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The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

phoronix.com

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Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#531

Post by nsajko »

comex wrote: post #515
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…

> 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. Unfortunately, that forbids general-purpose screenshotting and key-rebinding programs - but there is no sensible middle ground.…

It is my understanding that the Arcan system enables such usage:

https://arcan-fe.com/about/

https://github.com/letoram/arcan

https://github.com/letoram/arcan/wiki/Features

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#532

Post by phkahler »

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?

It is an X11 replacement. Just like CDs were a replacement for vynil records, and MP3 files were a replacement for CDs. But nobody expects to play records in a CD player.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#533

Post by phkahler »

Androider wrote: post #438
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 win…

>> In 2020, people aren't downloading and running native applications on desktops, not even (especially?) on Linux.

No, we download and run them in our web browsers because the operating systems (and X11) failed to implement security models that fit the modern world. Wayland is a move in the right direction here.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#534

Post by nsajko »

cedilla wrote: post #530
nsajko wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

OK, X sucks in a way (although your argumentation for that is wrong), but replacing X with Wayland is like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. (Also, I don't think Wayland fits in any hole nicely, with it being hostile to even such basic and universally expected features such as taking a screenshot.)

I don't understand where you are going with your first paragraph, except that you are assuming things about others that you should not. Similarly with the second paragraph.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#535

Post by nsajko »

phkahler wrote: post #532
nsajko wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It is an X11 replacement. Just like CDs were a replacement for vynil records, and MP3 files were a replacement for CDs. But nobody expects to play records in a CD player.

Considering you're this deep in the discussion with your comment, you've managed to overlook quite a few expected and needed features that Wayland misses (or is even hostile to) compared to X, and which thus make your analogy obviously invalid. In fact I have to wonder if you're just trolling me.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#536

Post by nsajko »

yyyk wrote: post #525
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…

>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 pro…

> by eventually only having a single compositor implementation

I'd just like to note explicity that this would probably be a compositor that tries to cater to only 80% of users (if that), with the rest of us being told to fuck off.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#537

Post by freetime2 »

horsawlarway wrote: post #490
freetime2 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I last tried Wayland on Ubuntu 19.10, but quickly went back to Xorg after discovering some issues trying to share my screen on Zoom. I don’t remember what the issues were specifically, but given that Xorg was working perfectly fine, it wasn’t something I was willing to spend much effort troubleshooting. It sounds like screen sharing is a known problem area? Does anyone know if they have fixed these issues in later ve…

Screen sharing and recording are a pain point because the default security model of Wayland doesn't allow applications to see what other applications are rendering. That said, Pipewire is a working solution for Zoom today on Wayland. I'm not on Ubuntu, so I don't know if the Chromium package they ship has Pipewire enabled by default, but my guess is that they do. I use a small extension to automatically default Zoom…

This is really informative, thank you!

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#538

Post by stjohnswarts »

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…

I think you might look at it with this perspective. It will take them deserting X11 in order to get stuff for Wayland working because everyone is just like "well X11 will work well enough". Now people won't have much of a choice other than not supporting linux Desktop at all.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#539

Post by badsectoracula »

sergeykish wrote: post #242
badsectoracula wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One X.org developer started Wayland and some (but not all) others joined. In any case, i wasn't referring to X.org developers - i explicitly mentioned that they do not want to maintain it anymore. I was referring to those who want to see it continue existing in one way or another.

Ah, I red "fork" as in ffmpeg-libav case, it is not what you meant, I would say "contribute". I am too surprised by critique. Anyone can contribute to X.Org [1], maybe there are no stable releases but it works, have active contributors [2] and recent commits [3] [4]. Wayland lives, ten years ago it was demo, now it has a lot of compositors [5], wlroots shared among many projects. [1] https://github.com/freedesktop/xo…

Yes but contributing without having proper releases that distros can grab and distribute doesn't help much.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#540

Post by badsectoracula »

sergeykish wrote: post #456
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…

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…

> 1. The old, mostly working thing waits your commit

From what i understand there are commits, just not releases. What is the point of committing if the maintainers do not bother to make a proper release that your work can be distributed to the users?

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