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The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

phoronix.com

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Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#452
post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Goal shift much? My point here has been to point out that gnome is the benchmark that matters most. That one side seems bent on ignoring that is baffling to me. Sadly, for the most part I have been discouraged from Linux desktop usage in recent years. Shame, as I have been on Linux for a couple of decades now. That said, I confess this is opening my interest. Would love to get myself and my children contributing, and…

> I only really care about performance and Wayland hasn’t been very convincing [0] with no discernible improvement over X11. there would be no controversy with "I only really care about GNOME performance and GNOME Wayland hasn’t been very convincing [0] with no discernible improvement over GNOME X11" GNOME matters for you, it does not matter for me (xmonad, xterm, browsers). If all user see is GNOME he can decide it…

Ah, fair. Taking back to the root, I see the connection. Since you directed specifically at me, I took it just back to my entrance.

Continuing in that vein. I stand by pointing that the choice of benchmark matters. I've been burned by my own choices and choices from peers too often to agree that hypothetical benchmarks will see improvements for everyone.

I also find it dubious that there are many use cases that are better served today than in the past. I want to believe you, but the evidence is coming in weak with a ton of argument from authority. You don't get a pass just for being a developer to tell users they are wrong.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wayland was the last straw for me. It made me switch to Macs after 20 years of almost exclusive Linux on the desktop and a few dev stints. It was cool when my time was less expensive. I check the state of the linux world about once a year still. And obviously keep using it on the servers. Best of luck to everyone using it for desktop. I totally get why you do it, but it's just not for me right now.

I was provided with a Macbook Pro 15" by my work and I struggle to understand comments like this. Upgrades often break things, I'm forced to use brew to install software which leaves files strewn around the file system and regularly seems to have cross package conflicts. And don't get me started on the hardware - the laptop is excessively heavy and the keyboard is awful (and I don't just mean the touch bar gimmick).…

Macports seems much better than brew generally, but also under maintained and vastly under-used compared to brew for some reason.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They didn’t say anything about LCDs.

[deleted]

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#455

I'm kinda annoyed this is the case before the GBM/EGLStreams argument got resolved... I've done some programming against GBM directly (wanted an OpenGL ES application to be in a "kiosk mode," didn't want to have to install X / a Wayland compositor + configure it), and the whole DRM+GBM stack is kinda _terrible_. Generously, one could call it barely documented; the majority of the useful and correct documentation I fo…

NVIDIA's EGLDevice / EGLOutput / EGLStream API isn't too bad in and of itself. The annoying thing is trying to have backends for both it and DRM / GBM in the same application. The programming models are just so different.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#456

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…

This criticism looks like "free as beer and I know better".

1. The old, mostly working thing waits your commit

2. That new thing can have some help too

I recommend developers story about this "mostly working thing" (2014) [1]. It is quite fun and eye opening, he clearly knows his subject better than most of the comments.

Wayland demo worked almost from day one. I've run it in 2010 [2]. But we need applications, that is migrating toolkits and this took 10 years.

It is very toxic development culture, cancel culture, mob.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWQh_DmDLKQ

[2] https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=858020#p858020

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#457
post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

To make the comparison closer to apples-to-apples, the Wayland analog to the Xorg server would be something like GNOME's mutter compositor, which had its first Wayland support out in 2013[1] -- 7 years ago. And the rate of progress has only sped up since then -- take a Wayland compositor from a year ago and compare it to the same one today, and things tend to be much more polished.

[1]: judging by https://wiki.gnome.org/Initiatives/Wayland

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 stuc…

My personal conspiracy theory: the GNOME/Freedesktop/Red Hat crew is pushing Wayland so hard to prevent people from using 30 years' worth of lightweight X window managers that exist and are better than GNOME.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You wouldn’t even necessarily need git/github to implement a new system! Agree on a standard file name like .githeartbeat containing a timestamp. Every few months (or w/e), active maintainers could push a commit to update the timestamp.

It sounds like a good idea, but I'm afraid it may be a nightmare for packagers (like the ones providing packages on GNU/linux distros), as they see updates to upstream only to realize they are just pings and don't need to be repackaged. It wouldn't be that often, though. And maybe they would actually love to have such heartbeat. I would love to hear a packager on that.

Packagers should generally only be looking at tagged releases in the upstream repository, though -- not every commit.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#460
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who are you expecting to provide this for you?

Let me fill in with my perspective as a Mac user: I expect the vendor (i.e Apple) to supply a decent desktop environment. The did a quite good job at it. I didn’t need to pay extra, it was included in the sale of the computer.

But X.org isn’t a hardware vendor. It’s not owned by any hardware vendor. It’s not even owned by an OS vendor, or by an OS at all.

Apple is a multi-trillion dollar company. Microsoft and Google are close behind. Of course they can give away their desktop environment away for free. System76 (et al) can’t compete with that. X.org can’t compete with that.

I mean, this is exactly the reason I use Mac, because it ships with a good DE out of the box supported by a trillion dollar vendor. But that doesn’t help people who prefer Linux.

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