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The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

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Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#361

Post by ywei3410 »

mort96 wrote: post #293
ywei3410 wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I believe you misread my comment; I said that the full-screen, minimize, re-size isn't part of the server-side decoration extension, but was part of a more basic xdg_shell protocol through the configure event.

I was objecting to the fact that you said that windows did not have this capability without the server-side extensions, whereas I think they can be through configure. I did not dispute whether sway had server-side decorations or not.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#362

Post by cycloptic »

bigbubba wrote: post #340
cycloptic wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 part…

Please don't use this kind of hyperbole. It's really not an interesting conversation when it leads into platitudes like "everybody did this" and "nobody did that" and "an entire group of people is arrogant and obstructionist" which neither of us have any way of proving or disproving. I wish this open-source-holy-war type of comment was not so common on Reddit and HN, it's about as constructive as the endless Emacs and Vim flame wars.

If you're trying to illustrate the trend that GNOME and XFCE (and KDE, and LXQT, and MATE, and Budgie, and Mint...) all have different goals and ideas for how applications should behave then yes, I would say that much is obvious by now, and it has only gotten more obvious over the last few years. If you have a technical solution to this then I'd love to hear it, but aside from that I don't care to bicker about whose fault it is that your applications broke, because honestly no answer is going to pleasing for you to hear. Unless I'm mistaken then we aren't paying customers, this is all just random no-warranty open source and there's no support hotline that's going to care about what's broken.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#363

Post by Spivak »

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?

There’s nothing from someone implementing a single extensible compositor that everyone standardizes to build their DE. It’s the same as Xorg and X11.

Right now there’s a bunch of competing compositors with different use-cases but nothing says it has to be true forever.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#364

Post by Arnavion »

michaelmrose wrote: post #357
Arnavion wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, Teams uses a function that is unsupported by Xwayland (XGetImage, if I remember the backtrace correctly), so it crashes. I worked around it with a rather convoluted setup that involves running Xephyr under Xwayland, then running Teams under Xephyr (via setting `DISPLAY`), and running vncviewer under Xephyr connected to a VNC server (wayvnc) sharing my screen on the parent wayland instance. Then I tell Teams to s…

I salute your creativity and tenacity but what the actual fuck the need for a rube goldberg setup in order to make an application work is ... unfortunate. If I did such a thing I would take one last look to take pride in my work before deleting the whole affair and installing an OS that isn't broken.

Well, I knew what I was signing up for when I decided to switch from X to Wayland, so I'm personally okay with it. It's the same with doing anything that isn't mainstream, such as my decision to use Linux in a workplace where a lot of stuff is Windows-first, and sometimes Windows-only. The best thing the iPhone did to the world was to make web applications more popular, and as long as Safari lags on web standards it pushes websites to not use Chromium-only features and give Firefox users like me a chance.

Anyway, a less convoluted setup might be to use the browser version of Teams in a browser where it allows you to screen-share, ie Chromium and not Firefox. IIRC when I tried it a few months ago people on the call said they could only see me broadcasting a black screen, but I know the browser is fine so it had to have been a Teams issue. Maybe it's fixed now.

Hopefully these applications will catch up soon. As another example, Zoom's native Electron application uses a GNOME-specific method of screen-sharing which doesn't work in non-GNOME DEs, but I've heard the browser version works fine.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#365

Post by getfactsright »

HeadsUpHigh wrote: post #214
snazz wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/...

This is sway, i3 on wayland, a tilling window manager. Not some commercial piece of software that has to target the lowest common denominator to survive in the market. It's meant so that you configure it and it's very configurable. So it doesn't any defaults bar what's needed to launch the manager. The rest is up to you.

Never mind this,

Sway already detects hidpi displays based on a heuristic from EDID info and chooses an appropriate scale factor.

https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/1800

8, now 9, comments in a subthread because no one could bother to validate assumptions or do a Google search.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#366

Post by forgotmypw17 »

The beauty of the software world is that "abandonware" can live on for decades.

Let the impatient get on with beta-testing today's developments, and I'll get around to using them 20 years from now, when only the good stuff remains.

I still do most of my writing and publishing work from Windows 95 and Me, and I love it, because everything is a solved problem, and no new patches to break things are coming out.

