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How X Window Managers Work, and How to Write One (2014)

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Re: How X Window Managers Work, and How to Write One (2014)

#111

Post by kaba0 »

zephyr9 wrote: post #36
emersion wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Feel free to continue using X11 of course, no one's forcing anybody to switch. That said: > Does upstream Wayland work on any platform except for Linux? Yes, FreeBSD. Patches welcome to make it work on other BSDs. > Does this display server have any form of colour management for, you know, the stuff it's displaying? No more than X11 right now, ie. none. But it's in the works.

I was under the impression Wayland on FreeBSD required a lot of patching on their end, but this has been merged upstream? If so that's pretty good news. Also good news re colour management. The last I heard about this was Drew DeVault (and I'm paraphrasing) calling it "precious horseshit". [0] https://drewdevault.com/2021/02/02/Anti-Wayland-horseshit.ht...

There is work on HDR colors, but I haven’t followed up on it.

Re: How X Window Managers Work, and How to Write One (2014)

#112

Post by sprash »

DonHopkins wrote: post #84
vidarh wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

X worked just fine on early 90s hardware. Performance today is about implementation, nothing inherent about X.

Mid 80s hardware, actually. Recreational Bugs talk [1989] by "Sgt." David Rosenthal (author of the ICCCM, the Andrew Window Manager, and NeWS, and an old friend), who explained the 80's era X-Windows hardware model and war on drugs quite well here: https://blog.dshr.org/2018/05/recreational-bugs.html >"You will get a better Gorilla effect if you use as big a piece of paper as possible." -Kunihiko Kasahara, Creative O…

You think this is bad? Just look at a native Wayland "Hello World" client [1]. This doesn't even print hello world. You have to do the text rendering yourself. And you need at least 500 more lines to implement the equivalent to a simple XGetImage() call.

1.: https://github.com/emersion/hello-wayland/blob/master/main.c

Re: How X Window Managers Work, and How to Write One (2014)

#113

Post by kaba0 »

sprash wrote: post #66
Seirdy wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fedora, Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, RHEL/Rocky, and Debian all have their default desktops on Wayland. Both GNOME and KDE have already switched and will keep legacy X around for compatibility purposes for another few years. On the more minimal side to compete with X-based window managers: Sway is very mature and River is turning out nicely. All that's left is an Openbox alternative. I believe there are a few, but I'm not famil…

This is not an organic transition. Major organizations seems to "push" it but there is not much "pull". Compare this to the "transition" from CVS/SVN to git. There was no need to even advertise git. People saw it and wanted it. The X11 ecosystem is more than just GNOME, KDE and i3 and porting XFCE will not be enough to "move on" (For me it is the small things like Xdotool, Xsel, Xcalib, etc. that are holding me back)…

Bazaar style development can’t really transition in such a fast way as cathedrals can. While in case of apple, simply declaring that this framework will be the default from the next release on is enough, linux doesn’t work like that. It is a slow transition, but it already has enough momentum behind it.

Re: How X Window Managers Work, and How to Write One (2014)

#114

Post by vidarh »

kaba0 wrote: post #110
qwerty456127 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are, if any, use cases where one would need a compositor? Other than transparent window decorations, wobbling windows and overlay dock? These are kinda cool but not worth any additional complexity or hardware resources IMHO. I have never seen any screen tearing in my life by the way. Despite I have always been generally using decade-old PCs with lowest-end (mostly built-in) GPUs and Raspberry Pi is the only way…

Have you tried playing a video? Or moving a window around fast? Without a compositor there will be tearing on X. With a compositor, X is just a useless middleman.

There's nothing stopping an X server implementation from doing compositing natively.

Re: How X Window Managers Work, and How to Write One (2014)

#115

Post by kaba0 »

sprash wrote: post #83
Seirdy wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Xdotool and xsel have had Wayland equivalents for years: see ydotool/wtype and wl-clipboard. The reason why major orgs have had to push for Wayland is the same as the reasons they had to push for HTTPS and TLSv1.2, unique passwords, keeping software up to date, etc: using outdated and insecure software with significant attack surface has real costs even if it's convenient.

