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The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

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Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#371

Post by ywei3410 »

ddevault wrote: post #351
gpm wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wayland is both a code base and a protocol unless you are being unreasonably technical about terminology (distinguishing between wayland and libwayland) to the point where you are deceiving casual readers. It is for all practical intents not possible to implement a useful wayland compositor without relying on libwayland, because mesa links to libwayland and expects to be passed pointers to data structures defined in…

Another obsolete "fact" about Wayland which hasn't been true since 2015. Which is all the anti-Wayland propegandists seem to be able to come up with. This was addressed by the linux-dmabuf protocol extension (which also works on *BSD, despite the name). The mesa route has been deprecated for years.

I do believe that the parent comment was unfair; it is possible to implement a compositor without libwayland — but I do think that there is some truth in that the C structures are the de-facto protocol from the client-side. For example graphics drivers seem to expect wl_display and wl_surface [1] rather than, say expecting the object id.

It’s not as though this is different under X though and isn’t a criticism of Wayland.

[1] https://www.khronos.org/registry/vulkan/specs/1.2-extensions...

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#372

Post by ddevault »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #370
ddevault wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bet…

"there's this Linux feature that's incredibly slow on x86-64"

This isn't the appropriate comparison. What they said is "x86-64 is incredibly slow", and then when you teased them for details, what they meant was "this Linux feature is incredibly slow on x86-64". To which the answer isn't "it's fast on RISC-V", but rather, "that's a problem with Linux, not x86-64".

If you have a beef with GNOME, then bring it to GNOME. Don't pin it on a tangentally related technology which bears none of the fault, and which has had hundreds of thousands of hours of work invested in it by volunteers all to make something nice for you to use.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#373

Post by hyperman1 »

ddevault wrote: post #329
marcosdumay wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are they optional¹ and are there alternatives to them? If the answer is yes, then there is a problem. 1 - I imagine "optional" can be the wrong word, maybe the correct is "universally adopted".

Yes, they're optional, and no, they're not universally adopted, but this doesn't damn Wayland . An example of where the screenshot protocol isn't supported (and this is fine) is where Wayland is used as the driver for the dashboard display in a vehicle (which is one of the major places where Wayland adoption is strong in industry). Wayland is designed to accomodate a broader variety of use-cases than X11: it's not ju…

From the linux-on-the-desktop perspective, I have the impression there are 2 major groups today: Red hat, going all in on both gnome and wayland, or most others on X11. So gnome having an objection to these basically means wayland does not have them. All the other wayland clients together are mostly background noise.

Stated from a programmer perspective, what I can count on being available. What is the baseline?

Desktop linux is a mess compared to windows or OSX, with gnome/KDE as major frameworks, and a ton of minor but still relevant frameworks. The one thing they have in common, the one thing that makes GUI applications work more or less together is X11. Wayland causes a split here: yet another painfull technology reset that will probably cost us a decade before everyone has migrated. Now if wayland itself is fractured between its major player and everybody else, there is a 3-way split.

It seems X11 will die, Gnome as 800 pound gorilla will dictate the technological baseline, hence end users will lose basic functionality after suffering trough wayland's maturisation.

I can understand your frustration. You've probably built something great, X11 seems a dead end, and I presume you can't do much about Gnome. But I'll either have to live with this mess or run back to windows. I've dealt with pulseaudio and systemd, and both were arrogant low-quality projects that took years to stabilize back to their original levels. I can live without beeps on my desktop for a week, or the occasional service weirding out. I can't live with a usable UI.

Maybe you deal with climate change conservatives by demonstrating they still can get their groceries without their CO2 spewing SUV.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#375

Post by tutfbhuf »

blibble wrote: post #346
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. as a counterpoint: my sway (Wayland) system is the first one I've ever had where I can watch youtube, or vlc/mpv at 60fps without flickering, dropping frames or tearing I've used nvidia and radeon cards, plus intel onboard in this machine with X and none of them allowed all of the above the display server also remains responsive even if one client starts going nuts generally sway is consider…

> first one I've ever had where I can watch youtube, or vlc/mpv at 60fps without flickering, dropping frames or tearing

Have you tried Picom?

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Picom

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#376

Post by tbr1 »

Arnavion wrote: post #301
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…

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…

The v4l2 trick "works", but usually the application will use a lossy video codec optimized for faces, not screens. wf-recorder to v4l2 as a poor-man's screenshare to Discord ends in a blurry mess. YMMV with Teams.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#377

Post by snazz »

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.

Configurability is great, but that isn't an excuse for having poor defaults. A child comment to yours mentions that Sway now uses a heuristic to find a "reasonable" default scaling factor, so it appears that Sway currently does the right thing.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#378

Post by [deleted] »

ddevault wrote: post #351
gpm wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wayland is both a code base and a protocol unless you are being unreasonably technical about terminology (distinguishing between wayland and libwayland) to the point where you are deceiving casual readers. It is for all practical intents not possible to implement a useful wayland compositor without relying on libwayland, because mesa links to libwayland and expects to be passed pointers to data structures defined in…

Another obsolete "fact" about Wayland which hasn't been true since 2015. Which is all the anti-Wayland propegandists seem to be able to come up with. This was addressed by the linux-dmabuf protocol extension (which also works on *BSD, despite the name). The mesa route has been deprecated for years.

[deleted]

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#379

Post by flyinghamster »

goatinaboat wrote: post #83
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 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…

I think much of the problem is that today's systems have vast amounts of eye candy that was all but nonexistent back in the 80s and 90s. X terminals and 486s don't have the resources to throwing fancy visual effects on the screen, and sometimes might not even be color displays.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#380

Post by tutfbhuf »

DyslexicAtheist wrote: post #241
peterangular wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 us…

Maybe someone could try to install Wayland on an old device, where latest Xorg works fast, and see if Wayland also does. Comparison video would be nice.
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