took a gamble when they began their open source initiative. It’s starting to pay off now with stuff like Stadia and the Valve stuff. I feel like Nvidia is going to have to do an open driver eventually. I hope they’ve got at least something in the works that we don’t know about.

I’m not going to suggest replacing Nvidia cards if they’re working fine for what you do. Just look at AMD (or Intel next year) if you start hunting for your next card. Don’t fall into the brand loyalty pit.

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

#370

Post by michaelmrose »

darkpuma wrote: post #355
chrisseaton wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Nvidia don't support it, then it's just a standard, not the standard.

Meanwhile X is still on death watch and Nvidia will be brought into the fold or be forced to stop pretending they support the linux desktop.

Wherein "death watch" is expected to work without difficulty for the next decade or longer.

They aren't pretending they support Linux, BSD, Solaris, Mac, Windows for a decade after each card is released.

While this was true ATI/amd were shipping garbage that barely worked for a few years. This has only changed in recent years.

We are a few years having one dedicated gpu maker in the fold and are already talking about using your massive 2% marketshare to strong arm the other. You could afford to be more humble and less entitled.

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