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The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

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Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#381

Post by dang »

ddevault wrote: post #152

Oh, look, more non-experts spreading misinformation about Wayland on HN. Must be Sunday. https://drewdevault.com/2019/02/10/Wayland-misconceptions-de...

Please don't take HN threads into flamewar. However wrong others may be, it's not ok to break the site guidelines by attacking them personally or impugning bad faith. If you have evidence of abuse, that's different—but the bar for 'evidence' obviously has to be higher than other commenters simply holding a different view.

Believe me I understand how frustrating it is when the community or a large subset of commenters seem to be repeatedly and perversely wrong about something. But that is the internet doing its thing. We all run into it on some topic that we know a lot about and/or feel strongly about. It can't be stopped or fixed. All you can do is share some of what you know, and yes, it's Sisyphean because the whole thing is stateless and has to be repeated every time. It won't stop because you ask it to or want it to; "it" is impersonal and doesn't have consciousness to begin with. One needs to accept that for one's own sanity (I hope it's clear that I'm talking from personal experience about this) and then patiently supply corrective information wherever you can and have the energy. Telling people to "fucking knock it off" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24889242) is only going to hurt both yourself and your cause. We also can't allow it in comments here for obvious reasons (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and we've been pleading with you for years already not to do it.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24885769.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#382

Post by zlynx »

nullc wrote: post #328
corty wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The design overview slides are their own critique: Wayland does almost nothing besides render buffer handling. Input? Applications job. Window decorations? Compositors job. Application talking to the Compositor? Somebody elses job. Clipboard? Maybe compositor or toolkit. Screenshots and remoting? Somebody elses job, but only after Wayland has bored the appropriate holes in its security model. This all leads to a ton…

> But the buffer handling is great, ... so long as you don't care about latency and don't mind a $3000 top of the line 64 core desktop feeling slightly slower than a machine from 20 years ago. :(

This depends on the user. Personally I never minded the extra frame of latency.

And some of the newer Gnome desktops have even removed that, thanks to some tricky work by one guy, as I understand it.

I may have misunderstood the explanation but it seems to involve some nice timing getting all of the application buffers swapped just before the main GPU screen buffer swap. This gives applications long enough to draw updates, for the most part, and gets all updates into the next screen buffer update instead of the update after that.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#383

Post by gpm »

ywei3410 wrote: post #371
ddevault wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Way…

> isn’t a criticism of Wayland.

Indeed, my comment is merely observing that wayland is both a protocol and a code base for all practical purposes, I'm trying to leave the criticism to other people ;)

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#384

Post by bitwize »

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.

As long as Red Hat continues to contribute to the community, and the majority of users consider their output superior to the alternatives, the Linux ecosystem will be dominated by Red Hat.

The entire Linux userland is pretty much a Red Hat thing at this point. Deal with it or find another OS.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#385

Post by emilsedgh »

How is this news?

The long term plan was to abandon X.org and move to Wayland.

Of course Wayland is still not there, but X.org is mature and stable enough to keep users happy for the time being, until the whole ecosystem catches up with Wayland.

As a matter of fact, abandoning X.org (except for security patches) would be a good strategy to incentivize the ecosystem not to build on top of it anymore.

Maybe X.org should do what request.js and momen.js did and call it done at some point.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#386

Post by martinsb »

Arnavion wrote: post #364
michaelmrose wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Re: black screen when using Teams from browser. Check you have environment variables set correctly: XDG_SESSION_TYPE=wayland and XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP=sway. I set up them in my .zshrc before starting sway. This helped me to fix the black screen issue. Hope it helps you too!

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#387

Post by CyberRabbi »

rjzzleep wrote: post #71
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.

I keep trying to use Wayland, but it never fully works. Everyone keeps saying how well the highdpi stuff works, but then it really only works for a subset of things. For the rest it's actually worse than Xorg. Multiscreen is Xorg is kinda mushy so I thought maybe Wayland fixes it, but no it doesn't. Wayland is now 12 years old and everything is still half-baked. It quotes an intel developer saying they don't want to…

I use sway with no issues and a much snappier Desktop with no screen tearing.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#388

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

tbr1 wrote: post #369
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The thing is, that's also been true since at least 2015 - the claim is that Xorg is dead and all the devs who were working on it are on Wayland now and it'll be working any day now. And that's been the claim for at least the 5 years that I've been following it. And in fairness, they have made progress in that time - by the time Wayland is as old as Xorg, it might even reach feature parity!

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#389

Post by pmontra »

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…

Anecdotally I run X11 on several Sun workstations (Motorola 680xx), a Dec Alpha (some RISC), HP X terminals, etc. All of them were reasonably fast or at least not any slower than the Windows and Mac boxes of the time (1990/95.)

We played videogames on them. Does anybody remember Netrek, Xtanks, and a F16 vs MIG flight simulator which I can't remember the name of?

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#390

Post by bitwize »

symlinkk wrote: post #359
p_l wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's evolution of the stance that started in early GNOME 2.x time, and crystallised with GNOME 3. Similar to how GNOME 3.8 was used to push systemd one everyone, similar to how they tried to push their own idea about input methods on everyone (since I don't use IBus, I don't know if they finally succeeded - fortunately UIM and XIM still work). "We know better" could be their motto.

And yet, they have built the most popular desktop environment for Linux. To me, GNOME (on Fedora) feels more polished and visually consistent than Windows 10, which is impressive considering the massive imbalance of resources between those two projects. Would that have been possible if they listened to the zealots online who complain if they don’t support every possible configuration under the sun? I don’t think so.

Being better than Windows 10 is a low bar to clear, and doing so doesn't make your software not shit.

Honestly, the current state of mainstream desktop environments -- open source or proprietary -- is pretty awful with the exception of perhaps KDE and little ones like XFCE and LXDE. It kind of makes me glad I didn't hop on the GNOME train in the late 90s -- I could see the awful coming even back then -- and just stuck with a bare WM.

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