31–40 of 134 posts
This is a bit of topic but: Every time I see the X11 protocol, I realize that the UNIX philosophy (everything is a file) is dead. It’s a pity that instead of improving the speed of the file system, everyone started to ignore it, hence making it’s speed even less important, and on and on... And now nobody uses the file system for these purposes.
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I think capturing desktop and screenshots should be addressed by standard Wayland extensions with integration with something like Pipewire as far as I know. I didn't follow the progress of that though. Some details here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PipeWire Some features though are surely missing. Such as support for adaptive sync. No one really is pushing that forward. See: https://github.com/swaywm/wlroots…
Like I said... I gave up and bought an AMD card. Not everyone is going to do this. It's a step down from my NVIDIA card. I think there is still hope. Obviously today's reality is still bleak with signed blobs and plenty of question marks, but I think open-gpu-doc is a sign that NVIDIA does actually want to square away this problem, maybe they're just not sure how. I do believe NVIDIA is mostly responsible for Wayland…
This is a bit of topic but: Every time I see the X11 protocol, I realize that the UNIX philosophy (everything is a file) is dead. It’s a pity that instead of improving the speed of the file system, everyone started to ignore it, hence making it’s speed even less important, and on and on... And now nobody uses the file system for these purposes.
> Every time I see the X11 protocol, I realize that the UNIX philosophy (everything is a file) is dead. Brings back memories of the old days of the late 1990s trying out so many workstations running obscure Linux distros to actual UNIX OSes like IRIX, Solaris and HP-UX. They all ran some variant of X11 which was part of the UNIX philosophy which I found interesting (X11 forwarding, startx, etc) but as the requirement…
It's basically all the fun we had with X11 back in 2003, just to get an environment that's about as dependable (though admittedly much faster) as X11 back in 1993.
It's one of those cases where the "release early, release often" mantra kindda seems to work against us. I'm sure ten years from now Wayland will be just as solid as X11 was back in 2013, aka "good enough", but there's a different kind of crowd looking at this stuff today.
Unfortunately, the anti-Wayland buzz propagates easily because the community response is inevitably unsympathetic. Mention things like "I tried Wayland for an afternoon, applications kept crashing" and you'll inevitably get a dozen answers, all of them along the lines of nah bro I'm running Gnome Wayland which is the default in Fedora 67 on my ThinkPad X1 Carbon and I'm not getting any crashes. Well, yeah, 90% of the projects that failed to get traction and adoption in the field of graphical systems did so because they couldn't make the transition from "running on its developers' and fans' computers" to "running on everyone's computer". I can run Wayland on my system just fine, too, but I'm the only one in my immediate circle of nerds who can.
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X11 and its ecosystem of applications isn't abandoned by Wayland, because you can run an X11 server on Wayland. By all means, debate the merits of Wayland itself, but don't lean on inaccuracies and conspiracy theories.
My window manager won't work, my hotkey daemon won't work, my screenshot tool won't work, any X11 program that draws to the root window won't work. Xwayland is obviously not a working solution to fix the ecosystem problem. Who is inaccurate now? > debate the merits Wayland has no merits. That is kind of the problem. It is just a reimplementation of stuff that worked.
Once the integrated X support is gone you can't just replace it with a standalone X server of the sort that's available on OSes like Windows and Mac OS X either - by design, the standard Wayland API doesn't provide the functionality required to run X (or Windows) apps. In particular, it provides no way to set or get the absolute position of top-level windows, which apps on those platforms need to support things like menus. In a few years time, I can easily see modern Linux becoming the only current desktop OS that cannot run X apps.
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My window manager won't work, my hotkey daemon won't work, my screenshot tool won't work, any X11 program that draws to the root window won't work. Xwayland is obviously not a working solution to fix the ecosystem problem. Who is inaccurate now? > debate the merits Wayland has no merits. That is kind of the problem. It is just a reimplementation of stuff that worked.
The wayland project exposes what marvelous piece of software X11 really is since Wayland is still not able to compete, otherwise the whole Linux community would use it already. I respect the intention and efforts of the Wayland community to make things better. However, I wished the community would have focused on making X11 better (easier to maintain with modularity etc.) instead of following the mainstream which is…
My understanding is that Wayland was started by a few core developers of Xorg who just couldn't stand maintaining Xorg anymore.
This is a bit of topic but: Every time I see the X11 protocol, I realize that the UNIX philosophy (everything is a file) is dead. It’s a pity that instead of improving the speed of the file system, everyone started to ignore it, hence making it’s speed even less important, and on and on... And now nobody uses the file system for these purposes.
Not disagreeing we've moved on from it a bit in some places, but.. "Everything is a file" never meant "everything is a disk file" - think of std{in,out,err} or network sockets. The implications are more around having a standard set of syscalls for moving data in and out of a program, abstracting away where it actually lives and treating the data itself as something opaque.
Yeah, and shouldn’t that (theoretically) file systems with very small delay? (For example, RAM based file systems for inter-process communication.)
I thought that it isn’t the slow storage that is blocking use of files, but more of a software problem that has significant overhead to use files as a communication method. (I’m not an expert here; please correct if I’m wrong.)
This is a bit of topic but: Every time I see the X11 protocol, I realize that the UNIX philosophy (everything is a file) is dead. It’s a pity that instead of improving the speed of the file system, everyone started to ignore it, hence making it’s speed even less important, and on and on... And now nobody uses the file system for these purposes.
Not disagreeing we've moved on from it a bit in some places, but.. "Everything is a file" never meant "everything is a disk file" - think of std{in,out,err} or network sockets. The implications are more around having a standard set of syscalls for moving data in and out of a program, abstracting away where it actually lives and treating the data itself as something opaque.
You're right that it never meant 'everything is a disk file', but generally the implication of the unix philosophy was that everything could be accessed from the filesystem.
Have a look at Plan9, which is essentially directly descended from 7th edition UNIX and IIRC was built from what was going to be 8th edition UNIX. It has a HTTP interface from the filesystem -- one can literally do GET requests on documents from the internet just by opening a file on the filesystem.
This is a bit of topic but: Every time I see the X11 protocol, I realize that the UNIX philosophy (everything is a file) is dead. It’s a pity that instead of improving the speed of the file system, everyone started to ignore it, hence making it’s speed even less important, and on and on... And now nobody uses the file system for these purposes.
The problem with file systems is that it is extremely difficult to build reliable systems on top of them. It’s shared mutable state with barely any error handling possibilities.
And that makes me think about scoped file systems... (gotten the idea from global & scoped variables)
Since the biggest advantage of ‘everything is a file’ is that it allows a consistent API for manipulating data, why didn’t this happen?