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The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

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Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#81

Post by jcelerier »

stevefan1999 wrote: post #5

Yes, I agree. X11 is a historic artifact that is supposed to be honored in the museum now. The C/S architecture of X11 hits the spot when terminals and thin client are the norm, that means 20-30 years ago, but today, we all have dedicated graphics display devices (GPU, monitors) even in our pocket smartphone, and the way X11 works is holding Linux desktop scene back. But without X11 there you can't show how much impr…

> The C/S architecture of X11 hits the spot when terminals and thin client are the norm, that means 20-30 years ago, but today, we all have dedicated graphics display devices (GPU, monitors) even in our pocket smartphone, and the way X11 works is holding Linux desktop scene back.

I used X11 forwarding just yesterday to open & control my linux desktop's music player from my mac - which other 2020 technology allows me to just run

    $ ssh -Y my_desktop
    > my_music_player&
and being able to do that without lag (scrolling through the list views was much more fluid that my experiences with e.g. RDP or VNC even though it's a Qt 5 app, strawberry, which likely does most of the drawing server-side) or blurry jpeg-compressed pixmaps, and with the ability to resize, minimize, etc this individual window without any issue ?

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#82

Post by roenxi »

p_l wrote: post #56
roenxi wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nobody in particular wants to use the X11 protocol. It is complicated and supports a bunch of weird functionality that is rather niche. The trend seems to be to use OpenGL and call that done.

I haven't seen many serious complaints that Wayland doesn't support the X11 protocol since people can run an X server directly using XWayland.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#83

Post by goatinaboat »

swiley wrote: post #67

Sure X.org is abandonware but there are serious problems Wayland still hasn't solved that X has. 1) Wayland is really slow. I don't know if it's the compositing or what but it's unusable on lighter hardware that X ran fine on. 2) Widget toolkits handling window decoration is awful. Before the large number of toolkits just meant some controls were a little different but now basic behavior changes based on how programm…

Wayland is really slow. I don't know if it's the compositing or what but it's unusable on lighter hardware that X ran fine on.

This is crazy when you think about it. I remember running an X server, Hummingbird I think it was called, on 386 and 486 machines connecting to Suns and it was fine, this was a perfectly acceptable way to work. Couple of xterms, an Emacs, xbiff for email, maybe some xeyes just for fun. Developing with Tcl/Tk and running those applications. Now we have several orders of magnitude more CPU, memory, network and Wayland doesn't even perform as well as that! My mind is truly boggled.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#84

Post by diegocg »

corty wrote: post #42
nsajko wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but Wayland won't ever be able to "catch up to X11", because it's broken by design. (See my next comment.)

Waylands design is even more broken and leads to common functionality being duplicated and broken all over the place. Each app has to do input handling on its own? Comeon, a 5yearold could tell you that that is a huge design flaw. There are equally problematic design flaws in X11, just less of them and in different areas. Where Wayland tries to get rendering right and botches all the rest, X11 is weird for rendering,…

There is no reason why window managers can't share functionality via libraries. In fact, some do (wlroots).

X11 and its separation of graphic server and window manager encouraged code reuse by placing it in the server, but with Wayland that separation (and the extra context switches) are gone so there is less incentive to share code.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#85

Post by jcelerier »

akvadrako wrote: post #25
corty wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where is that supposed Wayland progress after a decade? Input is broken and inconsistent, screenshots don't work, remoting is broken, every WM has to be rewritten or abandoned, trivialities like c&p handling are not yet there. Wayland is still in the early phase of catching up to X11, for any progress it will take another decade or maybe even a Wayland replacement. We should face it, Wayland is a dead end.

