Live data from Hacker News

The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

phoronix.com

241–250 of 714 posts

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#241

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…

Yeah - I have no clue why you're being downvoted. I have the exact same professional experience where Wayland is slow out-of-box vs X. I also share the experience of getting X to work on ancient hardware without much difficulty. Let's be real here - if you're needing something to "just work" you're going to install X. Sorry Wayland, you're just not there yet.

> Yeah - I have no clue why you're being downvoted.

I didn't downvote but it's because parents comment are anecdotal and not providing further data one might be able to engage/confirm/refute ... and therefore I learned nothing from reading it.

I'm also running a dual setup of i3/sway and the only reason why I still keep i3 around is screen-sharing in jitsi and similar. and my experience is that wayland has a lower use of CPU/memory than when running X (i3) but it's not why I prefer sway. (I'm using sway with "xwayland disable" so maybe this is where a lot of resources are saved). But the whole discussion is pointless without verifiable benchmarks.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

One X.org developer started Wayland and some (but not all) others joined. In any case, i wasn't referring to X.org developers - i explicitly mentioned that they do not want to maintain it anymore. I was referring to those who want to see it continue existing in one way or another.

Ah, I red "fork" as in ffmpeg-libav case, it is not what you meant, I would say "contribute".

I am too surprised by critique. Anyone can contribute to X.Org [1], maybe there are no stable releases but it works, have active contributors [2] and recent commits [3] [4].

Wayland lives, ten years ago it was demo, now it has a lot of compositors [5], wlroots shared among many projects.

[1] https://github.com/freedesktop/xorg-xserver

[2] https://github.com/freedesktop/xorg-xserver/graphs/contribut...

[3] https://github.com/freedesktop/xorg-xserver/commits/master

[4] https://github.com/freedesktop/xorg-xserver/graphs/commit-ac...

[5] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/wayland

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#243
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have far more issues with my OSX laptop than having to run a script once every few months (presumably that script is called automatically)

I've just had another popup from OSX wanting a password for google, sophos pops up saying it's upset a fair bit, on occasion the entire machine just hangs, and wireguard doesn't set my search domain. There are other niggles but those are the ones that have affected me in the last 30 minutes.

On the other hand the biggest hassle from my desktop is ssh connections time out if I suspend the machine overnight.

(I've used ubuntu LTS on the desktop since 2006, before then it was debian testing since 1999)

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#244
post #187

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.

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.

That is entirely subjective no? Personally I think Motif is one of the pinnacles of GUI design.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#245
X.org is one of my longest-used pieces of software. I've used it for 25 years (at the time it was called XFree86 and you had to calculate your own modelines to get hi res), and it has worked incredibly well for me. I've written software some 20 years ago that still runs just fine (some xscreensavers) and I still use it today.

Kind of a shame.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

While technically correct, this misses the point. Very few features are part of the core Wayland protocol; off the top of my bind, there's the input methods, and a few ways to describe shared memory with the compositor and some callbacks to handle device registration. That's it.

For example, top level windows and popups themselves are an extension in Wayland (xdg_shell protocol rather than the defunct wl_shell), and so is the rather basic feature of compositing on the GPU (dma_buf) rather than going through some shared CPU memory.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#248
post #169

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?

The standard has been ~100 DPI, so a 200 DPI display should by default get 200 % scaling with no extra configuration needed.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#249
post #132

If Wayland is the future, the future is grim. People often complain that Wayland is taking a long time to catch up to X11, but that actually stems from a deeper issue: Wayland has a horrible design, for an X11 replacement, a design that leads to massive fragmentation issues across the graphical part of the Linux ecosystem. Implementing a Wayland compositor requires much more effort than implementing an X11 window man…

Check ydotool for an xdotool replacement: https://github.com/ReimuNotMoe/ydotool

The lack of a common screenshot protocol isn't related to security. The desktops just haven't been able to agree on a common protocol (yet?)

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regardless as to whether Gnome "does well" in the regard of performance, you must admit that for some of us choosing a competitor like wlroots over one like Gnome introduces a whole new adventure in replacing all the features of Gnome with standalone applications to use with wlroots. Plus a tiling window manager is a totally different workflow. Not everyone has the time for curating a desktop environment with individ…

It's not a particularly arduous "adventure". We maintain a list[0] of programs which use these protocols. And wlroots != tiling window manager: there are multiple wlroots-based compositors which do not use the tiling paradigm, the most developed of which is probably Wayfire[1]. [0]: https://github.com/swaywm/wlr-protocols/wiki [1]: https://github.com/WayfireWM/wayfire

Apologies; I misunderstood one of your links and thought sway had been renamed to wlroots.

To be clear the "adventure" I'm talking about is for replacing desktop environment niceties like the ones provided by gsettingsd and the tight integration provided between devices and the system management tools offered in full desktop blown environments like Gnome and KDE. I used i3 for six or seven years and it was never as nicely integrated as Gnome and I spent a LOT of time yak shaving to get it nice and keep it that way. Eventually I gave up. Gnome is really nice these days.

But maybe I missed the point of your original comment.

Post reply on HN