The death watch for the X Window System has probably started

kdbus was afaik not-exactly-compatible (at least not wire protocol compatible), and as its main reason for existence had speed.

And finally died after Linus went to town on dbus-daemon pointing out a bunch of fixes that made it much faster (though I don't know if anyone turned that example into actual patches for dbus-daemon).

As for arguments against d-bus - It's a mess. The protocol is variable-endianess for no reason, back in the very beginning the XML interface spec got significant criticism because introspection required punting and parsing XML.

Personally I'd also point to mess of multiple identifiers - last time I tried to figure out details for third-party implementation, I got 3 different addresses per object, whereas sometimes I believe just a reference would suffice.

Also, unlike its (probably closest) predecessor DCOP, it's very hard to use d-bus outside of writing a complex program.

Systemd is a factor, but it started years before. D-Bus is "desktop bus", and was rather obviously designed to be the interconnect between applications on the desktop. It seems to me to be preciously rare in its original goal of "COM-like" interop on desktop. Then it got started to be used for system daemons. HAL was somewhat reasonable if problematic. PolicyKit and ConsoleKit ... not so much. Those two laid foundations for badly described but "crucial" APIs provided by logind and systemd that were forced down everyone's throat later on. Now that I think of it, NetworkManager taking years to being configurable without gnome panel might have a hand in it too (and cast a shadow on D-Bus due to NM developer arrogance in the past).

So, generally, a bit of technology, a containership of politics.

Kwin 5.16 might technically support EGLStreams, but I have an Nvidia card and tried it out - after setting env variable to even make it try to work, Plasma crashed during startup, kicking me back to login. I tried again, and it managed to start up, but then plasma-shell crashed when I tried to search something. Performance varied dramatically, the mouse cursor switched from 60fps to 1fps randomly.

Kwin EGLStreams is not ready.

What makes you think that? The maintainers of both Wayland and Xorg have chosen to take Xorg behind the barn and shoot it.

Cairo wasn't the library behind the X11 drawing API, it was originally the Xr rendering extension, that was an alternative to the original X11 drawing API.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairo_(graphics)

>The name Cairo derives from the original name Xr, interpreted as the Greek letters chi and rho.

You're right, it doesn't actually make sense to put your drawing functions in the display server any more (at least in the case of X11, which doesn't have an extension language to drive the drawing functions -- but it did make sense for NeWS which also used PostScript as an extension language as well as a drawing API).

So Cairo rose above X11 and became its own independent library, so it could be useful to clients and toolkits on any window system or hardware.

https://www.osnews.com/story/3602/xr-x11-cross-device-render...

https://web.archive.org/web/20030805030147/http://xr.xwin.or...

https://keithp.com/~keithp/talks/xarch_ols2004/xarch-ols2004...

Here's some email discussion with Jim Gettys about where Cairo came from:

From: Jim Gettys Date: Jan 9, 2007, 11:04 PM

The day I thought X was dead was the day I installed CDE on my Alpha.

It was years later I realized the young turks were ignoring the disaster perpetrated by the UNIX vendors in the name of "standardization"; since then, Keith Packard and I have tried to pay for our design mistakes in X by things like the new font model, X Render extension, Composite, and Cairo, while putting stakes in the heart of disasters like XIE, LBX, PEX, the old X core font model, and similar design by committee mistakes (though the broken core 2D graphics and font stuff must be considered "original sin" committed by people who didn't know any better at the time).

So we've mostly succeeded at dragging the old whale off the beach and getting it to live again.

From: Don Hopkins Date: Wed, Jan 17, 2007, 10:50 PM

Cairo looks wonderful! I'm looking forward to using it from Python, which should be lots of fun.

A lot of that old X11 stuff was thrown in by big companies to shill existing products (like using PEX to sell 3d graphics hardware, by drawing rotating 3-d cubes in an attempt to hypnotize people).

Remember UIL? I heard that was written by the VMS trolls at DEC, who naturally designed it with an 132 column line length limitation and no pre-processor of course. The word on the street was that DEC threw down the gauntlet and insisted on UIL being included in the standard, even though the rest of the committee hated it for sucking so bad. But DEC threatened to hold their breath until they got their way.

And there were a lot of weird dynamics around commercial extensions like Display PostScript, which (as I remember it) was used as an excuse for not fixing the font problems a lot earlier: "If you want to do readable text, then you should be using Display PostScript."

The problem was that Linux doesn't have a vendor to pay the Display PostScript licensing fee to Adobe, so Linux drove a lot of "urban renewal" of problems that had been sidelined by the big blundering companies originally involved with X.

>So we've mostly succeeded at dragging the old whale off the beach and getting it to live again.

Hey, that's a lot better than dynamiting the whale, which seemed like a such good idea at the time! (Oh the humanity!)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtVSzU20ZGk

From: Jim Gettys Date: Jan 17, 2007, 11:41 PM

> Cairo looks wonderful! I'm looking forward to using it from Python, which should be lots of fun.

Yup. Cairo is really good stuff. This time we had the benefit of Lyle Ramshaw to get us unstuck. Would that I'd known Lyle in 1986; but it was too late 3 years later when I got to know him.

https://cairographics.org/bibliography/

One thing that a great majority of commenters here seem to be missing is that Wayland's issues that make it unsuitable to replace X Windows will not just be ironed out in a couple of years (at least not in a way that would be an improvement over X), because it is flawed by design.

The thing is, Wayland developers do not want you to take screenshots or automate input events (injection and interception). Those are both "power-user" and "accessibility" features. So respectively those who like to use the Unix (or other OS) programming environment to its full potential (hackers?), and the blind/visually impaired will have a hard time if Wayland gets forced on them.

It is possible to solve those problems with effort on a per-compositor basis (meaning less choice for users and more redundant programming effort - programs that interact with GUIs will need to have separate code for each compositor!), or with protocol extensions - that, of course, would not be universally accepted. For example, I think no compositor currently give a Wayland user the option to mess with input events (key presses, etc.). This means no hot-keys!

Quoting Red Hat: "Furthermore, there isn’t a standard API for getting screen shots from Wayland. It’s dependent on what compositor (window manager/shell) the user is running, and if they implemented a proprietary API to do so."

An interesting Reddit discussion: "It has been almost a decade, why does Wayland not have a protocol definition for screenshots?" - answer - "Because security, dude! Wayland is designed with the thought that users download random applications from the interwebz which are not trustworthy and run them. Wayland actually makes a lot of sense if you don't think of Linux desktop distributions and desktop systems, but of smartphones. But for some reason we absolutely need this technology on the desktop, like we had not enough pain and lose ends over here without it." [7]

See [1] [2]. And my previous comments on the same topic: [3] [4].

Another thing wrong with Wayland is that forced compositing means noticeably (in interactive applications) more latency.

Small nitpick regarding the blog post: Chromium depends on GTK3.

[1] https://wiki.gnome.org/Accessibility/Wayland

[2] https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Accessibility/Wayland/

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20310200

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20308011

[7] https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/7lb5l7/new_screensho...