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

#471

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jul 08, 2019, 12:18 PM UTC

segmondy wrote: post #220

neilv wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, a lot of open source goodness is due to Red Hat, and a lot of open source programmers' livelihoods are and have been due to Red Hat. Red Hat earned a lot of goodwill among early Linux people, and fortunately they were able to sustain their work with enterprise business revenue flow, of actual dollars (not just goodwill). It's also true that a lot of people have been implicitly delegating a lot of foundation on w…

There's no Red Hat. They got by IBM for $34 billion, I keep seeing a lot of reference to Red Hat in this post. Please call it, what it is. IBM. It's all about money. Much can be said about this, but money has really corrupted and polluted OSS.

[deleted]

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

#472

Post by robocat » Mon, Jul 08, 2019, 12:18 PM UTC

mnm1 wrote: post #440

robocat wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Fuc…

MacBook Pro's generally use AMD I think (although Apple laptops were about 40% more expensive for an equivalent spec when I looked).

nVidia needs to choose to support Wayland, not Redhat.

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

#473

Post by pjmlp » Mon, Jul 08, 2019, 12:24 PM UTC

rleigh wrote: post #173

Maybe the death watch for the traditional Linux desktop has also started... Linux distributions have had a decade long slide in their usability and polish. Much of this has been due to an abandonment of its historical UNIX roots in favour of half-baked "modern" replacements. Being a UNIX replacement with a full X11 server and all the rest was what made it compelling and practical in the first place. However, it's com…

For me that happened with Windows 7 and OS X. I just keep a netbook with Linux for travel purposes.

While others might just use ChromeOS or Android, so long they still run Linux as kernel underneath.

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

#474

Post by orbifold » Mon, Jul 08, 2019, 12:39 PM UTC

shmerl wrote: post #242

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 recommend you simply to switch to AMD if you are using Linux and want a high end GPU. That's the only way for you to get a usable desktop with modern features. Or wait until Intel will release a new GPU next year, it should work well with upstream too. Nvidia has no interest in making their cards play well with Linux, so just avoid them completely to keep your sanity and don't waste your time trying to work around…

Or you know, just don't use the linux desktop. Nvidia's drivers are the only ones with a good Vulkan / OpenGL implementation, the other ones are underperforming severely. Nvidia also exclusively develops CUDA, so it basically it the only serious alternative for accelerating scientific workloads. Basically no-one cares what Kernel/Window system developers think as long don't cripple the Kernel severely enough that NVIDIA can't around their nonsense.

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

#475

Post by orbifold » Mon, Jul 08, 2019, 12:41 PM UTC

microcolonel wrote: post #112

csande17 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> By all means, if you want to do NVIDIA's job, be my guest. If I wrote an X compositor that supported NVIDIA's proprietary interface, it would work with pretty much every window manager that's ever been written. If I patch wlroots to support NVIDIA, I'll still only be able to use window managers based on wlroots; I won't be able to use ones that spun the Wheel of Incompatible Wayland Compositor Libraries and landed…

This is why it was so infuriating when NVIDIA refused to implement the stanadrd interface: they made the ecosystem "fragmented" for their users, and the PR cost of that bears on the compositor writers, rather than NVIDIA. Having different compositors at the level they're at allows a lot more interesting innovations to be made, and aside from NVIDIA's tomfoolery, it has not caused significant inconsistency. Everyone u…

Have you considered that maybe it is the other way around: The standardised solution is inferior and NVIDIAs superior? Given the fact NVIDIA engineers probably know a lot more about modern graphics stacks than some Redhat employee this seems likely.

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

#476

Post by anthony_doan » Mon, Jul 08, 2019, 12:44 PM UTC

arghwhat wrote: post #459

csande17 wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> If Wayland had a standard compositor interface like X has, this wouldn't be a problem at all, would it? It does. It's called Wayland. I suspect you might instead be thinking of a standard window manager interface to plug into a compositor, rather than the other way around. The Wayland approach has been to just make it easier to write a compositor, instead of porting X's complexities and odd design choices. However,…

> NVIDIA is just one GPU manufacturer out of many, and on Linux, a small one.

Is there a list of ranking anywhere?

I vaguely have an idea of probably Intel is first then AMD second.

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

#477

Post by orbifold » Mon, Jul 08, 2019, 12:45 PM UTC

the_pwner224 wrote: post #178

microcolonel wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would use Wayland, but the most actively-developed tiling window manager, sway, doesn't work with the NVIDIA graphics card I own. May I suggest you buy an AMD GPU next time around; not only because they didn't try to impose their "standard" (which virtually nobody other than them implements, as far as I can tell) without implementing the de-facto standard interface, hurting their customers' access to Wayland to t…

> 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'…

I've never experienced those supposed horrors across multiple operating systems (FreeBSD, Linux, macOS and Windows 7/8/10), the only time I owned an AMD graphics card it was a total disaster, among other things I remember are really bad Linux drivers (proprietary or otherwise). I never had any issues with my current GTX 1080, 4xGTX 2080 workstations or the 2xV100 nodes I have access to.

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

#478

Post by LaGrange » Mon, Jul 08, 2019, 1:24 PM UTC

namibj wrote: post #232

LaGrange wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"--my-next-gpu-wont-be-nvidia" --ill-pass.

It's implying I have a choice in the accelerators I could rent in a cluster... Yes, it's about using an intel GPU for display and a nvidia GPU to provide local development (latency being the primary reason).

It's just generally taking a reasonable stand ("I don't want to spend my time on Nvidia, especially not for free") into an unreasonable one ("Users who have Nvidia are bad and should be bullied").

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

#479

Post by soulofmischief » Mon, Jul 08, 2019, 1:38 PM UTC

sprash wrote: post #222

soulofmischief wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> it's incredibly insecure I hear this all the time. But so far there was not even one incident where major hack was done via X11. The reason for that is that people who use X also exclusively use trusted apps. The Wayland security model makes many generic tasks insanely complicated. The real world security gains will be zero. Security through obscurity never worked.

Poison a single common open-source daemon which is used in a lot of systems; That daemon will have access to all keystrokes, window content, etc.

> The reason for that is that people who use X also exclusively use trusted apps.

Well that's just not true. What does trusted mean? Most of the software on our desktops is unaudited. We don't have insight into the entire chain of deployment for more than a handful of applications we feel like keeping up with.

On a side note, that would be a wonderful service; A man-like utility which simply displays change-logs coupled with relevant source-code diffs. Reduces the surface of trust down to one party. Something like that would require financial backing, however.

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

#480

Post by soulofmischief » Mon, Jul 08, 2019, 1:41 PM UTC

noobermin wrote: post #325

soulofmischief wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

X is very interdependent, and a lot of it isn't fully modularized. When you need to change the entire foundation, knocking down a few walls won't get you there.

It sucks, I know. Decades of hard work "gone". But think of it this way, isn't it often said you shouldn't be afraid to throw away old prototype code? X is a decades-long foray into graphical computing, but perhaps it's time to throw away the prototype and start over with what we've learned from the process.