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The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

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Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#331

Post by ddevault »

michaelmrose wrote: post #317
ddevault wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have not said that Wayland is above criticism. I have said that the criticism which has been raised thus far is largely invalid, and that the benchmark you pointed to is flawed. If you insist on using flawed benchmarks as evidence for the inferiority of a technology simply because no less-flawed benchmark exists to provide a counterpoint, you are wrong .

What percentage of Wayland users are on Gnome? It seems likely to me that Gnome is likely to be 90-99% of peoples experience with Wayland.

So what? What percentage of Wayland desktops are on Linux? Do comments on Wayland generalize to comments on Linux? What percentage of Linux installations are on x86_64? Do comments about Linux generalize to x86_64?

No, obviously they don't. So, knock it off.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#332

Post by diffeomorphism »

formerly_proven wrote: post #147
kriive wrote: post #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 Wa…

> 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?!

Why do you think it needs any of that? For that matter why do you think windows, mac, android, chromeOS etc. all need "explicit configuration"? They all simply set a reasonable default scale and then give you an easy way to pick a different one if you want.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#333

Post by ironmagma »

SweetestRug wrote: post #237
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 have to wonder if this is distribution dependent? On Manjaro my experience with Wayland has been fantastic. I cannot perceive any speed differences vs X.org; Wayland just flies. It would be interesting to poll users and see just what factors are contributing to speed issues. GPU? CPU? Distribution? Wlroots vs Gnome? etc. Learning more about what users experience could be helpful in making W…

This is a great idea. So many Linux issues go undiagnosed because the response is so often “it works fine for me, on my .”

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#334

Post by cycloptic »

bigbubba wrote: post #320
cycloptic wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would it take for something not to qualify as being "unreasonably obstructionist" to you? If there's an open source desktop project that has infinite resources to redesign and rewrite everything at will at a moment's notice, then please let me know. I'll gladly use it. Hell, I'll sign up as a developer.

Have GNOME devs yet acknowledged that XFCE exists? In one now infamous exchange with Transmission developers a GNOME dev claimed that he didn't even know what XFCE was and, furthermore, that cross platform applications like Transmission should choose whether they would be "GNOME apps or XFCE apps", suggesting that they can't be both. The context of this exchange was that GNOME developer asking that a feature be remov…

I had to dig up the comment you're talking about but just to put this in perspective: You are forming your current opinion about entire communities based on one comment made by one developer 10 years ago. I'm fascinated by all this open source that's out there but if you told me that a developer had to know every single open source desktop out there in order to contribute to one of them then I can't really get behind that. It's very hard to keep track of what everyone's doing all the time.

But in any case I don't understand what is contentious about that. Some pieces are shared between GNOME and XFCE, but a lot of pieces are different and applications have always needed to choose. If they weren't trying to be different they wouldn't have made a separate desktop environment with their own separate libxfce libraries and components. (To GNOME's credit, they have gotten rid of most of the "libgnome" things since then, but now an application that wants to speak to certain GNOME-specific pieces is usually expected to use their private dbus protocols, things that XFCE would never implement anyway)

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#335

Post by nullc »

flavor8 wrote: post #15
nlayers wrote: 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.

So for example, I applied updates to a set of fedora systems recently.

The updates to network manager decided to change network interface names from looking like enP51p1s0f0 to enP51p1s0f0np0. The rename broke the (also networkmanager) channel bonding configuration, resulting in them being unreachable and requiring a physical visit to get them back online.

Networkmanager adds a lot of automagic, but outside of simple widely used configurations ("laptop with wifi") it causes unpredictable and unreliable behaviour.

I especially like the standard fedora server install where the nics present during the install all get DHCP enabled on them, but only those nics. So if you move a network card to another PCI slot after the install it will mysteriously not work. ... I see nothing wrong with not automatically bringing up interfaces on a server, but mysteriously bringing up some and not others makes for mystifying and difficult to diagnose issues that no one seems to know how to fix.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#336

Post by Arnavion »

aorth wrote: post #318
linuxdaemon wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am forced to use ms teams for work. Every time I attempted to share my desktop, teams would crash. I thought it was just because teams sucks. As it turns out, it seems to be that running under wayland was actually causing it. Everything works fine under x.org. After I was running with x.org for a couple days, I realized there are quite a few little oddities that I just lived with and didn't realize it was because w…

Teams is an Electron app (like Skype, Signal, VS Code, Atom, etc), which is based on Chromium. Chromium doesn't have Wayland support yet so those run via XWayland. Things should get better once Chromium supports Wayland properly (soon, as it finally entered beta in 2020-09): https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Chrome-8...

Electron running on Wayland natively isn't relevant to its ability to screen-share. Even if it were running on Wayland it wouldn't be able to screen-share just based on that alone, because having a Wayland window doesn't have anything to do with screen sharing.

