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The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

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Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#431

Post by cycloptic »

bigbubba wrote: post #404
cycloptic wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If nothing broke then I don't see what the problem is. And, your assertion doesn't even seem to be correct. I re-read the bug and it's one GNOME developer suggesting for changes to be made only in GNOME 3, because support for a particular feature was deprecated upstream. The developer is apologetic and later goes on to make suggestions about what can be done in Ubuntu and XFCE. I see nothing there about "GNOME devs requesting that Transmission break itself." https://trac.transmissionbt.com/ticket/3685

I'm not trying to dispel any perceptions either, if you have a deep seated belief that GNOME (or XFCE, or anything really) are "not playing nice" because they removed features from upstream, there's nothing I can really say to you to change that view. If you want to challenge your own perceptions, I'd suggest you start developing a new open source desktop and application platform yourself over a period of many years just to see how much work it is, and how it's practically impossible to support everything that every app developer asks for when none of them are paying you a cent.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#432

Post by jcelerier »

akvadrako wrote: post #278
jcelerier wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Very few features are part of the core Wayland protocol; but that is the main critique. Most of the things not being part of core means that there is a lot more fragmentation of the linux desktop than there was with X, which is unilaterally a bad thing.

The Wayland base can be implemented in a library, like wlroots, which complete compositors could use. Currently compositor developers prefer separate implementations and it's really their choice.

the fact that the system provides a choice is the issue that leads to fragmentation (which is the main problem).

Saying "people could just do / not do X" absolutely never ever ever works, not in politics, not in programming, not in "not being an asshole to each other", not in "not using firearms", etc - things have to be enforced & unescapable at some point if we want sanity.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#433

Post by WesolyKubeczek »

wegs wrote: post #430
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…

I've heard enlightenment can be a Wayland compositor now, could you try it?

Also I think 3dfx Voodoo was the magic pixie dust, once you ever go OpenGL, you're not going back.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#434

Post by ddevault »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #415
ddevault wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.…

Is your goal to fix people's terminology or to fix the actual problem? It's not an end user's job to tease apart what specific thing is the root cause. If something changes, and their system feels slower, they're going to reasonably assume the thing that changed is at fault. That's doubly true if there's an easy switch to turn that thing on and off (which there often is, by picking a Wayland or non-Wayland session at…

The lengths to which people will go to justify being wrong. Yeesh.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#435

Post by m0zg »

I tried Wayland last year. It was nowhere near ready for prime time. Perceptibly slower, and I had video tearing when watching video in the browser. This is with bog standard Intel iGPU in a laptop a couple years old.

In its present state it can't beat "abandonware" I'm afraid. X.org works. Wayland does not. And that's all there is to it at the moment.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#436

Post by wander_homer »

acgkmopvvgvmgv wrote: post #273
Avamander wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Where is Mir now? Using Wayland. It could have not gone that way. Now we've got two equally bad alternatives out there. > That's one of the reasons a decade later you still have this much FUD. I don't think you know what FUD means.

Nice ignore the part where they realized Mir was useless. They even went on an edit spree in their wiki page. If Mir was so good and superior they would just keep developing it. Isn't that obvious? If the company who already spent all this dev time aka money on Mir doesn't believe in it, why would anybody else? They were even eating their own dog food and had some major industry pull at their disposal. The answer is…

> If Mir was so good and superior they would just keep developing it. Isn't that obvious? If the company who already spent all this dev time aka money on Mir doesn't believe in it, why would anybody else?

Not that I care or know a lot about Mir, but do you seriously believe that it was always the best technology that became successful and triumphed over its competitors?

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#437

Post by ernst_klim »

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…

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

Maybe it's time for people to stop whining in the internet and start writing code?

X.org code is there, support it, contribute to it, improve it if you want to.

> infamous heartbleed bug

Yeah. Because real open source is like that: millions are arguing in forums, few write code.

And that's the problem Wayland is trying to solve BTW, by removing quite a lot of obscure legacy which only a few properly understand.

Writing things from scratch is usually good, it allows:

1) To follow modern practices so modern devs can understand the code and contribute

2) To use modern languages and technologies which are inherently more safe and secure (due to better type systems, linters, language design)

3) To get rid of technical debt

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#438

Post by Androider »

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…

The problems Wayland solve are those of yesteryear, sprinkled with the broken dreams that we'd all be running it on Linux phones by now. In that context a strict security model makes sense.

Trouble is, that security model makes no sense on today's desktop. In 2020, people aren't downloading and running native applications on desktops, not even (especially?) on Linux. The desktop is now solely a manager of browser windows. Everything that normal folks do is done through the browser, from email to office collaboration. Maybe a few Electron apps sprinkled in (mostly targeted for developers, ironically). Maybe the calculator? That's pretty much it.

The most important desktop apps today? Chrome and Zoom. Both which barely work in Wayland. But at least all that non-existent native desktop software can't now spy on my web mail? Too bad screen sharing is now a complete shitshow.

Actually worthwhile problems to solve on the desktop are for example high DPI and fractional scaling, rock-solid multi-monitor support, dynamically plugging in and removing displays, mixing displays of varying DPIs, high refresh rates and variable sync etc. The desktop will increasingly become a niche for high-end developer setups.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#439

Post by jamesgeck0 »

p_l wrote: post #53
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.

It took about a decade for NetworkManager to gain CLI, all the time it tried to eat more and more control over network stack. It was also opinionated in the worst possible way, like responding to requests to support ad-hoc wifi mode (back when NM was only about WiFi) with "your request is dumb, you're dumb, and we will never do that". It got usable within last few years as somewhat general thing (after having already…

NetworkManager was literally just a GUI initially, wasn't it? IIRC in 2006, connecting to wifi from the CLI on a system with NetworkManager involved running the wpa_supplicant commands that NetworkManager wrapped.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#440

Post by pmoriarty »

cycloptic wrote: post #424
pmoriarty wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ok, so I can write the features ydotool is missing or pay someone to do it. I guess those options are the same for any software.

Either way, ydotool is clearly not a viable replacement for xdotool right now, if it will ever be.

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