Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

x.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 318 posts

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

#291

Post by kevincox »

WesolyKubeczek wrote: post #54

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 swi…

IIUC this is more or less how the secure screen lockers work. GNOME will switch to the Display Manager (GDM) screen and ask it to validate the user's credentials before switching back to the session screen. If GDM crashes there is nothing to see and it is restarted.

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

#292

Post by goosedragons »

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.

Does it? Desktop mode reports itself as X11. I don't think Gamescope supports Wayland either...

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

#293

Post by the_only_law »

destructionator wrote: post #117
vetinari wrote: post #91

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

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…

> The core X protocol provides backward compatibility

I had a bit of fun a while back trying to get an old X/11 terminal to work with a modern Linux machine and was somewhat surprised I was able to make it work. Sort of at least. Many display managers didn’t implement the proper protocols, but XDM did and I was able to get it to work at least a few times.

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

#294

Post by jerrysievert »

doctor_eval wrote: post #243
jerrysievert wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

I ended up leaving with a couple of generations of x terminals, my favorite which could pxe-boot and had a compactflash-like slot on it.

the weirder was an Apollo we had for an internal auction, strangest unix system I've ever run. but the b&w screen was very high resolution for the time and quite crisp.

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

#295

Post by aidenn0 »

vetinari wrote: post #148
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, let's enumerate. Option 1: Wants to used hardware acceleration, fails, allows you to disable it and actually use your computer. Option 2: Wants to use hardware acceleration, fails, refuses to allow you to disable anything, literally cannot display graphics. One of these works, even degraded. The other does not.

I don't dispute that. My claim was, that both options you mention are broken, and for that one "working", "limping" would be a better term. Certainly not something you would architect a display system around.

I have been using linux for over 20 years and reliable hardware acceleration has always been more "miss" than "hit." This goes all the way back to having to disable hardware cursors on my very first linux setup. I hear the amdgpu driver is pretty solid, and the i915 driver I use on my laptop is great. Nvidia is just a mess (nouveau and the nvidia binary drivers are differently buggy) and the radeon driver is complete garbage.

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

#296

Post by LeFantome »

lizknope wrote: post #147
peoplefromibiza wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Anyone who believes that XFree86 was stable in 1999 was apparently running a different XFree86 to me XFree86 on Linux wasn't very stable in 1999 (although it was more than usable, more than Wayland is today). X11 on IRIX in 1999 was pretty stable. Parent said X, not specifically XFree86. also something to consider: how many people were working on Xfree86 in 1999 and how many people are working on Wayland in 2023? W…

XFree86 worked fine for me since 1994. I sometimes had problems when exiting a video game like Doom or Quake. SVGAlib would give problems but that wasn't X.

It would help if you did not give easily verifiable facts to reveal the inaccuracy of your recall. You may have been using Doom in 1994 but you certainly were not using Quake. If this is an accurate memory, what year is it from?

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

#297

Post by messe »

goosedragons wrote: post #292
messe wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Does it? Desktop mode reports itself as X11. I don't think Gamescope supports Wayland either...

Gamescope itself is a wayland compositor, although it only supports X clients at the moment, getting frames through Xwayland.

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

#298

Post by NoGravitas »

topaz0 wrote: post #98
pauby wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The average user isn't running a Linux desktop.

I have been running linux on various hardware since about 2003. Zero of those computers had discrete gpus.

The last Linux box I used that had a discrete gpu had a Matrox G400 (released 1999). Every one since then has been Intel onboard.

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

#299

Post by lizknope »

LeFantome wrote: post #296
lizknope wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

XFree86 worked fine for me since 1994. I sometimes had problems when exiting a video game like Doom or Quake. SVGAlib would give problems but that wasn't X.

It would help if you did not give easily verifiable facts to reveal the inaccuracy of your recall. You may have been using Doom in 1994 but you certainly were not using Quake. If this is an accurate memory, what year is it from?

I installed Linux on my PC in September 1994 at the start of my sophomore year of college. I remember playing Doom during that school year from Sept 1994 to May 1995.

The Quake Wiki says Qtest was released Feb 24, 1996 and I remember playing that the week it was released.

I always felt that X11 on Linux was just as stable as X11 on SunOS, Solaris, Ultrix, HP-UX, IRIX, and AIX.

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

#300

Post by bitwize »

tmtvl wrote: post #276
bitwize wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More like the R6RS of desktops.

Really? I thought that one of the complaints about R6RS was that it was too broad and overspecified, while Wayland is too small so every other compositor is reinventing half of X11 by itself. I'd say it's more like R7RS (hash tables? No. Procedural records? No. Enumerations? Nope). EDIT: This comment may age poorly when R7RS Large is complete.

One of my problems with R6RS was it was a profound shift in philosophy. The consensus criterion was changed from unanimous to simple majority, for instance, and there was much more emphasis on building a practical software engineering language rather than a language core intended to be built upon.

But it kind of failed at that because its standard library had only a small fraction of the features that "practical languages" like Python or Java had! ("> 1 line to send an email -- NON-STARTER!") So it was kind of a fuck you to the existing Scheme user base, in favor of new users that had yet to materialize, and yet it didn't deliver what those new users wanted! (R7RS Small was kind of a return to form for Scheme. I really appreciate the Small vs. Large profiles, akin to C's freestanding vs. hosted implementation profiles.)

And Wayland is kinda the same. "Fuck everything about X11" is as significant a rationale for Wayland as any, but there's a lot of things X11 users need that it didn't do very well until fairly recently. But literally everyone with the know-how to work on X11 backs Wayland instead... so unlike the R6RS situation it's kind of a fait accompli. Enough Scheme implementers were assmad about R6RS that there had to be a compromise.

Post reply on HN