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The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

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Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#191

Post by josefx »

severino wrote: post #174
solarkraft wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wayland is a protocol. It has nothing to do with multi screen support. You're talking about the compositor you used. The one I use handles multi-screen setups quite well.

I never got to fully understand Wayland's model, but if this means that something that previously was handled by the display server for everybody, and now every single desktop environment (or at least something like wlroots) has to solve it over and over again... how isn't this a step back?

Cutting out bloat, just like you loose weight by cutting of your head.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#192

Post by darthrupert »

gtirloni wrote: post #148
darthrupert wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wayland was the last straw for me. It made me switch to Macs after 20 years of almost exclusive Linux on the desktop and a few dev stints. It was cool when my time was less expensive. I check the state of the linux world about once a year still. And obviously keep using it on the servers. Best of luck to everyone using it for desktop. I totally get why you do it, but it's just not for me right now.

Nobody is forcing you to use Wayland. Or are they? On Fedora it's a single line change em /etc to disable it (which I do because of Nvidia).

Indeed. And thankfully nobody is forcing me to use Linux.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#193

Post by pferde »

s1k3s wrote: post #30
lloydatkinson wrote: post #17

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…

Following is just an anecdote, I am aware that I may not be a representative sample, so read accordingly.

My current desktop PC has been on Debian (mostly Stable, sometimes Testing) for about fifteen years now, and apart from some minor bug here and there, everything works. Including gaming (Steam, as well as some standalone games), work, software development, multimedia.

From where I'm standing, I find Linux desktop much less bothersome than Windows or Mac these days. Every other week, there is an outcry about some new Bad Thing that Apple or Microsoft has done to their OS and half the tech community is up in arms about how all of their workflows are broken.

Or random Twitch streamers often having to fight against Windows more often than I thought reasonable, in order to get their streaming setup back under control.

Or work colleagues annoyed every other month about some VPN app not playing nice with Windows TCP/IP stack and locking them out of company network until they reboot.

Meanwhile, I'm in my little Linux corner, quietly doing my thing and not really having to fix anything other than mistakes I make, and bugs I cause.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#194

Post by jleahy »

adwn wrote: post #187
goatinaboat wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Devel…

For what it's worth, whenever I tunneled X over a non-local SSH connection, it was slow as molasses. That's because almost all contemporary GUI applications render to a bitmap anyway. Those that actually use the outdated X vector graphics operations look like utter garbage compared to anything post-1995. Frankly, I'd rather my applications are at least somewhat aesthetically pleasing.

I routinely use modern X applications running on a remote (25 miles) machine, all day long as part of my job.

It works flawlessly if you have a reasonable amount of bandwidth and reasonable latency.

Sure, it doesn’t work over dial-up.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#195

Post by ptx »

mcny wrote: post #142
oriesdan wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like a good idea, but I'm afraid it may be a nightmare for packagers (like the ones providing packages on GNU/linux distros), as they see updates to upstream only to realize they are just pings and don't need to be repackaged. It wouldn't be that often, though. And maybe they would actually love to have such heartbeat. I would love to hear a packager on that.

Personally I'm a fan of zero touch where I as a developer submit my code repo to app store like play store, apple app store, flathub or something and they just build it using a standard definition that the store defines and make it available on the store. Kind of feels like a lot of effort for every distro to look at every change in every application...

That's what distros do. That's what they are - a collection of vetted software packages tweaked to work together.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#196

Post by snazz »

dralley wrote: post #178
varbhat wrote: post #68

I recently came to know about Arcan which is the alternative to both Wayland and Xorg . https://github.com/letoram/arcan

standards.xkcd

I don't think we'll ever get into that situation. Mir is gone now and Arcan is a pretty niche solution, so I think that Wayland will continue replacing X.org unabated now.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#197

Post by blitblitblit »

So can we revive any of these also abandoned alternatives?

* Tiny X (Still Xorg just barebones and faster) - https://github.com/tinycorelinux/tinyx

* Xynth - https://github.com/alperakcan/xynth

* Nano-X / MicroWindows - http://microwindows.org/ (Seems still active? Just needs some modern GUI ports.)

* DirectFB (Needs modern driver support) - https://web.archive.org/web/20120118003245/http://www.direct...

* SVGALib (Needs modern driver support) - https://github.com/akosela/svgalib

* FBUI (Needs porting to modern kernels) - https://github.com/8l/fbui

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#198

Post by snazz »

Athas wrote: post #169
formerly_proven wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> just throw output eDP1-1 scale 2 in the config and you're set Why? What? Why? The system exactly knows the DPI of all attached displays, why does it still need explicit configuration in 2020 to support HiDPI?!

How would it know what scaling factor you want?

It should start with a reasonable default and then give the user the choice of different scaling factors like macOS does: https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/380570311227342859/...

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#199

Post by MayeulC »

jleahy wrote: post #194
adwn wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what it's worth, whenever I tunneled X over a non-local SSH connection, it was slow as molasses. That's because almost all contemporary GUI applications render to a bitmap anyway. Those that actually use the outdated X vector graphics operations look like utter garbage compared to anything post-1995. Frankly, I'd rather my applications are at least somewhat aesthetically pleasing.

I routinely use modern X applications running on a remote (25 miles) machine, all day long as part of my job. It works flawlessly if you have a reasonable amount of bandwidth and reasonable latency. Sure, it doesn’t work over dial-up.

Honestly, X forwarding doesn't work that well in my experience, unless you have a very stable connection, with quite a bit of bandwidth (~1Mbps at the very least). I've had more success using xpra for forwarding, as I'm often connecting over Wi-Fi (hostel, campus rooms...).

It's also rather complicated to set-up on the server side (xauth, magic cookie, etc).

waypipe, on the other hand, was a breeze to use, even though it's very young. I tried with Firefox and 500Mbps of upload capacity, it worked fine as long as the window wasn't too large.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#200

Post by sergeykish »

badsectoracula wrote: post #182

So why not just fork it? If the maintainers do not want to maintain it anymore... why not just fork it? I've heard people saying that it is big and complex but some time ago i downloaded the code of the X server itself and it didn't seem that big (i've worked in much bigger codebases myself).

No one wants? XOrg developers started Wayland, they don't want to work on XOrg anymore. Red Hat does not need anymore.
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