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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)

#241

Post by wkat4242 »

emersion wrote: post #175
jmclnx wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The largest issue with Wayland is it has "Linuxisms". That means no work was done by the Wayland people to make it portable to other UN*X. So the BSD folks (and other UNIX people) have a lot of work to get it going. And there still seems to be confusion if or will Wayland require systemd, from what I have seen, no 100% clear direction from anyone.

This used to be true, but not anymore. We have upstream support for FreeBSD in libwayland now. Other BSDs have MRs which are only waiting for CI support. Wayland itself has nothing to do with systemd, many users are running Wayland without systemd.

Yes Wayland runs on FreeBSD but KDE still doesn't start with it unfortunately

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

#242

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

recuter wrote: post #237
_vbnz wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wayland has a massive loss in functionality (in the name of "security" and off-loading implementation details to compositors/window managers) compared to X11 though. Stuff like xdotool, screen sharing, clipboard sharing, etc. is much harder.

Wait just a second mister. Is it a loss of functionality or is it just "much harder"?

Why not both? It's a loss in functionality because it's much harder and the Linux desktop environment ecosystem is too niche, fragmented and underfunded to make the transition complete in a way that satisfies all camps so we end up in this traditional linux situation where several solutions coexist in parallel forever.

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

#243

Post by doctor_eval »

jerrysievert wrote: post #204
doctor_eval wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t identify as an old timer but I was using NCD X-Terminals connected to Data General Aviion back in the mid 90s and they were solid as a rock. XF86 also worked quite well in the late 90s but it did require a lot of work and there were warnings that certain settings could blow the monitor. Fun times.

to be fair, we had Keith Packard working with us at NCD during the mid 90's. it helped to have someone innately connected to X11.

That NCD terminal wasn't mine, but I had the use of it while I worked at a customer's site for 6 months or so. One of my all-time favourite devices. I wrote so much code on that thing. Thanks!

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

#244

Post by recuter »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #242
recuter wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait just a second mister. Is it a loss of functionality or is it just "much harder"?

Why not both? It's a loss in functionality because it's much harder and the Linux desktop environment ecosystem is too niche, fragmented and underfunded to make the transition complete in a way that satisfies all camps so we end up in this traditional linux situation where several solutions coexist in parallel forever.

Time heals all wounds. If it is hard but not impossible eventually the gaps will be filled. Also the people who maintain X11 can't live forever sadly. Eventually there will only be Wayland.

We only have to wait a few more decades at the outmost.

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

#245

Post by destructionator »

chlorion wrote: post #220
destructionator wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This link comes up in literally every Wayland thread and it is even more bullshit now than it was in 2013 when it was first posted (and it was bullshit then too). It is titled "the real story" but it is quite the opposite. A few key points: 1) he laughs at how X has a bunch of extensions. https://wayland.app/protocols/ hypocrites much. In 2013, since it was completely unusable, it probably didn't have many. But turns…

None of Waylands internal functions between a client and compositor are blocking or synchronous to my knowledge. Generally you fire off a message and will later receive an event back from the compositor, which is happening in an event loop. There is an exception, which is the explicitly blockling "roundtrip" function(s), but that is meant for special cases only. Being asynchronous was an design goal for Wayland from…

This isn't that different than X though which also has the fire off a message and receive event back. Very few of the functions actually make you want (even in xlib, which wraps the protocol itself to be a bit easier to use from C, the majority of functions still are async - much to the chagrin of newbies trying to decipher error messages)

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

#246

Post by destructionator »

vetinari wrote: post #132
destructionator wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This link comes up in literally every Wayland thread and it is even more bullshit now than it was in 2013 when it was first posted (and it was bullshit then too). It is titled "the real story" but it is quite the opposite. A few key points: 1) he laughs at how X has a bunch of extensions. https://wayland.app/protocols/ hypocrites much. In 2013, since it was completely unusable, it probably didn't have many. But turns…

1) no, he complains that X11 has a big core and then extensions. Extensions are fine, but they were unable to kick out parts of the core, because it is the core and something somewhere assumes it is there. So they had to maintain it, despite not being used in practice, except by that little something that nobody can point their fingers at. 2) he talks about obsolete hardware. There's no really a point to support s3 t…

> That graceful degradation is in practice the same, as just using Wayland. Ever tried to use modern X11 app over network? RDP is vastly better experience, (and RDP support is wip in wayland).