All "equivalents" you mention have less functionality than their originals and some only work on specific compositors like wlroots/sway. Like all things Wayland it's a mess with zero benefits for the user. HTTPS vs HTTP is a false equivalent. HTTP works just fine like before. X11 can be made fully secure (e.g. QubesOS does it) but nobody uses it because there is really no need on a FOSS system where 100% of clients y…

Thanks, X can be made secure by goddamn running n virtual machines.

Also, this is just patently false: “Like all things Wayland it's a mess with zero benefits for the user.”

Re: How X Window Managers Work, and How to Write One (2014)

#116

Post by yissp »

phendrenad2 wrote: post #59
cunidev wrote: post #57

Is there anything similar for Wayland? Its protocol looks considerably more complex than Xorg's, and so are most resources to learn it.

Most of the concepts here are the same for wayland. The only difference is, Wayland handles compositing, whereas in x11 compositing is a pluggable component.

A Wayland compositor is responsible for quite a bit more than an X11 window manager. Compositing, as you mentioned, but also display modesetting, input handling, clipboard management, and so on. Although, of course, one can use a library like wlroots or libweston to handle most of that stuff if you just want to focus on the desktop experience.

Re: How X Window Managers Work, and How to Write One (2014)

#117

Post by jgb1984 »

kaba0 wrote: post #107
jgb1984 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have used strictly Nvidia gpus, on debian Linux, for 20 years, using the binary drivers, and I have none of the issues you describe. It just works, very well, stable and fast. Xorg is an amazing piece of software and combined with openbox it does exactly what I need.

> Xorg is an amazing piece of software Based on what? Because I rather believe its maintainers..

Maybe you didn't read my comment? Based on having used it for over 20 years.

Re: How X Window Managers Work, and How to Write One (2014)

#118

Post by andrewshadura »

erik_seaberg wrote: post #85
Seirdy wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Wayland does support remote execution; see waypipe for an example. 2. X11 does lack critical features that lots of users need: GUI isolation (a very basic security measure that's otherwise been standard practice for decades), mixed DPIs, and perf on low-end ARM devices (compare Sway with dwm/openbox/i3 on a rbpi or pinebook and the difference is kinda shocking).

Waypipe ships client-rendered images across the network; datacenters would fall back to software rendering because there’s no way to take advantage of a user’s desktop GPU. I think the industry will continue moving to Javascript or Wasm apps as the most widely portable and accelerated remote display system we have.

> Waypipe ships client-rendered images across the network

That's also exactly what most modern GUI toolkits do when they run on X11.

Re: How X Window Managers Work, and How to Write One (2014)

#119

Post by sprash »

II2II wrote: post #73
loxias wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> replacemeant for Xorg WHY. What's the compelling reason for Wayland? How will it make my life better? As someone who's used Linux as their only computing environment for 20 years, I'm terrified of my Xorg being taken away. It works! I understand it! And, I'm still bitter over my init system becoming unnecessarily complicated and stupid with systemd. There's what feels like a rising attitude in the F/OSS community o…

I have been using Linux for over 25 years. I am not going to shed any tears over the loss of X, though I am concerned that some edge cases will be missed in the transition to Wayland or XWayland. The latter is why I am holding off on switching. Let others figure out and fix those edge cases for me. As for systemd, it appears to be an entirely different type of transition. I won't go as far as saying it is unnecessari…

> I have always seen X as complex.

True, but don't assume Wayland to be less complex [1]. It has a lot less features, sure.

1.: https://wayland.app/protocols/

Re: How X Window Managers Work, and How to Write One (2014)

#120

Post by pimeys »

linguae wrote: post #3
fyrn- wrote: post #2

Maybe don't write an Xorg window manager right as the replacemeant for Xorg starts to take off though

1. The article was written in 2014. 2. While it appears that Wayland is poised to replace X11 on Linux desktops given the amount of backing Wayland has compared to X11, it is not clear whether Wayland will replace X11 in the BSD ecosystem. According to the FreeBSD Wiki, Wayland is not ready to be a daily driver ( https://wiki.freebsd.org/Graphics/Wayland ), though work has been done getting Wayland compositors and ot…

I've been using Wayland and Sway with FreeBSD 13 quite successfully. Everything worked quite well, except some indicators in Waybar that were using some Linux specific things to get values for memory usage etc...
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