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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

#491
post #10
post #4

So, RedHat decided that they do not want nvidia users anymore? I’d be more than happy to switch to Wayland, but I can’t.

GNOME, which is what powers the RedHat desktop, supports nvidia on Wayland just fine, and KDE got nvidia/EGLStreams support since KWin 5.16. So at least 2 major DEs do, though quite a few others don't, and have taken a principled stand not to (Sway for example won't). When it comes to RedHat though, they're all-in on GNOME anyway so keeping X around for nvidia users isn't really a concern for them when their desktop…

(Update: I upgraded to the freshest Fedora and tried to enable Wayland again. It finally worked! After 3 years of trying to make it happen! It is not perfect (the screen flickers occasionally, input latency is slightly increased), but it is at least usable. The window movement, animations, etc, everything is buttery smooth, as it should be. So, my rants are over, Wayland FTW.)

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

#492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/bdip8a/nvidias_patch...

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

#493
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…

I don't understand the ojection to dbus in particular. Are there not multiple implementations of the dbus spec?

There is a new implementation of the daemon named dbus-broker; it is unfortunately not yet based on bus1, as that hasn't been merged yet...

https://github.com/bus1/dbus-broker/wiki

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

#494
post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, they don't play as nice as AMD, but they do at least give you working drivers. They do have place for consumers, there are valid use cases for Nvidia on Linux, such as: 1) top performance available on the market; 2) off-the-shelf passive cooled 4K capable cards (GT 1030); 3) (significantly) better performance per watt and less noise for high-end cards. I still prefer AMD for their play-nice attitude with Linux…

I have run a GT 1030 with a pair of 4K displays for a few months and the performance is terrible (for a desktop usage). I don't know where the bottleneck is (PCI bandwidth maybe) but you should avoid this card. I have replaced it with an RX550 and I don't have any performance problem anymore. It is not passively cooled, but the fan can be stopped from software if you want.

Perhaps you got the "disgrace version" of GT 1030 with slow DDR4 in place of GDDR5? [1]

[1] https://www.gamersnexus.net/hwreviews/3330-gt-1030-ddr4-vs-g...

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

#495
post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. This is just not true. Gnome with Wayland is one of the most popular and modern DEs and it supports Nvidia's proprietary drivers today.

OP explicitly mentioned Sway (based on wlroots), not Gnome (mutter). Besides, even Gnome can't handle XWayland with Nvidia today. And if you play games, especially in Wine, that's still a requirement. While Gnome developers bent under Nvidia's pressure, other compositor developers aren't interested in accommodating exceptions for blobs and wasting their resources on that. TL;DR: just ditch Nvidia and forget about all…

> OP explicitly mentioned Sway (based on wlroots), not Gnome (mutter)

My parent commenter did not refer to Sway, that's why I rejected the claim that AMD is the "only way for you to get a usable desktop with modern features".

> even Gnome can't handle XWayland with Nvidia today. And if you play games, especially in Wine, that's still a requirement

I'm not sure what you're referring to. I've successfully launched and played Wine games with Nvidia proprietary drivers in Gnome with Wayland.

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

#496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 por…

OK, there are a group of people where at the time we bought NVIDIA it was not a mistake, it was the better card for Linux Desktop, at that time AMD open source GPU was bad and the Catalyst proprietary one was terrible in performance, Steam games were only supporting NVIDIA. Sure when I will need to buy a new card I will again have to check what is the best one for Linux and then I will probably get an AMD card again(…

> AMD Catalyst drop support for my 1 year old cheap Laptop

My advice is: Unless you're running a qualified application on a workstation GPU, do not use Catalyst (or whatever they're calling it this year). It is almost always more finnicky. Mesa has the best performance, and the most meaningful features for OpenGL, Vulkan, and D3D9 for any any GCN 1 or later (and probably r600 or later, but I don't have personal experience with that) GPU. AMD staffs people to maintain Mesa, including for GPUs they do not support their proprietary driver on; and if you're running a fresh/rolling-release distro, you'll tend to have a great out-of-the-box experience with Mesa.

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

#497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Some NVIDIA engineers probably know a lot about graphics stacks; charitably I'd say that those ones aren't the ones tasked with insisting on EGLStreams, which lacks a considerable number of crucial features.

To be honest though, NVIDIA engineers do not spend any time engineering graphics stacks at all; they write graphics drivers for stacks that are already largely specified. They're really good at shipping hundreds of megabytes of dirty hack code to patch popular shaders from ISVs to run slightly faster on their hardware, and probably great at writing shader compilers and threaded GL drivers.

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

#498

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…

Not sure what you're talking about here, Haiku's window system has network transparency, with drawcall-forwarding, even. In fact there is an HTML5-based remote client for it!

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

#499
post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is the problem right? Whenever there is a functionality that you could get with X11 by tweaking configurations files you have to write you own complete new Display Server in Wayland to have that functionality. This is especially true for people that prefer low latency over tear-free rendering.

I don't get this thread. On one hand, people complain (wrongly) about Wayland being too monolithic. Now, people complain about there being competing Wayland implementations with different feature sets. What's it gonna be, guys?

Those complaints aren't actually opposed but perfectly complement each other.

Wayland requires* everything to be monolithically built into the display server (which is also the window manager), which means if I want to use a new WM (say, XMonad) I need to reimplement all of this stuff. Want screenshots? Build it into your WM! Want redshift? Build it into your WM! The result is that development effort will be wasted reimplementing "competing Wayland implementations" stuff that no-one actually wants.

Compare X11, where I could run an Xorg server together with any of a number of lightweight window managers, and the window manager is only responsible for, y'know, managing windows, and determining how the window decorations look. Xorg handles everything else, allowing a robust marketplace of competing WMs to arise.

* Unless/until they finally give in and standardise protocol extensions for out of process window managers.

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

#500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Not sure what you're talking about here, Haiku's window system has network transparency, with drawcall-forwarding, even. In fact there is an HTML5-based remote client for it!

That's cool! I didn't know that.

Perhaps people might be interested in porting Haiku's graphics system to Linux to replace X11?

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