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Gnome developer proposes removing the X11 session

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Re: Gnome developer proposes removing the X11 session

#51

Post by r0l1 »

uxp8u61q wrote: post #49

As someone who used to be a diehard Linux user and supporter, and then switched back to windows after about a decade, this thread is a good reminder of why I switched back. I've been hearing about the year of the Linux desktop for... Years... And yet here are people who suggest I should put up with an incomplete, partially broken display server, because they don't want to deal with maintenance of the old one. And in…

I am using wayland since 5 years and never looked back to X11. I think it is the right way and time to remove the old insecure X11 backend. GNOME should not be bloated with legacy stuff.

Re: Gnome developer proposes removing the X11 session

#52

Post by mcpackieh »

linuxandrew wrote: post #47
enriquto wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The design of Wayland starts with the premise that every application connecting to your display might not be completely trusted, What a strange premise... Do the wayland people have keylocks on all the rooms, drawers and cupboards on their houses? Unix programs by default have access to all files in the user home. That's the main point of running programs after all: to edit your files. Letting these programs see al…

> If for some reason you want to run an untrusted application, use a container. But building your whole house around the "untrusted" premise sounds ridiculous. I guess we should do away with memory protection as well. Filesystem permissions? Bah, they can go too, after all, a computer is generally used by a single person right? The reality is that many users use untrusted applications that don't have access to home,…

> The reality is that many users use untrusted applications that don't have access to home, ergo Flatpak.

I'd like to see this quantified. How many people using flatpack are afraid of their application reading their files, vs using flatpack simply because it's a convenient way to install programs? I don't mean "oh me me!" responses, are there any user surveys to support the premise that average users are afraid of their applications?

Quite frankly I don't believe this level of paranoia is the norm. On Windows and MacOS, applications installed in the normal way can read the files on your desktop. This is the way it as always been on Linux too, with few exceptions. Letting the most paranoid users set the norms is a recipe for irrelevance. How popular is Qubes? It's a pain in the ass.

Re: Gnome developer proposes removing the X11 session

#53

Post by bandrami »

jeroenhd wrote: post #21
bandrami wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except for the guy who tried to do that with Python2 and the Python Foundation threatened legal action

When did they do that? All I can find is the Python foundation protecting their trademark. Someone launched "Python 2.8" without any affiliation to the Python Foundation, that's a silly move. Surely everyone in open source learned from the Iceweasel debacle. Something called Tauthon is still being patched every few months for people who can't let go of Python 2.7, though I don't see many contributors to that fork.

> without any affiliation to the Python Foundation

Sorry, no dice. The Python team said for years as the 2 to 3 rollout grew increasingly catastrophic "If you wan't to keep Python 2 all you have to do is maintain it" and then threatened to sue the guy who called their bluff. It was a real low point in free software.

Re: Gnome developer proposes removing the X11 session

#54

Post by bandrami »

codetrotter wrote: post #31
jeroenhd wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When did they do that? All I can find is the Python foundation protecting their trademark. Someone launched "Python 2.8" without any affiliation to the Python Foundation, that's a silly move. Surely everyone in open source learned from the Iceweasel debacle. Something called Tauthon is still being patched every few months for people who can't let go of Python 2.7, though I don't see many contributors to that fork.

> Someone launched "Python 2.8" without any affiliation to the Python Foundation, that's a silly move. […] > Something called Tauthon is still being patched every few months for people who can't let go of Python 2.7 I was curious and did a search for Python 2.8 and found: - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13144713 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13159144 Clicking on the GitHub repo it seems that in fact t…

Also "without any affiliation" is a stretch. He picked up a codebase they abandoned and they got pissy because he kept its name. It was really not a good look.

Re: Gnome developer proposes removing the X11 session

#55

Post by bandrami »

hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #34
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, users could stay on the perfectly fine X, and anyone who wants to push for Wayland adoption can put in the effort to make it not a regression.

Users are at the mercy of developers. If you want to stay and care about maintenance, you’d better hope someone is there maintaining it.

In that sense they're even more at the mercy of packagers. There's nearly 400 million repositories on Github alone; the pain point is curating those into a coherent system.

Re: Gnome developer proposes removing the X11 session

#56

Post by bandrami »

aumerle wrote: post #4
bitwize wrote: post #3

X can easily support per-display DPI -- clients just have to eschew the legacy global DPI setting. The Xrandr extension knows the dimensions of each display in both pixels and millimeters from its EDID. Clients interested in making adjustments based on per-display DPI could simply use those values obtained from Xrandr. These values can be wrong, of course -- monitors have been known to lie in their EDID reports -- bu…

xrandr is not sufficient for this. One needs a way for users to configure the per monitor DPI. And have the configuration available to X clients. Currently the only cross DE mechanism for this is Xft.dpi and its global, not per monitor.

xrandr is perfectly sufficient for this, although GTK for whatever reason chooses to break it (not just not implement it; proactively break it). Xcb picks it up just fine, as does Qt. I'm pretty sure Fltk does now too though I haven't tried it in a while.

Re: Gnome developer proposes removing the X11 session

#57

Post by Shekelphile »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #25
redox99 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, basic functionality is still not there 15 years after release. And I believe gnome still has that thing where if the UI lags, the cursor lags. Windows DWM, WDDM architecture, and anything graphics related on Windows is superior in so many ways. They should have copied that instead of the mess that Wayland is, which was developed in a manner that is typical for so many free software: the developers think they know…

> So, basic functionality is still not there 15 years after release. X11 didn't have what we currently consider "basic functionality" for decades after its release. The design of X11 says that every application connected to your display is completely trusted, hence why it can grab any key (and thus be a keylogger if it wants to be). The design of Wayland starts with the premise that every application connecting to yo…

It has nothing to do with security and everything to do with hollowing out all generic functionality and passing it on to the compositor. In other words, the devs are lazy and went for a minimalist approach and now we all get to suffer.

Re: Gnome developer proposes removing the X11 session

#58

Post by sam_lowry_ »

mongol wrote: post #38
enriquto wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The design of Wayland starts with the premise that every application connecting to your display might not be completely trusted, What a strange premise... Do the wayland people have keylocks on all the rooms, drawers and cupboards on their houses? Unix programs by default have access to all files in the user home. That's the main point of running programs after all: to edit your files. Letting these programs see al…

It is not a strange premise. It is the security model that for example Android uses. Unix security model is dated, and it is good that steps are taken in this direction.

Android is different, it is built to run untrusted apps.

My Linux Desktop runs Chromium, xterm, IntelliJ and occasionally Gimp.

Do I need the Wayland security model? Hardly so.

Am I an outlier among Linux Desktop users? Hardly so.

Re: Gnome developer proposes removing the X11 session

#59

Post by olgeni »

Reminds me of systemd: we "modern" developers despise anything that reminds us of "traditional" Unix, thus we need to rewrite it in such a way that is not only new, but actively punishes unwelcome users.

Then we will complain about "embrace and extend" while people try to replace their xdotool scripts and their perfectly working X11 setups.

Too bad for them: we don't care about custom applications, we still aim to just steal users from Windows. And 2024 will be the Year of Linux on the Desktop.

Re: Gnome developer proposes removing the X11 session

#60

Post by hsbauauvhabzb »

bandrami wrote: post #55
hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Users are at the mercy of developers. If you want to stay and care about maintenance, you’d better hope someone is there maintaining it.

In that sense they're even more at the mercy of packagers. There's nearly 400 million repositories on Github alone; the pain point is curating those into a coherent system.

Im not sure how many million of those are required to run gnome on x11 though.
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