If those are your best arguments against Wayland you are making a good case for it because: input is broken and inconsistent – what? screenshots don't work – they do. I use them all the time. remoting is broken – I know it's supported but I've never wanted to do it. every WM has to be rewritten or abandoned – of course, that's by design. Wayland doesn't even have WMs. c&p handling are not yet there – do you mean copy…

> screenshots don't work – they do. I use them all the time.

they don't work on wayland, they work on specific compositors that implement an extension.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#86

Post by p_l »

diegocg wrote: post #69
znpy wrote: post #38

I am not necessarily against Wayland or new things in general. But it bothers me when no clear upgrade path is defined ("drop your stuff" is not acceptable) and a half-hassed incomplete solution is proposed instead, and backwards compatibility is pretty much disregarded. For what concerns my personal computing, I'll stay on Xorg until XFCE supports Wayland. Then I'll update.

>backwards compatibility is pretty much disregarded. Wayland compositors provide backwards compatibility with most X11 apps via XWayland, I don't think it's fair to say that they completely disregard compatibility

Due to how XWayland works, a lot of applications (sometimes critical ones) won't work under XWayland ever (pretty much everything that works on interaction between X clients fails hard).

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#88

Post by vetinari »

boudin wrote: post #21
est31 wrote: post #7

Today I've updated to the newest Kubuntu release 20.10 and considered switching to Wayland, but then abandoned the idea when I found out that middle click copy paste is only implemented in Plasma 5.20, and I only have Plasma 5.19. I've seen they've fixed the screenshot program though (which I remember to have been an issue on older versions). I'm looking forward to 21.04 for my next attempt to switch, maybe by then F…

Firefox native support is pretty much here already (I've been using it for quite a time now and it works really well). The only missing piece that is not merged yet is screen sharing unfortunately. It's available on Fedora's Firefox build. All GTK3 apps runs well on Wayland too. Qt apps runs well but it doesn't feel as polished (I mainly have issues when I use 2 screen with different scaling). The last big things are…

It is blurry only if you have fractional scaling enabled (enabled is enough, even if you use integer scale). With fractional scaling disabled, even xwayland apps are sharp.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#89

Post by Dunedan »

akvadrako wrote: post #46
bjarnek wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

systemd is hanging in 90% of all shutdowns on my machine. This never happened with sysvinit scripts.

There is a one-line fix for that. Change this line in /etc/systemd/system.conf : DefaultTimeoutStopSec=2s

That's a workaround, not a a fix and might break applications which legitimately need more time to stop!

A proper fix is to integrate startup and shutdown of all applications with systemd. That's something not properly supported everywhere yet. For example for KDE that's currently in the works: https://blog.davidedmundson.co.uk/blog/plasma-and-the-system...

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#90

Post by p_l »

rjzzleep wrote: post #71
znpy wrote: post #38

I am not necessarily against Wayland or new things in general. But it bothers me when no clear upgrade path is defined ("drop your stuff" is not acceptable) and a half-hassed incomplete solution is proposed instead, and backwards compatibility is pretty much disregarded. For what concerns my personal computing, I'll stay on Xorg until XFCE supports Wayland. Then I'll update.

I keep trying to use Wayland, but it never fully works. Everyone keeps saying how well the highdpi stuff works, but then it really only works for a subset of things. For the rest it's actually worse than Xorg. Multiscreen is Xorg is kinda mushy so I thought maybe Wayland fixes it, but no it doesn't. Wayland is now 12 years old and everything is still half-baked. It quotes an intel developer saying they don't want to…

Having used Intel open source drivers for 12 years, I've never lost the opinion I gained back with X3100 gpu that Intel is the darling because technically open sourcing the driver papered over the many, many faults of their code.

Whenever I had a chance to run on nvidia binary drivers, the only things I occasionally missed were some new features, or having to wait a bit longer to update the kernel. Stability was better, drivers more performant, and I don't remember daily fighting with memory leaks.

And X.Org's driver architecture could be replaced completely (in fact, it could be made to run on the same stack as Wayland) - it wouldn't be the first compositing Xserver around, and could use methods that would deal with noticeable to many lag involved in compositor-based UI.

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