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

#431

Post by heftig » Mon, Jul 08, 2019, 6:24 AM UTC

dmix wrote: post #205

djsumdog wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ideal Linux laptop is one with just Intel integrated, and no discrete GPU. Honestly, Intel GPUs are decent enough, even if you want to do some mild gaming. Handing two GPUs on a laptop in Linux doesn't have the best support. A lot of the Optimus/Bumblebee stuff is not very well maintained.

True, I don't do any laptop gaming. Intel GPU's seem to be sufficient as long as it can easily power a full HiDPI internal monitor + 4k external monitor... which Librem's Intel 620 GPU is listed as supporting but it looks like Librem's 15 v4 only has an HDMI port and not usb-c/displayport, which limits it to 4096x2160@30Hz instead of 4096x2304@60Hz. So I guess you'd have to look at Lenovo, HP etc for top tier.. Sadly…

Don't overestimate the Intel GPUs. My current system uses a 530 which is getting pushed to its limits trying to render the desktop at 60 Hz, either UHD on AC or FHD on battery. Forget UHD on battery, that doesn't even manage to move the cursor at more than 10 fps.

IMO the ideal GPU for a UHD screen would be either an Iris or a Vega 10. But it's difficult to find the former outside MacBooks and the latter with more than an FHD screen.

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

#432

Post by yyyk » Mon, Jul 08, 2019, 6:25 AM UTC

bitwize wrote: post #2

Omae wa mou shindeiru. If the future of X is uncertain, then X is already dead. No one wants to base their OS on something without a clear maintenance and development roadmap.

It's not like distros contributed all that much to X in the first place. Most likely, X will remain until Wayland is ready - which it isn't yet, 'prototype' support for some very common use cases does not count as support.

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

#433

Post by ubercow13 » Mon, Jul 08, 2019, 6:42 AM UTC

xorcist wrote: post #169

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…

The CADT development model is very real, but it's not really a good description of the Xorg situation. The most active Wayland developers are not only also Xorg developers but have been so for a very long time. They know their history. X11 has some fundamental problems. It's not fun using a modern desktop where it is impossible to sandbox individual applications. Firefox frequently processes untrusted data and is run…

Does Windows not have those same fundamental problems?

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

#434

Post by ibotty » Mon, Jul 08, 2019, 6:47 AM UTC

kazinator wrote: post #177

How many of these Xorg developers are the original people who made X11R3 in the mid 1980's? Somehow X didn't die without those people.

Keith Packard is the only one AFAIK.

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

#435

Post by ht85 » Mon, Jul 08, 2019, 6:51 AM UTC

ZeroCool2u wrote: post #402

ht85 wrote: post #214

Slightly off-topic, but is anyone here using Wayland with a touchpad? The last time I tried libinput, the behavior was horrendous compared to a synaptics. 2 finger scrolling had a ~2mm threshold before it activated and wouldn't compensate for the lost distance once the scroll started, making it feel very unnatural. I couldn't find an option to enable true palm detection either. There was an option to disable the touc…

I've been using Ubuntu with Gnome on Wayland for the past year or so on my Dell XPS 13. I actually ended up switching to Wayland, because of how much better the touchpad worked with it. To be fair though, Dell has an entire team dedicated to supporting the XPS 13 Developer Edition, so the drivers are highly curated compared to most devices.

My experience was on an XPS 9570, not sure if there's a large gap in driver / support.

Out of the box synaptics was pretty bad, but after tuning the palm detection zone size and a couple timings (long press, etc) it feels amazing. When I don't have to test convoluted UIs, I can go days without plugging the mouse.

Don't you have the small "lag" when two fingers scrolling?

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

#436

Post by sprash » Mon, Jul 08, 2019, 6:52 AM UTC

majewsky wrote: post #279

sprash wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would have been possible if Wayland decided to include drawing primitives. They religiously decided against it. Now every toolkit has to somehow manage dpi scaling by itself. Actually it is a huge mess.

