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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)

#281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

What do you mean by all Wayland's calls being blocking though?

It isn't really Wayland's calls itself, I prolly stretched too much there, but the main thing is the async discussion usually comes up in the context of running applications remotely, which Wayland simply doesn't support. If you do a loop of XInternAtom (which btw you shouldn't do, even in xlib - notice that there's also XInternAtoms, plural, for that kind of thing which batches them to reduce wait time...) locally, it is unlikely to matter. The time spent there is near zero anyway. But remotely, now you might be looking at several ms per iteration and that adds up fast. Now the blocking aspect can become problematic.

Since Wayland doesn't support this kind of network remote use anyway, the distinction doesn't matter. Local X vs Wayland are both fast.

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

#282

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

I remember in 1996 when we were told that X12 (Broadway?) would be viewable within a web browser as well as on our local display...

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

#283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Async X11 was tried with xcb, and it failed. In the above linked video, this is illustrated in the "Bad IPC" part, with the example of gedit startup (gedit uses gtk and gtk uses xcb) and where it blocks.

He claims gedit does 130 blocking InternAtom calls, 34 blocking GetProperty calls, and 116 property change requests. None of those are actually using the available async functions (or even available XInternAtoms call to batch all those 130 into the main thing).

Since this video is coming up on ten years old, it might have been true at the time, and gtk/gedit have since changed the implementation. But regardless, if the video is accurate, they didn't use the non-blocking calls. If the video is not accurate, it is meaningless anyway.

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

#284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 wh…

If you don't mind answering, what do you do that uses GUI over network? Not looking to argue or try to claim would work better or anything, just curious what people use it for seriously these days.

I use tons of things on it. When I use my laptop, often I'll run a local browser (though sometimes I run remote browsers too - Chromium's core works actually surprisingly well on a remote X link - but the bigger problem there is that chromium doesn't support multiple instances, so if I left the browser open on the desktop, the cookies and history aren't shared on the remote instance on the laptop which defeats the purpose of reusing the instance anyway, but sometimes the shared passwords still nice to have) with most everything else being run remote.

Among the specific applications are my developer tools, image viewers, music editors, the apps I'm actually working on, etc. Of course, some of these also work fine on ssh terminals and I do plenty of that too, but there's just no need to be limited and I'll run whatever I want to.

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

#285
post #139

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.

I have tried Wayland several times over the last few years, but I have many persistent niggles caused by third parties refusal to fully support it. For one, Discord doesn't support push-to-talk VOIP on Wayland (I believe it requires them to create a daemon for global keypresses). I also recently 'upgraded' my RX 5700 XT to a 3070, because I received the 3070 for free, and Nvidia just refuses to support Wayland.

It's not that Wayland is bad. It's that companies, whose primary focus is Windows, just refuse to develop for it.

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

#286

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

I'm not sure if it was 1999, but I remember Mir being the golden future of display servers and Wayland being a pipedream. That didn't work out very well.

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

#287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wh…

I was about say, literally WHAT? x2go destroys every other solution I've ever tried for this.

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

#288
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've seen commentary from people who have worked intimately on both protocols and implementations of both who consider Wayland to have the better architecture. For those interested in details: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWQh_DmDLKQ

Most of the criticisms in this talk are solved with DRI3. Also this guy makes money with a consultant agency that mainly works on Wayland and indirectly profits from shitting on X11. This is not a neutral source.

Right? I really feel like not enough attention is paid to the question of: Who is paid to work on "the successor to X" and what influences are at work there?

Seems to me that would be an obvious place to look for "why Wayland sucks," given that unfortunately, "paid" sometimes leads one to "exclusivity."

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

#289
A question that's not asked enough:

Who, or what groups, get paid or make a living to work on "the successor to X?"

And more importantly, where do THEIR incentives lie, especially regarding the question of "playing nice with the old stuff and other devs trying to build things here."

My best guess is this is where you'll find ALL the answers to "why wayland sucks."

(It may not even be "nefarious," simply "not worth our time," or "why not just use OUR preferred DE instead of the one you're working on?" -- okay, maybe that is nefarious. :)

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

#290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 2017, a typo was fixed. The content is from 2013: https://cgit.freedesktop.org/wiki/xorg/log/Development/X12.m...

Yet I'm still running X11, with Wayland still struggling and no X12 in sight.

Wayland is X12.
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