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The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

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Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#421

Post by nullc »

sergeykish wrote: post #337
grandinj wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

> Do you remember fonts without anti-aliasing?

On a 200 dpi display the xfontsel display looks better. :)

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#422

Post by WesolyKubeczek »

What looks like "typical Linux geeks being geeks" with this situation:

1) the old, mostly working thing is being abandoned in favor of

2) that new thing which doesn't work in so many cases it's laughable, even after 11 years. How many years was it between the concept of X and a working release at Palo Alto?

Note that the new situation is so perfect for passing the buck from the windowing system to the compositors, and compositor folks are busy fighting feuds over which one another's private protocols or even public ones they are not going to support.

Oh, and the browsers. Chromium is making its first shy bumbling steps towards actually working on Wayland! A mere decade after!

I've heard it was so much easier to write Wayland clients, what could have happened?

Upd: This toxic development culture in a nutshell is exactly what this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24165445 is about. Well, we know it's not limited to Google.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#423

Post by zepearl »

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?

I agree. On one hand I can understand the need to shrink code, focus on the core functionality etc..., but on the other hand X has e.g. "xset" and "xbindkeys" which can be used for all X-desktops (or "Window Managers" or however they're called). With wayland each single desktop environment has to re-implement all that functionality => looks like wasted effort to me - the modularity (from the point of view of functionality) of X is lost in Wayland.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#424

Post by cycloptic »

pmoriarty wrote: post #405
cycloptic wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

Check the paragraphs below that where the developer asks for help either by donations or by pull requests.

I understand you probably don't want to do that because you're fine with xdotool for now, but the options are there should you need them.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#425

Post by sergeykish »

nullc wrote: post #421
sergeykish wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

> Do you remember fonts without anti-aliasing? On a 200 dpi display the xfontsel display looks better. :)

I believe you can disable anti aliasing and font hinting in Fontconfig.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#426

Post by josefx »

adwn wrote: post #187
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…

For what it's worth, whenever I tunneled X over a non-local SSH connection, it was slow as molasses. That's because almost all contemporary GUI applications render to a bitmap anyway. Those that actually use the outdated X vector graphics operations look like utter garbage compared to anything post-1995. Frankly, I'd rather my applications are at least somewhat aesthetically pleasing.

> Those that actually use the outdated X vector graphics operations look like utter garbage compared to anything post-1995

Modern UIs could do with being a bit more like 1995. Most of my work is performance sensitive so the first thing that goes are all the desktop effects that try to barf pointless rainbows and glitter in my direction.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#427

Post by Sebb767 »

noobermin wrote: post #409
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…

Trying out something new and fun is what you do in your free time. Working with decade-old legacy code is what you get paid huge amounts for and the reason you want to start from scratch in your free time.

I agree that this is not good overall, but it's going to be very hard to convince people to work on not-fun things for free. Some might see it more akin to volunteer work, but the amount of people willing to do this are far outnumbered by the people simply doing things for fun. Too be fair, it is at least pretty great in so far as that they're doing open-source work :)

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#428

Post by WesolyKubeczek »

cannedslime wrote: post #417
chrisseaton wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you really tell the difference? What's the latency? Are your eyes that sensitive?

I think our sight is all a little different. I can clearly see 50/60hz strobing in light when others can't. Back in the old CRT days I would get strained eye sight and nausea if I worked at monitors running below 85hz, unless it had long lasting phosphors like the old monochrome CRTs.

Good LCDs are static unless you're running a dvi-vga-displayport-vga-hdmi dongle monster where the pixels are inevitably shifting a bit every instant. What you're more likely to be seeing is PWM backlight flickering at you.

If it's indeed the LCD and not the backlight, pray tell us the model so we don't end up buying it.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#429

Post by jcelerier »

akvadrako wrote: post #276
jcelerier wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if you go to r/unixporn there are a ton of custom X11 WMs with very very small userbase - sometimes a dozen individuals. Screenshotting works with all of them.

WMs are not compositors. Compositors are more like a WM combined with X.org.

yes, that's the issue - writing a different desktop metaphor like the various tiling WMs was something that took as few as a couple hundred lines of C. Now with Wayland the person who wants to write his own desktop environment has to rewrite much more to get to something that doesn't even provide half of what Xorg gives.

Also, compositors are not mandatory anyways on X (I don't use one personnally and prefer it like that) so it's a weird remark to make.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#430

Post by wegs »

WesolyKubeczek wrote: post #422

What looks like "typical Linux geeks being geeks" with this situation: 1) the old, mostly working thing is being abandoned in favor of 2) that new thing which doesn't work in so many cases it's laughable, even after 11 years. How many years was it between the concept of X and a working release at Palo Alto? Note that the new situation is so perfect for passing the buck from the windowing system to the compositors, an…

Newer isn't better-designed. Unix was really well-designed, compared to so much of the modern stuff, and it does everything I need. Nineties Linux was a nice Unix. I wish we hadn't spent the past quarter-century turning it into nineties Windows, with layers upon layers upon layers of cruft.

I don't get why Wayland is slow, when Enlightenment was fast on machines with 32MB of RAM, a 3dfx Voodoo, a spinning HDD, and a 66MHz CPU...

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