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The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

phoronix.com

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Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#651

Post by Const-me »

danaris wrote: post #644
Const-me wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technically what Wayland is doing, using 3D GPU for everything, is the best way forward. Windows is using it since Vista. When done right, gradients mentioned in other comments are free, GPUs have hardware to interpolate values (such as colors) across vertices of triangle, for free. Many other effects are either free or very cheap. Engineering-wise it's really hard. Microsoft reworked GPU driver model introducing WDD…

> Technically what Wayland is doing, using 3D GPU for everything, is the best way forward. It's great for the common desktop case. It's not as great for some other cases in which Linux is the preferred platform (headless servers, repurposed old hardware, etc). The problem isn't, of course, that there exists a solution for this on Linux. It's that that solution is being pushed as the only one that should be maintained…

> It's great for the common desktop case.

Also phones and tablets. Also embedded devices who have a GPU + LCD, I have personally shipped Linux firmware where I used NanoVG on top of DRM/KMS to render touch screen GUI. Also for kiosks, cars, smart watches and many other applications.

It’s great everywhere you have a high-resolution screen. And it’s mission-critical for ARM devices who don’t have CPU power to render that screen on CPU, at least not at 60Hz.

> headless servers

Why would you want a GUI there? Even Microsoft has console-only “core” editions of their Windows Server, since 2008. They made it because competition from Linux, who had that from the very beginning and was thus way more suitable for cloud use cases. It still is due to other reasons, but that’s another story.

> It's that that solution is being pushed as the only one that should be maintained—and thus, exist—going forward.

I get why some people would want the X to be maintained, but the thing is, it’s very expensive, and not fun.

Developing game console emulators is expensive, but fun and people do that in their free time with great results. Moving forward GPU-targeted Linux GUI is expensive, not too fun, but there’re commercial applications with healthy profit margins (automotive, embedded, etc) so people from these areas are working on that tech. Patching x.org for repurposed old hardware, on the other hand…

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#653

Post by erik_seaberg »

Const-me wrote: post #406
Flex247A wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What could be the reason behind this? Asking as a noob.

Technically what Wayland is doing, using 3D GPU for everything, is the best way forward. Windows is using it since Vista. When done right, gradients mentioned in other comments are free, GPUs have hardware to interpolate values (such as colors) across vertices of triangle, for free. Many other effects are either free or very cheap. Engineering-wise it's really hard. Microsoft reworked GPU driver model introducing WDD…

Wayland’s mistake is assuming every application has a local GPU. In reality the user has just one GPU attached to his monitor, which is fine for email and gaming, but serious tools run miles away in datacenters. We wouldn’t be rewriting everything in javascript if only we hadn’t forgotten how cool remote X was.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#654

Post by sergeykish »

AzzieElbab wrote: post #649
sergeykish wrote: post #558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Python 3 changed nothing * print is function * string is unicode by default Should have been clean and easy migration path # python 2 from __future__ import print_function print(u"foo") u"" # was u"" b"" # was "" But u"" was not supported in Python 3 until PEP 414 (python 3.3) [1]. That's four years [2]: Python 3.0.0 Dec. 3, 2008 Python 3.3.0 Sept. 29, 2012 Ruby string switched from codebytes to codepoints with encod…

Doesn’t wayland run x11 server as well?

Yes, removed for test

    $ sudo pacman -Rs xorg-server-xwayland
Otherwise X11 applications work fine. GTK+ supports Wayland since 2015

https://wiki.gnome.org/Initiatives/Wayland/GTK%2B

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#655

Post by Const-me »

erik_seaberg wrote: post #653
Const-me wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technically what Wayland is doing, using 3D GPU for everything, is the best way forward. Windows is using it since Vista. When done right, gradients mentioned in other comments are free, GPUs have hardware to interpolate values (such as colors) across vertices of triangle, for free. Many other effects are either free or very cheap. Engineering-wise it's really hard. Microsoft reworked GPU driver model introducing WDD…

Wayland’s mistake is assuming every application has a local GPU. In reality the user has just one GPU attached to his monitor , which is fine for email and gaming, but serious tools run miles away in datacenters. We wouldn’t be rewriting everything in javascript if only we hadn’t forgotten how cool remote X was.

> but serious tools run miles away in datacenters

I work on a serious tool, specifically it’s CAM/CAE stuff. Despite Google, Amazon and MS sales people apply pressure to upper management (they want us to move to their clouds and offering gazillions of free compute credits), our software works on desktops and workstations, and I have reasons to believe it gonna stay this way. With recent progress of HPC-targeted CPUs, and steady downward trend of RAM prices, I believe our customers are happier running our software on their own computers, as opposed to someone else’s computers.

> We wouldn’t be rewriting everything in javascript if only we hadn’t forgotten how cool remote X was.