> They religiously decided against it. They decided against it because no one (except maybe xterm) was using X11's drawing APIs anymore. The whole point of Wayland is to get rid of all the unused legacy that lingers in X11.

People didn't use X11's drawing API because it is severely limited (no transparency, no anti aliasing) and not because they are inherently a bad idea.

Both Windows and MacOS come with their own primitives that are widely used.

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

#437

Post by incompatible » Mon, Jul 08, 2019, 7:00 AM UTC

nqzero wrote: post #377

jcranmer wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's only because of Wayland's design that "GPU manufacturer creates nonstandard interface to their driver" is some giant, existential, ecosystem-fragmenting threat to the open-source community. That's not how I think of it. By analogy, consider POSIX. Every major operating system supports the POSIX interface--all of them, except one that is. But no one goes around calling that one OS a "giant, existential, ecosyst…

> no one goes around calling that one OS a "giant, existential, ecosystem-fragmenting threat to the open-source community." we did do that, and they were, but for the most part, for the moment (at least) we've won - so it's no longer on the tip of our tongue

I'm not sure what victory is being declared here: is Wayland likely to run on more than a tiny fraction of devices any time in the near future? If not, that "one OS" can take a large part of the blame.

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

#438

Post by thristian » Mon, Jul 08, 2019, 7:00 AM UTC

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…

X11 has a "standard compositor interface", but X11 compositors generally don't talk to the hardware directly, they talk to standard X11 drawing APIs like OpenGL or XRender. What you're talking about is really "Xorg drivers", a legacy from the time when Xorg was responsible for display hardware, and the OS kernel was responsible for every other kind of hardware.

Hardware definitely needs drivers, but these days the Linux community has settled on the model that all drivers should live in the Linux kernel, where they can share common code like "talking to the PCI bus" and security infrastructure. What you're proposing is that, instead of having one driver layer from "standard API" to "hardware interface", there should be multiple redundant driver layers, so that NVIDIA can implement whichever layer optimally balances their desire to support customers with their desire to hide their intellectual property.

That's not a crazy position (NVIDIA certainly holds it, and they're no small fry!) but telling Libre graphics-stack people "you need to make your architecture more complex and do extra work for free, to make this multi-billion-dollar company feel more comfortable" is always going to be a difficult proposition.

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

#439

Post by thristian » Mon, Jul 08, 2019, 7:05 AM UTC

new_realist wrote: post #387

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.

Or use X11, which is what people will actually end up doing. At the end of the day, X, GNOME and KDE have all figured out how to work with NVIDIA binary drivers, but wlroots has not.

NVIDIA writes and maintains their own Xorg graphics driver on top of their kernel driver. NVIDIA is apparently not interested in providing the same courtesy to wlroots.

(I don't know how much NVIDIA has contributed to GNOME and KDE's Wayland compositors)

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

#440

Post by mnm1 » Mon, Jul 08, 2019, 7:16 AM UTC

robocat wrote: post #415

roenxi wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

X.org is more horrible and also impossible to maintain. It would have been given the boot over a decade ago except for the fact that AMD/then ATI and Nvidia only supported X and video drivers were incorporated into X directly. There was a big push starting in ~2008 where AMD started open sourcing their drivers. Infrastructure started developing in the kernel where it makes sense instead of in X. Now we've reached the…

For laptops with top-end CPU and screen spec etc, they mostly have nVidia chipsets from what I have seen. I would have slightly preferred AMD, but I wanted an i9 in a laptop that had good Linux support, and so nVidia was all I could get (XPS15).

Are there any decent high end laptops that use AMD? I haven't seen anything. Not Lenovo. Not Dell. Not system 76 or any other Linux vendors. I prefer one too considering what shit nvidia drivers are. So the Redhat/wayland people are essentially saying all powerful laptops that have a chance of running Linux are already obsolete even ones not released yet? Redhat is powerful but not powerful enough to decide that. Fuck wayland if they refuse to support virtually the entire market for pro laptops. It certainly isn't the future without that. That's just delusional.