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The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

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Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#561

Post by RedShift1 »

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…

Imagine if all the work that has gone into Wayland went into Xorg... We'd have a pretty sweet graphical server.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#562

Post by WesolyKubeczek »

phkahler wrote: post #518
WesolyKubeczek wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>> Cannot say Wayland works smoothly on my triple-monitor setup. How does X work on that setup?

Very smoothly.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#563

Post by IvyMike »

ernst_klim wrote: post #437
noobermin wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 obs…

> Writing things from scratch is usually good,

Joel Spolsky wrote a good argument to the contrary: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

Any good examples of large projects where a rewrite from scratch has been good?

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#564

Post by blockmeifyoucan »

meddlepal wrote: post #446
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.

The day of the Linux desktop is Windows with WSL2. The irony.

Did you ever actually setup a graphical environment with WSL2?

I run one, which is why to me the irony feels reversed to what you probably meant. It's clumsy, slow and tedious to setup.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#565

Post by nikanj »

ernst_klim wrote: post #437
noobermin wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 obs…

3) To get rid of technical debt

Technical debt i.e. "code that should be refactored, because it was originally implemented in a hurry"? Yes, technically you're right and deleting all of the code is a way to also get rid of the code that should be refactored.

The same way whole-limb amputation is a very effective way to remove nail polish.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#566

Post by sergeykish »

znpy wrote: post #511
neurostimulant wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It took python community 10 years to migrate to python 3, and the migration process from python 2 to python 3, while tedious, is certainly a lot easier than porting a gui app from xorg to wayland. It could take some time until most app developers finally migrated their apps from xorg to wayland.

worth noting that in the python 2 to 3 story, a migration path was mostly provided along with tools that tried to automatically refactor your code, the latest 2.x release was supported for nearly a decade, and there have been directions on how to temporarily write code to work on both python2 and python3.

Python 3 is only unusual in its failure. Perl6 Apocalypses [1] is wonderful. Python 3000 is pointless [2].

I've been Python developer at that time, the writing was on the wall. They have not provided migration path. PEP 414 "Complaint: This PEP may harm adoption of Python 3.2" [3], this is insane. Community voted with feet — they've stayed with Python 2 until clean migration path arrived. I've switched to Ruby and been happy since.

Ruby 1.8.7 was supported for five years.

You had to write Python 2 code and run 2to3, you had to live in the past or abandon it.

[1] https://raku.org/archive/doc/apocalypse.html

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Python#Features

[3] https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0414/

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#567

Post by pjmlp »

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…

> Unix was really well-designed,

Not really, it is just a pile of hacks on top of hacks, starting by everything is a file until one needs to use sockets.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#568

Post by pjmlp »

ddingus wrote: post #221
tupputuppu wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apologies, but I don't understand your comment. The original article said X.org is unmaintained. Your comment basically replied "it works for me and I like it, Wayland doesn't cut it". Sure - great opinion - but doesn't change the state of the world, which is that X.org is unmaintained and all the real development firepower has moved on to Wayland. We can all have opinions and I kind of agree with yours, but the arti…

"Need to accept" vs "get stuff done" = "use Windows or OSX" Fact is the people who developed X thought through multi user graphical computing. That process has not really happened since. It needs to, or we just won't see desktop Linux compete.

2% after 30 years in the making, and hatred for the GNOME and KDE communities, always pushing for PDP-11 experience with multiple xterms like I was doing in 1994 on IBM X Window terminals on the university campus with DG/UX, I already gave up around Windows 7 release.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#569

Post by bsder »

tbr1 wrote: post #553
bsder wrote: post #551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Every single thing you've mentioned can be fixed with Xorg/X11. Then why hasn't it been fixed? In open source, those who make the code get to make the decisions--for better or for worse. My personal opinion as to why X11 gets so few contributors--the build system is so terrible that nobody wants to touch it anymore. I suspect they would get a lot more contributors if they changed to something like meson/ninja which…

Xorg has had a meson build system since 2017: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/commit/1549e30... Are you referring to something else?

That says "Work in Progress". It doesn't look like it ever completed.

And I still see autogen.sh and Makefile.am goop in the top level of that repository.

However, I would be quite happy to be wrong.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#570

Post by ernst_klim »

nikanj wrote: post #565
ernst_klim wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 obs…

3) To get rid of technical debt Technical debt i.e. "code that should be refactored, because it was originally implemented in a hurry"? Yes, technically you're right and deleting all of the code is a way to also get rid of the code that should be refactored. The same way whole-limb amputation is a very effective way to remove nail polish.

> code

More like fundamental design decisions and API's which you can't refactor without breaking compatibility.

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