Native applications these days have the option to use pipewire and xdg-desktop-portal for screen-sharing, and it doesn't matter whether they use that from a Wayland window or an Xwayland window. Both Firefox (under Wayland) and Chromium (under Xwayland) use this method today.

Unfortunately Teams does not use that method and instead calls an X function directly, which crashes, as I wrote in the sibling comment.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#337

Post by sergeykish »

grandinj wrote: post #325
sergeykish wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fedora switched to Wayland, that is unfortunate for X.Org users but basically it means someone stopped fixing issues. You either fix them yourself and contribute back if possible. Or switch to distribution where someone still fixes these issues. I've investigated X.Org caused bug just for two days and since then totally support Wayland development. What we have today is not healthy.

We used to have a well-functioning display server that was robust and battle-tested. The wayland people replaced that with a half-baked solution because they insisted on boiling the ocean - replacing the entire thing in one go, instead of working piecemeal (which the X protocol was explicitly designed to allow). Which is a great pity, because now the day of the Linux Desktop is even further off.

X.Org people replaced it with Wayland. Are you going to maintain X.Org? Who is going to maintain it? Maybe you are going to hire developers to preserve purity?

> instead of working piecemeal

That's exactly what happened. Do you remember fonts without anti-aliasing? Run xfontsel, that's X11 fonts rendering. Freetype, Fontconfig, Cairo, Pango, HarfBuzz work on client side and push pixels to X Server. Entire rendering model changed, X.Org become compositor. They've faced limits, they've implemented DRI, DRI2 [1].

Now developers decided to make good compositor. And they've done it without disturbing X11 ecosystem, with clean way to port toolkits. Window Managers can't be ported but they can be reimplemented, just look how many compositors people built [2]. It is a miracle.

Linux future is bright. Video drivers moved from X Server to kernel, display configuration parts replaced by KMS, we've got modern font rendering, text shaping, we've got open source AMD GPU driver!

I still use Intel GPU, X.Org and xmonad, but the times they are a changing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_Rendering_Infrastructur...

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

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#338

Post by bigbubba »

vetinari wrote: post #77
willtim wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't true. It was never as good as Intel's Connman, which was designed to be modular from the start. NetworkManager started out as a UI app and then was evolved into what it is now. It's still not as fast as connecting to WiFi as Connman. I guess it was adopted instead of Connman because RedHat.

NM doesn't connect to wifi by itself, it uses wpa supplicant for that. If something is slow, it is wpa supplicant. Fortunately, nm backends are modular and you can use Intel's iwd instead.

A while ago, maybe about a year ago, after upgrading Debian I discovered that I was no longer able to connect to my 5GHz wifi network, but could connect to 2.4GHz networks. Switching from NM to wicd fixed the problem. Same kernel, same wifi card and driver, same wifi AP with the same configuration. As baffling as it seems, getting rid of NM was the only thing I had to do, or could do, to make it work again. NM is now dead to me.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#339

Post by SweetestRug »

linuxdaemon wrote: post #290
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…

I am forced to use ms teams for work. Every time I attempted to share my desktop, teams would crash. I thought it was just because teams sucks. As it turns out, it seems to be that running under wayland was actually causing it. Everything works fine under x.org. After I was running with x.org for a couple days, I realized there are quite a few little oddities that I just lived with and didn't realize it was because w…

I had the exact same problem - as others have already said, its a problem with electron not having Wayland support. I solved it in two different ways:

- An unofficial Teams app (https://github.com/IsmaelMartinez/teams-for-linux) which works great - screen sharing works without problems, no crashing, and native notifications!.

- Use teams in qutebrowser: the dev (The-Compiler) added support for screensharing and it works great. Just like the unofficial app above, it also has native notifications, not the weird popup notifications of the official app.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#340

Post by bigbubba »

cycloptic wrote: post #334
bigbubba wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have GNOME devs yet acknowledged that XFCE exists? In one now infamous exchange with Transmission developers a GNOME dev claimed that he didn't even know what XFCE was and, furthermore, that cross platform applications like Transmission should choose whether they would be "GNOME apps or XFCE apps", suggesting that they can't be both. The context of this exchange was that GNOME developer asking that a feature be remov…

I had to dig up the comment you're talking about but just to put this in perspective: You are forming your current opinion about entire communities based on one comment made by one developer 10 years ago. I'm fascinated by all this open source that's out there but if you told me that a developer had to know every single open source desktop out there in order to contribute to one of them then I can't really get behind…

> You are forming your current opinion about entire communities based on one comment made by one developer 10 years ago

Incorrect. I am using a single example to illustrate a trend. A single example to illustrate what "unreasonably obstructionist" looks like. That particular incident made everybody roll their eyes but it hardly surprised anybody because GNOME has earned this reputation. Even back then nobody was particularly surprised by the GNOME arrogance, and I've not seen this change.

(Also, maybe I'm getting old but 10 years ago really isn't that long ago.)

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