I do, in fact, use modern X11 apps over the network literally every day. Some are better than others - if the programmer made the effort to actually gracefully degrade it can be a considerably better experience than the ones who just shoot a constant stream of bitmaps down the wire (which do work better on rdp, i remember once upon a time, I'd ssh to my linux box and set up port forwarding to a windows box on my lan so i can remote desktop to it, then run Xming from there... which is absurd that that actually worked better), but if you do it well, remote X is very nice to use.

The seamless integration of windows from multiple computers is a thing to behold. Remote Desktop is great and I like a lot about it, but even the "Seamless" rdp doesn't work as nice as X.

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

#247

Post by markrages »

csdvrx wrote: post #170
markrages wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sloppy-focus-follows-mouse is the feature that keeps me on X. A basic Unix feature forever, completely broken in Ubuntu's Wayland.

It works fine on Arch with the Hyprland compositor: putting the mouse from the terminal to waybar, you can still type in the terminal. When was the last time you really tried wayland? My first (and last) time was 2017. Much has changed! In a few years, when wine support is perfected, I think people dissing wayland will be seen as quaint as those insisting on a distribution "unsoiled" by systemd are seen today :)

I tried it up to last month in Ubuntu 22.04. I changed back because I got tired of the broken focus-follows-mouse and Ubuntu tracks the bug but doesn't fix it.

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

#248

Post by zamalek »

recuter wrote: post #237
_vbnz wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wayland has a massive loss in functionality (in the name of "security" and off-loading implementation details to compositors/window managers) compared to X11 though. Stuff like xdotool, screen sharing, clipboard sharing, etc. is much harder.

Wait just a second mister. Is it a loss of functionality or is it just "much harder"?

Neither. Screensharing was a massive issue for a while, but it's now far easier than X11 because the server/portal is responsible for a lot of the more fiddly bits.

The underlying problem is that the protocol (ABI, really) has to be specified and implemented for these things to work. Screensharing was a prominent early example of something which hadn't been through that process. It was a very visible issue, an easy wound for hardcore X11 fanatics to pull at, and - apparently - continue to bash on long after it has been solved.

Clipboard woes have likewise been solved.

Mouse and keyboard injection has not yet been solved, but I recall there being some draft spec to that effect.

Ultimately, if Wayland does 100% of what you need, you should be using it because it generally does those things better. If it doesn't do what you need, then stick with X11 until it does (and support for that protocol is widespread).

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

#249

Post by bitwize »

wkat4242 wrote: post #239
bitwize wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Xorg is maintained... by Red Hat. As steponlego pointed out, they're already binning up chunks of the code base, but that's just preparing for when they shut the lights off entirely. As soon as Red Hat says "Shop's closed, boys, we won't be updating this code anymore" KDE and Qt will happily cut out their X support. Especially since Qt has for years been targeting mobile phones, car displays, and embedded application…

Yeah I know RedHat 'maintains' X11, this is part of the politicizing they do. Embrace, extinguish, they just forgot the extend part :) RedHat and their business focus is a lot of what is wrong with Linux for users today. We don't make money for RedHat so their priorities aren't with us. I'm hoping someone will still take it over for when happens. RedHat doesn't own X11. Wayland has its uses but there's a lot of niche…

Probably your best hope is OpenBSD's Xenocara project, a fork of Xorg. If Xorg bitrots away and Red Hat won't touch it, some OpenBSD madlads are likely to step up... at least until Wayland gets running well on OpenBSD. :)

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

#250

Post by pabs3 »

kelnos wrote: post #197
pabs3 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The average user isn't running a desktop.

Oof, that hits hard, but you're probably right: I expect there are more people who primarily (or even exclusively) use a smartphone or tablet than a general-purpose computer running a general-purpose OS. It's a sad state of affairs, to be sure.

There are libre mobile devices, but approximately no-one uses them, just like approximately no-one uses Linux on the desktop. Unless some large vendors start shipping Linux by default on all their devices, or the current mainstream OS vendors become really obnoxious and people go searching for alternative devices with Linux installed by default, that isn't going to change since people really don't want to have to do installs themselves.
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