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The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

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Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#291

Post by weare138 »

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.

This. I'm not necessarily against moving to Wayland but the display server and compositor is a really important component and Wayland has been a long time coming, 12 years now to be exact. Either we need a clear path to Wayland or just keep maintaining Xorg.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#292

Post by Keyframe »

vincnetas wrote: post #131
Keyframe wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Repos could really have exactly that. A dead man's switch that asks you every, I don't know, three.to six months - via email even - "you good for this repo still?". You answer with a click "yup" and that's it - a signal on a repo on github or whatever that says "still alive". Otherwise "uh oh - we need help" and then a mechanism there to immediately offer alternative forks with a good enough signal "strength". It's l…

But someone has to volunteer to implement this process. Do you have time for that?

On github? I can't do that. Process has to be as frictionless as possible - hence not in a repo in files itself. A simple email with a button, not to bother maintainers too much / at all.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#293

Post by mort96 »

ywei3410 wrote: post #283
mort96 wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you just create a Wayland window, GNOME will draw _only_ that window, with no decorations. The window can't be moved, minimized, resized, etc. because there's no decorations. The window's content shows up, but that's it.

I don't believe that's correct. The move, minimize, full-screen and resize seems to be part of the xdg_shell protocol (which has no extra methods for decorations and is only for window roles etc...) under the configure event [1]. I suspect that's how the tiling window managers like sway do it without extra server-side decorations. Possibly this is a subtle distinction, but I do think it matters. [1] https://github.co…

Sway does server-side decorations. It draws window borders and a title bar for you, and handles the drag events in the title bar and borders for you.

Go ahead and make a basic Wayland window in GNOME. Compare the user experience to KDE or Sway.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#294

Post by mort96 »

cycloptic wrote: post #288
mort96 wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know, and that's kind of what I'm complaining about. There's no reason it couldn't support SSDs.

I was trying to be clear here: There is a reason and it's that it's not really possible architecturally for them to support SSDs in Wayland; doing so would require a redesign of significant parts of the compositor's code. I'm sorry if that was misunderstood. If you're trying to say they should have anticipated this and made a different architectural decision years ago, maybe that's true, but that also offers no pract…

I am trying to say that maybe they should have made the architectural decisions which wouldn't prevent non-GTK applications from working in GNOME. That's all.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#296

Post by p_l »

ATsch wrote: post #259
p_l wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bett…

> And X.Org's driver architecture could be replaced completely (in fact, it could be made to run on the same stack as Wayland) Many distros do this already. Both for graphics drivers (xf86-video-modesetting) and input drivers (xorg-input-libinput)

There's more to it - X.Org is based on lowest-common-denominator code from early days of X11, and the internal driver system despite upgrades is a bit lacking.

There's glamor, but AFAIK it's not as tested as it should, and is still shoehorned into old model.

An example of not following the old model is Xsgi, which was (hw) compositing and quite ingenious in many ways.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#297

Post by remexre »

I'm kinda annoyed this is the case before the GBM/EGLStreams argument got resolved...

I've done some programming against GBM directly (wanted an OpenGL ES application to be in a "kiosk mode," didn't want to have to install X / a Wayland compositor + configure it), and the whole DRM+GBM stack is kinda _terrible_. Generously, one could call it barely documented; the majority of the useful and correct documentation I found was on Mesa contributors' blogs, and there were still edge cases in the API that were getting ironed out in the 5.9 kernel release.

I haven't needed to write against EGLStreams, but I might give it a try to see if it's as much of a pain or not; from the 1-page overview on the nvidia docs, I suspect not -- it sounds quite similar to the VK_KHR_swapchain extension.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#298

Post by bigbubba »

solarkraft wrote: post #153
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 think you don't mean that the Wayland protocol forces slowness but that the compositor you used was slow. The one I use is fast. > And if you don't like the window decorations (say, they take up too much screen space) your choices are suck it up, or if you're lucky and willing to spend a bunch of time reconfigure every different toolkit your apps use. No, there are protocols to negotiate w…

> The [compositor] I use is fast. [...] I've been happy with a wlroots based one (Wayfire) for a few months

wlroots performed very poorly on my i5-3427U with 4000 series iGPU. Very poorly. I ended up using neither X nor Wayland and instead having mpv render straight to the frame buffer (--vo=gpu --gpu-context=drm)

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#299

Post by solarkraft »

vageli wrote: post #167
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.

> 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. Which compositor do you use?

I use Wayfire [0], a customizable compositor based on wlroots, the same base as sway. It's quite involved and not absolutely perfect yet, but it has some features I haven't yet seen on other DEs like being able to swipe horizontally on your touchpad to smoothly switch workspaces (following your fingers) and the satisfaction of having it properly configured is pretty high.

There have been 3 issues I've had regarding it, 2 I'd call minor:

- I haven't found a way to rearrange external displays, though it is theoretically supported

- After a bug in my TV switching to the lowest possible resolution through switching the input in home assistant it would not work with 4K again until after a complete reboot (so it may not even be a wlroots issue)

- XWayland apps are unresponsive in the upper half of the second screen (4K at 1x scaling)

Using mostly native Wayland apps neither of these have been deal breakers for me. Something under-discussed is that virtual desktops are per-screen, which I find quite cool.

So that's my adventure with Wayfire, but I would assume that Gnome and KDE have perfected multi-screen usage on and off of Wayland by now.

[0]: https://wayfire.org/

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#300

Post by sergeykish »

pjmlp wrote: post #287
sergeykish wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Open source gives you freedom to fix it, to share fix, to hire to fix. I see it as another proof that people who depend on the infrastructure do not want to contribute. They would better whine and critique.

A freedom that a large majority ignores, because they only see it as free beer.

I've submitted Daniel Stone "The real story behind Wayland and X (2013)", checked past submissions, there is yours 6 years ago.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24888454

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