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The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

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Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#401

Post by ddevault »

dang wrote: post #381
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…

> we've been pleading with you for years already not to do it.

The same years during which you've done nothing to prevent the spread of seditious misinformation on Hacker News. If you were better moderators I might take your guidelines more seriously.

My thread with counter-arguments is detached and languishing at the bottom of the page, meanwhile all of the misinformation dominates the conversation comfortably from the top. This is a gross failure of the moderation on HN. Are you a human script, enforcing the guidelines with blinders on? Or are you a moderator, helping to craft thoughtful and good faith discussions, and to combat misinformation and propaganda?

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#402

Post by pengaru »

blitblitblit wrote: post #197

So can we revive any of these also abandoned alternatives? * Tiny X (Still Xorg just barebones and faster) - https://github.com/tinycorelinux/tinyx * Xynth - https://github.com/alperakcan/xynth * Nano-X / MicroWindows - http://microwindows.org/ (Seems still active? Just needs some modern GUI ports.) * DirectFB (Needs modern driver support) - https://web.archive.org/web/20120118003245/http://www.direct... * SVGALib (N…

You left out GGI/KGI.

But most of this stuff is basically irrelevant in a post-KMS/DRM linux world.

So few apps were ever written targeting directfb and libggi it's as if they never existed.

SVGAlib apps frequently performed direct hardware access requiring root and disrupting graphics hardware state WRT other graphical apps like X or fb. Unfortunately we have a significant collection of old demos and games targeting SVGAlib, but at this point it's probably best to just run them in a virtualized linux environment lacking any graphics drivers so SVGAlib can run the show on a faked VGA. For such apps where source is available, it's better to just port to something like SDL.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#403

Post by JoshTriplett »

folmar wrote: post #399
flavor8 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's your problem with NetworkManager? It's generally good, and certainly much better than what came before.

If you are cable-connected and on the edge of your wifi range it will periodically drop your cable connection to check if wifi is good. Not great. Connecting to wifi takes way longer than without it. Simple dhcpcd for ethernet + wpa_supplicant with handcoded config work way better.

> it will periodically drop your cable connection to check if wifi is good

I don't know when you encountered that behavior, but NetworkManager has for a long time handled wired and wireless as two independent connections; it just sets routing priority to prefer wired if available. I believe you that you observed that behavior, but to the best of my knowledge this does not match any current behavior of NM.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#404

Post by bigbubba »

cycloptic wrote: post #362
bigbubba wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 an…

Transmission never broke. GNOME devs requested that Transmission break itself on non-GNOME platforms. Falling back on 'well you're not paying anything' really does nothing to dispel the perception that GNOME devs don't play nice with others. If anything, it cements it.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#405

Post by pmoriarty »

cycloptic wrote: post #249
nsajko wrote: post #132

If Wayland is the future, the future is grim. People often complain that Wayland is taking a long time to catch up to X11, but that actually stems from a deeper issue: Wayland has a horrible design, for an X11 replacement, a design that leads to massive fragmentation issues across the graphical part of the Linux ecosystem. Implementing a Wayland compositor requires much more effort than implementing an X11 window man…

Check ydotool for an xdotool replacement: https://github.com/ReimuNotMoe/ydotool The lack of a common screenshot protocol isn't related to security. The desktops just haven't been able to agree on a common protocol (yet?)

ydotool only supports a tiny fraction of xdotool's features.

...and that's unlikely to improve much any time soon, since, according to ydotool's README:

"Since Jun, 2019, I have little time to maintain this project"

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#406

Post by Const-me »

Flex247A wrote: post #93
goatinaboat wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What could be the reason behind this? Asking as a noob.

Technically what Wayland is doing, using 3D GPU for everything, is the best way forward. Windows is using it since Vista. When done right, gradients mentioned in other comments are free, GPUs have hardware to interpolate values (such as colors) across vertices of triangle, for free. Many other effects are either free or very cheap.

Engineering-wise it's really hard.

Microsoft reworked GPU driver model introducing WDDM. They invented a new user-facing API for that, introducing Direct3D 10. They did that in close collaboration with all 3 GPU vendors. They made user-mode components like desktop compositor itself, dwm.exe, and higher-level libraries to benefit from all that stuff. Initially they were optional things like WPF, Direct2D, DirectWrite, then with Win8 they introduced WinRT later rebranded to UWP. That one is no longer optional and is the only practical way to render "hello world, GUI edition" in modern Windows (possible to do with DirectWrite or legacy GDI but neither of them is practical).

The problem "render nice high-resolution graphics, fast" affects everything, the entire stack. Modern Linux has decent kernel infrastructure (DRM/KMS), but even so, remaining challenges are hard. Linux has less luck with user-facing GPU APIs (Vulkan is not yet universally available, neither is GLES3+ or OpenGL 4.3+). For some GPUs, quality of drivers is less than ideal. OS maintainers oppose stabilizing kernel ABI for drivers. There's no high level GPU-centric graphics libraries, I tried once with moderate success https://github.com/Const-me/Vrmac but that only supports one specific Debian Linux on one specific computer which happens to support GLES 3.1, and some important features are missing e.g. no gradient brushes or stroked pens.

I don't see any large party interested in making that happen. At least not for desktop Linux. Valve started to do relevant things when they thought Windows 10 is going to kill their Steam business model, then it became apparent Microsoft won't make Win10 into an iOS-style walled garden, and they no longer have much motivation.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#407

Post by josefx »

kllrnohj wrote: post #238
mrob wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm against Wayland because it forces compositing on all windowed applications. I'll stay on Xorg as long as possible because I'm not willing to sacrifice latency for no tearing.

All your stuff is already composited, and if done well it doesn't add much latency at all. You're still paying it in X, just badly, and with none of the upsides (eg, no tearing). Even if you're trying to avoid a compositor, none of the UI toolkits are participating in that nonsense.

KDE seems to have a flag to turn of the compositor, which seems to result in no tearing.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#408

Post by a1369209993 »

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.

And yet, Microsoft has built the most popular desktop 'operating system'.

We've seen, again and again, that popularity has absolutely nothing to do with technical merit or even lack of overt user-hostility.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#409

Post by noobermin »

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.

May be it's time for people to be against new things.

Open source I know is often a work of love, but it's a bit painful that everyone is chasing after new things instead of keeping things that already work working. It's like how there are dozens of js frameworks that have thousands of contributors whereas openssl had one which lead to the infamous heartbleed bug. We need to talk about how the culture of open source is broken in this regard and figure out how to fix it.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#410

Post by dang »

ddevault wrote: post #401
dang wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> we've been pleading with you for years already not to do it. The same years during which you've done nothing to prevent the spread of seditious misinformation on Hacker News. If you were better moderators I might take your guidelines more seriously. My thread with counter-arguments is detached and languishing at the bottom of the page, meanwhile all of the misinformation dominates the conversation comfortably from…

Detaching flamewars so that they languish at the bottom of the page is standard HN moderation and the reason we do it should be obvious. If you don't want that to happen, nothing is easier to avoid (from a moderation point of view): simply provide corrective information respectfully. Of course that is not so easy from a personal frustration point of view—that is something every HN user (certainly including me) has to work at.

I definitely don't want to penalize your counterarguments, but if you can't or won't decouple them from guidelines-breakage, what choice do we have? We do just the same with users and threads that are arguing the opposite.

There are two very different issues here: (1) Wayland; (2) protecting the commons. Important as the first one is, the second has to take precedence because it affects every topic, every thread, and the survival of the community.

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