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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)

#151

Post by WhatIsDukkha »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #112
dark-star wrote: post #96

The discussion about "wayland vs X11" is eerily reminiscent of the discussion of "systemd vs. sysv-init"... Some people apparently really do hate it when things change that they seemingly have no control over Edit: I fully expect to be downvoted into oblivion for this post :-D

I think in both cases, there's a similar switch of philosophy. We went from "there are a bunch of components glued together, and with enough glue you can solve anything (except an excess of glue)" (shell scripts for sysvinit vs declarative unit files for systemd; X11 apps that can do almost anything, vs the privileged compositor for wayland), to a model of "we wanted things to just work without having to install glue…

You are presenting this in certain way that I think veers into inaccurate and misleading in an attempt to smooth things over and be nice.

What we had before systemd was -

90% glue code, reimplemented quite badly across X distributions.

That glue code was, in practice, extremely brittle and very very unfun to attempt to keep even simple daemons running "portably" distribution to distribution.

The other 10% was increasingly aging and ill maintained c code snippets.

That was not a nice world for people actually using it.

For people making stuff up about "the old days" that didn't actually participate in the misery of making basic systemv scripts, yeah it was composable and we lost something.

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

#152

Post by earlyam »

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

As a user(!), Wayland is much more usable at 15 than X was at 25.

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

#153

Post by zozbot234 »

WhatIsDukkha wrote: post #151
JoshTriplett wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think in both cases, there's a similar switch of philosophy. We went from "there are a bunch of components glued together, and with enough glue you can solve anything (except an excess of glue)" (shell scripts for sysvinit vs declarative unit files for systemd; X11 apps that can do almost anything, vs the privileged compositor for wayland), to a model of "we wanted things to just work without having to install glue…

You are presenting this in certain way that I think veers into inaccurate and misleading in an attempt to smooth things over and be nice. What we had before systemd was - 90% glue code, reimplemented quite badly across X distributions. That glue code was, in practice, extremely brittle and very very unfun to attempt to keep even simple daemons running "portably" distribution to distribution. The other 10% was increas…

The internals of systemd are just as brittle, and the model of unit file configuration does not really apply cleanly beyond the simplest cases. So editing unit files becomes an undocumented dark art.

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

#154

Post by rodgerd »

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…

> I don't know why people get so hung up about this.

People get hung up on this because they believe that free software somehow entitles them to dictate that others perform infinite labour on whatever schedule, projects, or features that they deem fit, irrespective of whether the people they are dictating to want to, think that it's a good idea, or whatever.

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

#155

Post by yyyk »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #112
dark-star wrote: post #96

The discussion about "wayland vs X11" is eerily reminiscent of the discussion of "systemd vs. sysv-init"... Some people apparently really do hate it when things change that they seemingly have no control over Edit: I fully expect to be downvoted into oblivion for this post :-D

I think in both cases, there's a similar switch of philosophy. We went from "there are a bunch of components glued together, and with enough glue you can solve anything (except an excess of glue)" (shell scripts for sysvinit vs declarative unit files for systemd; X11 apps that can do almost anything, vs the privileged compositor for wayland), to a model of "we wanted things to just work without having to install glue…

X11 offers a lot of functionality on the server - a lot of it unused, but still. Wayland technically specifies little but the protocol. So here the philosophy switch is the other way around.

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

#156

Post by pelorat »

ravishi wrote: post #99
fsh wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wayland is the default on Fedora, Ubuntu, Red Hat, and Debian. The majority of desktop linux users is probably on Wayland by now.

Until they have to share screen in a meeting and give up tweaking flags in different places, login using X and never look back again. Seriously for anyone who works remotely sharing screen is essential, but it still doesn't work flawlessly in Wayland.

Just do real time video encoding of the screen and forget about X.

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

#157

Post by yyyk »

fsh wrote: post #24
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 Fedora, Ubuntu, Red Hat, and Debian. The majority of desktop linux users is probably on Wayland by now.

I recall none of these distros change existing installs, also plasma (KDE) is often still on X11. So it depends on proportions of new users+new installs+selected DE+video card...

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

#158

Post by cwillu »

raydiatian wrote: post #105
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

> “barely usable” I run Hyprland just fine with Wayland, I seriously doubt it is barely usable. > IPv6 of desktops Dunno if you’ve looked at your ip link lately but you probably have an ipv6 address!

Having an ipv6 address is the easy part. Having ping6 actually able to ping something over ipv6 is another thing entirely.

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

#159

Post by ThatMedicIsASpy »

messe wrote: post #139
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 15yo, barely usable It's the default on several distros. I regularly play AAA games on my gentoo gaming PC, using proprietary NVIDIA drivers, on KDE Plasma, with little or no performance differences compared to X11. Even the Steam Deck, arguably the most popular linux PC, runs its default UI on Wayland.

Gamescope is wayland while the desktop is x11

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

#160

Post by JoshTriplett »

WhatIsDukkha wrote: post #151
JoshTriplett wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think in both cases, there's a similar switch of philosophy. We went from "there are a bunch of components glued together, and with enough glue you can solve anything (except an excess of glue)" (shell scripts for sysvinit vs declarative unit files for systemd; X11 apps that can do almost anything, vs the privileged compositor for wayland), to a model of "we wanted things to just work without having to install glue…

You are presenting this in certain way that I think veers into inaccurate and misleading in an attempt to smooth things over and be nice. What we had before systemd was - 90% glue code, reimplemented quite badly across X distributions. That glue code was, in practice, extremely brittle and very very unfun to attempt to keep even simple daemons running "portably" distribution to distribution. The other 10% was increas…

I was attempting to acknowledge, in good faith, that there are valid tradeoffs between models, even for folks who prefer one model over the other.

I'm happy in the current model as well. But I also acknowledge what it traded off to get there.

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