The X.Org Server Is Abandonware? • Hacker News Board

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#521

Post by nialv7 » Mon, Oct 26, 2020, 12:53 AM UTC

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…

> massive fragmentation issues across the graphical part of the Linux ecosystem

This is a fair criticism. It is true that we see each of the compositors rolling its own extensions to the protocol. But I believe wayland is trying to standardize a lot of the protocols which should cover common use cases.

> each new compositor implementation reinvents the wheel many times

This is not true. There are libraries like wlroots[0] which you can build on top of. You don't have to redo the work that is already done in other compositors.

> application that needs to grab the entire screen will need separate code for each compositor it supports screenshots

There is the PipeWire[1] effort to support screenshot and screen capture on wayland in a unified way.

> Wayland is also, with its forced composition, hostile to interactive applications requiring low latency, e.g. video games.

Also not true. On a properly implemented compositor, video games frames shouldn't have longer latency to screen than on Xorg. X server has to do composition too, whether you run a compositor or not.

[0]: https://github.com/swaywm/wlroots [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PipeWire

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#522

Post by danhor » Mon, Oct 26, 2020, 12:53 AM UTC

_abox wrote: post #443

noobermin wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've added this comment to my favorites; a very succinct description of the problems with Wayland. At this point I wonder if starting from scratch was the right call vs. spending the 12 intervening years trying to (yes) dig into X11 and fix existing issues.

And it doesn't even mention the valuable features of X11 that were considered out of scope for wayland, such as network transparency. It's really super useful being able to just fire up a program on a remote SSH session and get the window on my local computer. Without having to set up VNC and a window manager etc etc on the remote computer. Of course this feature also needs a big review. It needs proper security (tho…

X (at least nowadays) isn't very network transparent. Most things are done via shared buffers (it's faster than shoving bitmaps down a socket), with special fallbacks implemented by the clients, so that x forwarding doesn't break.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#523

Post by snazz » Mon, Oct 26, 2020, 1:01 AM UTC

horsawlarway wrote: post #466

snazz wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think we'll ever get into that situation. Mir is gone now and Arcan is a pretty niche solution, so I think that Wayland will continue replacing X.org unabated now.

And honestly, it's doing a decent job. Happy to see Ubuntu make the switch, it'll pull in a good number of daily users and we can iron out the last few remaining issues. Frankly, Wayland has been excellent to me. It's hard to describe how nice it is that I can't remember the last time I had to open an xorg conf file to try to get monitors working, or get even basic functionality from my touchpad.

Oh, I totally agree—Sway is my favorite window manager on Linux by far. systemd and Wayland and other similar projects are controversial, but they're making huge improvements in the Linux desktop space and the lack of fragmentation is refreshing.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#524

Post by mcguire » Mon, Oct 26, 2020, 1:02 AM UTC

moomin wrote: post #474

wegs wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

One of these days you should read the X section of the Unix Haters Handbook. Wayland is being built for the world as it is, X was built for a world that never was. In this case, it’s quite hard to not be better designed.

"One of these days you should read the X section of the Unix Haters Handbook."

I have. It was written by someone who doesn't know the difference between a "client" and a "server".

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#525

Post by yyyk » Mon, Oct 26, 2020, 1:04 AM UTC

ivanbakel wrote: post #494

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…

> These seem to be intentional design decisions (marketed as being necessary for security, but really being power-user hostile) That's an unnecessarily abrasive view: the Wayland protocol designers do not hate power users. But allowing programs to constantly take in arbitrary input & output information in the background, as well as simulate arbitrary input to other programs, is an obvious and glaring security flaw. U…

>Unfortunately, that forbids general-purpose screenshotting and key-rebinding programs - but there is no sensible middle ground... In order to actually break into a mass desktop market, there has to be consideration of the ways people who do not currently use Linux behave.

Oddly, the actual mass market desktops have (and have had for a long time) solutions for the 'general-purpose screenshotting and key-rebinding programs'.

I know how bad was X11 technically, and sympathize with replacing it - but that by itself does not make Wayland a success. It took Wayland over a decade to almost get basic capabilities, and it's going to take another decade until all the compositor-based protocols are standardized (probably by eventually only having a single compositor implementation). By the time Linux finishes reimplementing its desktop, Windows and MacOS will be in an entirely different place.