It was cool in the epoch of OpenGL 2. By the time Metal, Direct3D 12, and finally Vulkan arrived, it stopped being cool. Essentially, these APIs were designed to allow apps to saturate PCIe. You can’t transfer that bandwidth over any reasonable network.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#656

Post by vlowther »

cipherboy wrote: post #640
phone8675309 wrote: post #630

Earlier quoted context omitted.

nVidia is the overwhelming leader in GPUs that people care about, so if you don't mind excluding the majority then it sounds like a great direction. Hope it works out for you.

You've got two primary use cases for nVidia's GPUs: 1. Gaming. Just about nobody games on Linux with nVidia. Most people I know who game (from Linux) with nVidia GPUs use PCI passthrough to a guest VM running Windows. Very few use nVidia GPUs on their host system. My primary setup is a 2950x/128GB DDR4/Vega 56/2080 Super -- the latter goes to kvm exclusively. 2. "Research" such as machine learning. You don't need Way…

The GPU stats at https://www.gamingonlinux.com/index.php?module=statistics&vi... disagree with your first point. A few years ago I did all of my gaming direct on Linux with an nVidia GPU, and did so for over a decade, on various laptops with and without mixed Intel/nVidia GPU setups.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#657

Post by CapricornNoble »

cipherboy wrote: post #640
phone8675309 wrote: post #630

Earlier quoted context omitted.

nVidia is the overwhelming leader in GPUs that people care about, so if you don't mind excluding the majority then it sounds like a great direction. Hope it works out for you.

You've got two primary use cases for nVidia's GPUs: 1. Gaming. Just about nobody games on Linux with nVidia. Most people I know who game (from Linux) with nVidia GPUs use PCI passthrough to a guest VM running Windows. Very few use nVidia GPUs on their host system. My primary setup is a 2950x/128GB DDR4/Vega 56/2080 Super -- the latter goes to kvm exclusively. 2. "Research" such as machine learning. You don't need Way…

>>>1. Gaming. Just about nobody games on Linux with nVidia.

I guess I'm the oddball here. 95% of my gaming is native Steam Linux apps on my Kubuntu box with a GTX1060 6GB.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#658

Post by badsectoracula »

1_player wrote: post #554
badsectoracula wrote: post #546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The utopian philosophy of "Linux is about choice" has doomed any idea of a Linux desktop. If it isn't about "choice" - ie. user control and freedom - then what is the point of using Linux in the first place and not stick with Windows where things are already chosen for you and way more often than not work out of the box because it is by far the most tested against desktop environment?

Libre/open source is the point. Not being restricted by proprietary software and walled gardens. The only truly successful open source software running on a Linux system is the kernel, because there's NO choice. No talented teenager can write their own Linux kernel that does Y instead. Imagine what would the world look like if there were 50 half compatible, community-managed forks of the Linux kernel. The year of the…

> Libre/open source is the point. Not being restricted by proprietary software and walled gardens.

And the point of libre/open is the word from FLOSS you forgot to add: freedom, ie. being in a position to decide and control your software.

Libre/open/free software isn't an end goal by themselves, they the means to be in control.

> The year of the Linux desktop won't come because apart from the kernel the ecosystem is incredibly fragmented and reaching consensus is pretty much impossible

Until Wayland came along, X11 was the only defacto window system for Linux - if you wrote an application targeting X11, it would work on all Linux desktop system.

Wayland fragmented the window system landscape.

> so in 2020 we're still deciding whether to do client side or server side decorations.

This wasn't a question at the past, everyone agreed that server side decorations are better because they allow users more control through their window managers - with exception for special cases, of course (the WMs didn't forbid it after all, applications could do both).

It wasn't until some GNOME "designer" saw iPad, got jealous they didn't thought of it and then mad that people could actually have choice in how their Linux systems looked and behaved that we got client side decorations.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#659

Post by badsectoracula »

bsder wrote: post #551
badsectoracula wrote: post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of that require throwing away the entirety of Xorg/X11, breaking every existing application while expecting everyone to rewrite their code in a completely different way, breaking a ton of existing workflows (often without alternatives) and splitting the already tiny Linux desktop in half. Every single thing you've mentioned can be fixed with Xorg/X11. (except subpixel antialiasing because that already existed fo…

> 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…

> Then why hasn't it been fixed?

I don't know, my guess is that people found making new stuff much more fun than fixing existing stuff.

Which is fine.

However that isn't the same as the existing stuff being unable to be fixed.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#660

Post by badsectoracula »

sergeykish wrote: post #560
badsectoracula wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Do you imply X.Org sabotaged? Issues fixed, system is stable and only maintainer stops it? You should notify disillusioned people who still commit to the repo [1]. [1] https://github.com/freedesktop/xorg-xserver/graphs/commit-ac...

I do not imply anything. The fact is that there haven't been any release for two years yet there is work apparently being done.

So why aren't release being made?

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