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X12: Requirements for a successor to the X11 protocol (2013)

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Re: X12: Requirements for a successor to the X11 protocol (2013)

#51

Post by adrianmsmith »

mjg59 wrote: post #40
oleg_antonyan wrote: post #14

X is almost 40yo, stable, reliable, difficult to maintain. Wayland is 15yo, barely usable. Any old timers remember 1999 when X was 15? Wayland is like IPv6 of desktops

Anyone who believes that XFree86 was stable in 1999 was apparently running a different XFree86 to me. The sysrq key was mostly useful at the time for using the SAK shortcut to kill all processes on the current terminal, which with luck included your wedged XFree86 which would then get respawned by xdm. I don't miss those times.

XFree86 in 1999 might not have been, but in 1994 when I went to university in the UK and was using Sun computers which were solely X servers to display programs running on the "main" shared computer in the corner of the room, X and all the associated software was all stable and worked fine.

Re: X12: Requirements for a successor to the X11 protocol (2013)

#52

Post by pauby »

fsh wrote: post #36
ddtaylor wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The majority of graphics cards are Nvidia which don't play nicely at all with Wayland.

The average user has a laptop with an Intel or AMD iGPU. Gaming machine are niche.

The average user isn't running a Linux desktop.

Re: X12: Requirements for a successor to the X11 protocol (2013)

#53

Post by [deleted] »

throwawaylinux wrote: post #33
chungy wrote: post #5

Mind that the page describes a hypothetical update to X. In practical terms, Wayland is X12.

Right, the name or any kind of lineage does not matter, Wayland is the X11 successor because it is the current seriously developed and improved open display protocol. Nothing about Wayland stole from X11, has any less legitimacy to be the post-X11 protocol than something called X12, or prevents anybody else from improving X11 or from working on an alternative they call X12 or anything else. I don't know why people ge…

[deleted]

Re: X12: Requirements for a successor to the X11 protocol (2013)

#54

Post by WesolyKubeczek »

I wouldn’t say that screens (protocol term) in X11 are totally useless. In fact, this is how I would implement a more secure screensaver (this would require cooperation from the server, though): the screensaver client somehow securely authenticates to the server so it’s entitled to be the screen locking/unlocking process. It’s hosted on a separate X11 screen. When there’s a command to lock the machine, the server switches to that screen. Upon unlock, the server returns to the default screen.

Now if you kill the screensaver, or it segfaults because you hit a lot of keys, or a butterfly causes an EMI disturbance and the screensaver dies, you are left with an empty screen and not with your work exposed like in the current scheme of things.

Re: X12: Requirements for a successor to the X11 protocol (2013)

#55

Post by sprash »

mjg59 wrote: post #40
oleg_antonyan wrote: post #14

X is almost 40yo, stable, reliable, difficult to maintain. Wayland is 15yo, barely usable. Any old timers remember 1999 when X was 15? Wayland is like IPv6 of desktops

Anyone who believes that XFree86 was stable in 1999 was apparently running a different XFree86 to me. The sysrq key was mostly useful at the time for using the SAK shortcut to kill all processes on the current terminal, which with luck included your wedged XFree86 which would then get respawned by xdm. I don't miss those times.

X11 became really stable in the late 00s. And since the introduction of DRI3 it is at the same technological level of Wayland concerning the efficient buffer swap mechanism. X11 is however still miles ahead on the architectural level. Parts of the system like window managers or compositors can fail or be replaced at runtime without affecting running clients. Wayland lacks the appropriate standardized interfaces for that and there are not plans if not outright refusal to actually implement them.

Re: X12: Requirements for a successor to the X11 protocol (2013)

#56

Post by kstenerud »

oleg_antonyan wrote: post #14

X is almost 40yo, stable, reliable, difficult to maintain. Wayland is 15yo, barely usable. Any old timers remember 1999 when X was 15? Wayland is like IPv6 of desktops

Wayland is the default on RHEL since 2019.

Wayland is the default on Centos since 2019.

Wayland is the default on Ubuntu and Debian since 2022.

In Arch, Wayland is the default for GNOME installs.

Wayland is far from "barely usable"

And yes, I remember 1999. X was a pain to get working properly with many graphics cards. Some things never change...

Re: X12: Requirements for a successor to the X11 protocol (2013)

#57

Post by linuxandrew »

return_to_monke wrote: post #15
chungy wrote: post #5

Mind that the page describes a hypothetical update to X. In practical terms, Wayland is X12.

does Wayland have network transparency tho?

Network transparency doesn't offer any tangible benefits for a lot of apps and desktop environments because they are drawn with bitmaps and textures rather than vectors.

This topic has been done to death for the past decade. VNC and RDP won. X11 was a razor edge case and nothing more.

Re: X12: Requirements for a successor to the X11 protocol (2013)

#58

Post by actionfromafar »

pjmlp wrote: post #32
oleg_antonyan wrote: post #14

X is almost 40yo, stable, reliable, difficult to maintain. Wayland is 15yo, barely usable. Any old timers remember 1999 when X was 15? Wayland is like IPv6 of desktops

Old timers remember when xmodconfig could be used to burn monitors.

Not exactly burn them, just gently char the innards until the finest magic smoke was released.

Re: X12: Requirements for a successor to the X11 protocol (2013)

#59

Post by gpderetta »

linuxandrew wrote: post #57
return_to_monke wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

does Wayland have network transparency tho?

Network transparency doesn't offer any tangible benefits for a lot of apps and desktop environments because they are drawn with bitmaps and textures rather than vectors. This topic has been done to death for the past decade. VNC and RDP won. X11 was a razor edge case and nothing more.

ssh -X is still easier and lighter weight that running a VNC server on any machine I need to run a GUI though.

Incidentally at $CURRENT_JOB this happens very often: when WFH, I RDP to a windows machine, form which I VNC to a unix xvnc box form which I ssh -x to my actual dev box. It is amazing that it works at all and it is quite usable!

Re: X12: Requirements for a successor to the X11 protocol (2013)

#60

Post by vanderZwan »

aidenn0 wrote: post #19
bartvk wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not up to date on the Linux desktop ecosystem. In what sense is Wayland struggling?

It doesn't work reliably on any GPU I own, for any stable version of a linux distro I use. One GPU is too old, the other is too nvidia.

To be fair, I'm on an five-year old laptop with NVIDIA and since last year it almost works well enough to be a daily driver. For some weird reason Chromium doesn't render at all, even though Chrome does. That's the only remaining bug of significance.

Whereas when I tried a year before I had to bail after an hour because many applications would just have a black screen.

It kind of feels like it will take only one more year for this to work well enough (except then the laptop might be so old hardware support ends up lacking)

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