Maybe this can't be helped - Open Source desktop development was always extremely underfunded and undersupported.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#526

Post by cycloptic » Mon, Oct 26, 2020, 1:04 AM UTC

pmoriarty wrote: post #440

cycloptic wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It likely won't ever be a drop-in replacement because a lot of X operations don't really make sense in Wayland. (Even in X, xdotool isn't perfect and a lot of its commands won't work if your window manager doesn't support the right hints) Unless you feel like volunteering to make a standard for this, you'll get the best mileage out of using an API specific to your compositor rather than waiting for someone else to come up with a standard. I know GNOME exports its internals with a javascript interface, and Sway has a way to run various commands using a JSON interface too.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#527

Post by phkahler » Mon, Oct 26, 2020, 1:13 AM UTC

p_l wrote: post #86

diegocg wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>backwards compatibility is pretty much disregarded. Wayland compositors provide backwards compatibility with most X11 apps via XWayland, I don't think it's fair to say that they completely disregard compatibility

Due to how XWayland works, a lot of applications (sometimes critical ones) won't work under XWayland ever (pretty much everything that works on interaction between X clients fails hard).

>> pretty much everything that works on interaction between X clients fails hard

It's supposed to fail hard. That isnt just a security hole in X, it's a total lack of security. The notion that any app should be able to monitor or manipulate any other app is archaic and wrong from a security perspective.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#528

Post by bsder » Mon, Oct 26, 2020, 1:16 AM UTC

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…

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

Except that X11 is NOT "mostly working" for a significant amount of modern usages.

Yes, if you happen to want to run your Terminal, Emacs, etc. remotely over a network connection, X11 is your huckleberry--but only because anything more complicated than a bitmap makes that a very difficult problem.

If you want HiDPI, subpixel anti-aliasing, color calibration, multiple resolutions on multiple displays, smooth video, no tearing, etc. X11 only works to a certain degree, some days, for some people, for some video cards. And it's not even clear how those should work over a network connection.

This is not new. After all, X11 critiques came in for a full chapter in the Unix Haters Handbook and that's 25 years old. Wayland is simply revisiting the same problems as X Server Extensions 30 years later (they aren't ubiquitous so nobody uses them so they aren't ubiquitous).

The problem is that people who use obscure features are VERY vocal about it while people who simply abandon your operating system because accelerated video doesn't work reliably are very quiet.

Maybe Wayland isn't the way forward, but X11 certainly hasn't been the way forward for decades.

The only advantage I can see is that if Wayland manages to tear out the X11-isms in everybody, what comes after Wayland will have a lot easier time of it.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#529

Post by javier2 » Mon, Oct 26, 2020, 1:17 AM UTC

WesolyKubeczek wrote: post #468

horsawlarway wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean... having used both X and Wayland as daily drivers, you're fucking insane if you think you can EVER get me back on X. On Wayland I get excellent multi-monitor support (mixed scaling ratios, much better automatic detection and configuration, much better plug-and-play). I also have a touchpad on my XPS that feels just as good as a Mac. To boot, I haven't had to touch a config file related to input devices or out…

Cannot say Wayland works smoothly on my triple-monitor setup. One of the monitors sometimes stops working randomly, and wakes up to display Plymouth screen when I reboot the thing. Dell Precision 7520 with an AMD GPU. The degree of flakiness is different depending on whether you're on Plasma or GNOME, but it's there nonetheless.

To be fair, triple monitors barely work on my macbook

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#530

Post by cedilla » Mon, Oct 26, 2020, 1:20 AM UTC

nsajko wrote: post #502

ivanbakel wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These seem to be intentional design decisions (marketed as being necessary for security, but really being power-user hostile) That's an unnecessarily abrasive view: the Wayland protocol designers do not hate power users. But allowing programs to constantly take in arbitrary input & output information in the background, as well as simulate arbitrary input to other programs, is an obvious and glaring security flaw. U…

OK then, if Wayland is meant for closed and user-hostile platforms, why is it being marketed as a X11 replacement? Why is there a constant FUD-included push to dissmis Xorg in favor of Wayland compositors?

When you dismiss any reasoning as "userhostile" and "FUD" it will be difficult to understand any change.

For the life of me I can't understand why so many people are always convinced that people who develop replacements for decades old frameworks do it only to spite users.

But the answer is: X sucks. It's 36 year old software with dozens of extensions. No one wants to write software that uses X, and apparently, per this HN submission, no one wants to maintain X.