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The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

phoronix.com

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Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#51
post #9
post #2

Better to say both X11, and Wayland are now two pieces of abandonware.

I fear you are right. While there might be commits in the Wayland repos, featurewise progress has ceased. Waylands broken architecture has made progress hard to impossible. Porting of popular window managers is extremely slow since there is just no thought given to X compatibility. Input handling by each application on its own is insane and broken. Feature-consistency across compositors on things like screenshots is…

I also fear this. I dont care about most WMs being left behind, kde and gnome is already spread too thin. And I say that as a xfce user of ten years.

Got a new laptop with amdgpu and am enjoying the new life with wayland and gnome. It just took waay too long.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#52

I have been using Fedora with Wayland daily for over 7 months now and I it works pretty well. I see that there are a lot of complains about Wayland here on HN. About input, screenshots and other stuff. But I have not experienced any of that. Input works perfectly and I have no problem with screenshots or screencasts. Maybe it's that I have well supported hardware (Thinkpad X1C7) or is it something that I'm missing?

You are probably only using Gnome and GTK3 applications. Everything else lags behind (because in Wayland you need to reinvent everything for each WM and toolkit). Everything is also incompatible because of all those reimplementations, so if you don't just stick to the one true Gnome way, it will be broken. If you just do what Fedora is designed for, I agree that it can be fine.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#53
post #15
post #12

X.org works fine, Wayland seems to be another RedHat thing. I must admit I haven't tried it, but given NetworkManager, systemd and other pearls from RedHat I'm not optimistic.

What's your problem with NetworkManager? It's generally good, and certainly much better than what came before.

It took about a decade for NetworkManager to gain CLI, all the time it tried to eat more and more control over network stack. It was also opinionated in the worst possible way, like responding to requests to support ad-hoc wifi mode (back when NM was only about WiFi) with "your request is dumb, you're dumb, and we will never do that".

It got usable within last few years as somewhat general thing (after having already wrestled control over network from you first), of course by the time it got useful work started on replacing it with new thing.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#54
post #35
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not it is not, that's the whole point of the article. There's been no release for the past 2 years, even if there's bug fixes and updates waiting to be released. There's no release planned. If another company steps in an decide to take over support from Redhat, it can come back to life though.

Debian's last release is from March this year, presumably from the current tree. Do officially declared releases really matter all that much?

Yes, it's quite important, the fact that there's no official release means that the project is stalled. It doesn't prevent to create custom builds by applying patches on top of the last release but that will only work for small bug fixes, customization and security fix. Bigger pieces of work will never be tackled this way, such as a good handling of hidpi screens, fixing security flaws such as being able to grab the output of any graphical application and read all inputs.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#56
post #48
post #24

Someone explain why the push to wayland when there is no discernable performance increase [0] and lots of broken applications. [0] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GNOME-Xo...

Most of X.Org is horrible and the entire system is unmaintainable. It is hard to even get maintenance releases for it released, as the article alludes to. Development hasn't stalled because people think X is good. Development has stalled because the fundamental design is so misaligned from the modern graphics stack that improvements are not worth attempting.

The thing is, X.Org server is not X11 the protocol.

X11 could be easily implemented on new driver framework supporting new graphic stack. Instead we got a piece of sh*t that is fitting for a custom embedded device or some closed environment, but not an X11 replacement.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#57
I have been using sway on Fedora for a year. It's been really good so. It's a smaller niche than X.org's, but I get to do everything I need. HiDPI support is just right, just throw output eDP1-1 scale 2 in the config and you're set.

Clipboard works perfectly splendid, screen-sharing works (not as perfectly splendid as clipboard does), input works, chromium/electron is getting support for native wayland. Qt and GTK Wayland support's quite good.

I have had no problems whatsoever and I invite you to try it. I have no hard-proof evidence or numbers to support my opinion, just try it.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#58
post #24

Someone explain why the push to wayland when there is no discernable performance increase [0] and lots of broken applications. [0] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GNOME-Xo...

Wayland is not just focused on performances but on addressing security flaws of X11. Those benchmarks were benchmarks of gnome 3.36, it doesn't represent "wayland" but gnome 3.36 implementation of it. If your concern is performance, it's still pretty much on of the point of focus. Gnome 3.38 already brought some good improvement there and there's still a few things to come in the area.

In term of broken application, what do you mean?

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#59
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s this kind of endless stream of broken and incompatible technologies that makes me use Linux in server and embedded scenarios only. Every time I’ve had to use desktop Linux it’s just been one problem after another.

Not sure what you're trying to use it for but I've been on Mint for the past 4 years and I've had no problem with it, other than the fact that every time I turn on the computer I have to run a shell script that fixes my resolution. I'm using it for development, I also have a personal Mac and my work PC is Windows and I can say the Linux is miles ahead of both of them. And the Mac and Windows computers have been $1500…

> I've had no problem with it, other than the fact that every time I turn on the computer I have to run a shell script that fixes my resolution

I can’t tell if this post is a parody or not. The fact that it’s 2020 and minor annoyances like this are still fairly common in desktop Linux is telling.

macOS SSHing into a Linux VM (either locally hosted or on the cloud) is the sweet spot for me.

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