Keeping it within NAT and VM is plenty secure enough for my purposes, and IE6 is plenty enough modern for me.

At least I can still read my config files.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#367

Post by forgotmypw17 »

nullc wrote: post #341
Avamander wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love how people say that an unified method of taking screenshots, screen streaming, screen recording and performance in general is legacy baggage.

A lot of this is due to a design culture that seems common around the Gnome project. Victims of this mimetic disease have caught on to the idea that 80% of usage needs 20% of the features. This might well be true in a literal sense, but it ignores that 99% of the users need one or two items from the remaining 80% of the features and its just a different one or two items for each user. The result is something that isn…

Yeah, as soon as I saw Unity, I jumped ship from Gnome, and soon after, Debian.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#368

Post by Spivak »

openfuture wrote: post #206

Okay so Wayland is a no go and X.org is too crufty to attract contributors.... Where is the "rewrite it in rust" crowd when you need it? :) The X11 protocol is the surface you need to maintain but swapping the internals should be do-able. Maybe we should have some call to action or reverse-auction or something. I'd love to support a viable path forward (I feel this effort would be a bit like neovim). Personally I thi…

The problem is that if you were going to rewrite a display server from scratch you would probably want to implement Wayland over X11. X11 is barely a protocol anymore because Xorg is so dominant, you either do what Xorg does bug-for-bug and with all the extensions or apps will break.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#369

Post by tbr1 »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #222
jasoneckert wrote: post #104

I'm all for Wayland - I agree with its direction and focus. However, Wayland will take a long time to reach the maturity that X.org has had for decades, including remote support. As a result, having both X.org and Wayland available on your disto is probably going to be the norm (and should be the norm) for a while. X.org is less "abandonware" and more "transitionware" in my opinion.

> Wayland will take a long time to reach the maturity that X.org has had for decades Xorg (the server) is from 2004 (16 years ago), the X Consortium was founded in 1988, and Wikipedia puts X11 itself at 1984 (36 years ago). Wayland's initial release was 2008 (12 years ago). Wayland is either 3/4ths the age of Xorg, or 1/3rd the age of X11 - bluntly, if they don't have their act together now, why should I expect them…

Developers willing/able to work on X11/Wayland plumbing are a (very) finite number. A single developer can have a large impact. With more of them switching their primary efforts to Wayland, the past few years have seen large improvements in the landscape, and this trend is bound to continue.

Granted, there are rough edges, and I wouldn't claim any Wayland compositor is as polished as an X11 one -- but we're not that far off, and for many people the benefits of running a Wayland session today outweigh the cons.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#370

Post by JoshTriplett »

ddevault wrote: post #163
verroq wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I only really care about performance and Wayland hasn’t been very convincing [0] with no discernible improvement over X11. [0] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GNOME-Xo...

GNOME is not a good representative of Wayland. Wayland is just a protocol - it's up to the compositors to have good performance to distinguish it from Xorg, and GNOME does not do well in this regard. Other compositors, particularly wlroots, enjoy excellent performance. Wayland also opens the door to many performance improvements which are not possible on Xorg, and which take advantage of newer GPU features, especiall…

Drew, if someone posted a comment saying "there's this Linux feature that's incredibly slow on x86-64", it wouldn't be a refutation to say "it's fast on RISC-V". That would rightfully just produce a response of "that's nice for you, it's still slow on x86-64 and that's what I'm using, so from my perspective the feature is slow in an environment many people use".

If you want this to stop, make GNOME's performance better in the ways you envision, because it is the experience most Linux users get. (Quite a lot of work has been going into GNOME Wayland performance lately.) Arguments about Wayland protocol feature politics don't necessarily make the out-of-the-box experience worse; for many people it's a good "Just Works" experience. Stop telling people they need to switch desktop environments to get a better experience; some fraction of people will go "if I have to switch, I'll switch back to Windows/macOS/etc". A vanishingly small fraction of people will go "oh, sure, I should switch to a different window manager and environment that isn't what I'm used to and doesn't necessarily have the integration I'm used to, and switch my apps to match too; this makes me happy", and those people know who they are already.

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