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Gnome developer proposes removing the X11 session

theregister.com

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Re: Gnome developer proposes removing the X11 session

#111

Post by justinclift »

abenga wrote: post #107
justinclift wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the article is still correct, and Wayland doesn't work with the Nvidia binary drivers then that's a hard blocker for at least myself. :/ That being said, I'm still using Ubuntu 20.04 LTS on my desktop as I prefer stable systems. That way I can put time into the things I'm interested in more. :) So, as long as it all works nicely by the time I need to change from Ubuntu 20.04, then I likely won't particularly care…

It works perfectly fine on Debian testing (in fact the X session developed show-stopper bugs that forced me to use Wayland), so it should be on Ubuntu soon.

Cool, thanks. :)

Re: Gnome developer proposes removing the X11 session

#112

Post by nathants »

i’m working on a 240hz low latency game on linux.

currently i run on x11, either directly via startx or via dwm when developing.

i will switch to wayland in an instant if it demonstrably improves any metric i care about.

i continue to monitor the situation and look forward to improvements in either stack and in drivers.

Re: Gnome developer proposes removing the X11 session

#113

Post by bandrami »

E1Q6Y57O wrote: post #103
bandrami wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "subset" of clients using Xcb or Qt? I'm fine with only counting them, personally...

This comment makes no sense, XCB isn't a toolkit. You might be thinking of something else with a similar acronym. But anyway, any solution that tells users to only use a small subset of compatible clients is about as disruptive as just switching wholesale to Wayland. It's not the reason anyone is hanging on to the X server.

I didn't say it was a "toolkit", it's a library that largely replaces Xlib, and it uses xrandr correctly to allow multiple pitches

https://xcb.freedesktop.org

Re: Gnome developer proposes removing the X11 session

#114

Post by bandrami »

hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #60
bandrami wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

To run (let's ignore build deps for now) it needs dconf, desktop-file-utils, glib, schemas, python, ibus (you can disable it but it still has to be there, annoyingly), telepathy, a seat manager, pulse, polkit, eds, mutter, gtk4, and whatever fonts you want. If you want it to display on the local machine you'll need an xserver; as of now each of the apps can simply act as a client though (which is the capability they are discussing getting rid of).

I know this because I'm a packager...

Re: Gnome developer proposes removing the X11 session

#115

Post by bandrami »

jeroenhd wrote: post #94
DangitBobby wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After reading your first link I'm having a very hard time understanding how it's a "new version incompatible with either Python 2.7 or Python 3" or how you can think "they created an alternative language that was completely different" is true in any sense. > Python 2.8 is a backwards-compatible Python interpreter that runs Python 2 code and C-extensions exactly as-is, while also allowing Python 2 programmers to use t…

> Really sounds like Python 2.8 to me! That's the problem, isn't it? Nobody who works on Python actually worked on this fork, but it sounds and looks official. That's why the Python Foundation people found this troublesome enough to demand a rename. Tauthnon has lots of additions to normal Python, most stemming from a bunch of PEPs that author liked. You can't run Tauthon code on any Python interpreter (either 2.7 or…

That's begging the question, because the guy who picked up the codebase they abandoned was absolutely "working on Python" in any normal sense of the word. The people who used to work on Python stopped working on it to make a new language which they also wanted to call Python.

Re: Gnome developer proposes removing the X11 session

#116

Post by E1Q6Y57O »

bandrami wrote: post #113
E1Q6Y57O wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment makes no sense, XCB isn't a toolkit. You might be thinking of something else with a similar acronym. But anyway, any solution that tells users to only use a small subset of compatible clients is about as disruptive as just switching wholesale to Wayland. It's not the reason anyone is hanging on to the X server.

I didn't say it was a "toolkit", it's a library that largely replaces Xlib, and it uses xrandr correctly to allow multiple pitches https://xcb.freedesktop.org

Yes, I know what it is. Here are some corrections.

1. XCB is a low level binding to the X11 protocol. It doesn't really replace Xlib. Originally that was the intention, but it's non-trivial to take an Xlib program and port it to XCB.

2. XCB doesn't know anything about scaling or even about XRandR, besides the wire protocol. Just because a client uses XCB is no guarantee that it even uses XRandR. It's definitely not a guarantee that it implements scaling.

3. There is no way to use XRandR correctly to allow multiple pitches, because XRandR doesn't have that functionality. All it does is report an estimated size of the monitor.

4. The scaling you're talking about is happening in the client, not in XCB or XRandR, and if it's ever going to work at all it needs to be controlled by some other setting or environment variable. Someone else in the thread posted a big set of those environment variables. Ideally you wouldn't use XRandR at all, there would be another extension.

5. None of the above applies to Qt, because Qt is a toolkit that does (mostly) implement the scaling for you. That's why it was weird you grouped it with XCB.

Re: Gnome developer proposes removing the X11 session

#117

Post by bandrami »

E1Q6Y57O wrote: post #116
bandrami wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't say it was a "toolkit", it's a library that largely replaces Xlib, and it uses xrandr correctly to allow multiple pitches https://xcb.freedesktop.org

Yes, I know what it is. Here are some corrections. 1. XCB is a low level binding to the X11 protocol. It doesn't really replace Xlib. Originally that was the intention, but it's non-trivial to take an Xlib program and port it to XCB. 2. XCB doesn't know anything about scaling or even about XRandR, besides the wire protocol. Just because a client uses XCB is no guarantee that it even uses XRandR. It's definitely not a…

That's a whole lot of "nothing" it has to do with randr:

https://xcb.freedesktop.org/manual/group__XCB__RandR__API.ht...

But, yes, software using Xcb does have to actually do it correctly for it to work, like nearly all aspects of software development.

Re: Gnome developer proposes removing the X11 session

#118

Post by E1Q6Y57O »

bandrami wrote: post #117
E1Q6Y57O wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I know what it is. Here are some corrections. 1. XCB is a low level binding to the X11 protocol. It doesn't really replace Xlib. Originally that was the intention, but it's non-trivial to take an Xlib program and port it to XCB. 2. XCB doesn't know anything about scaling or even about XRandR, besides the wire protocol. Just because a client uses XCB is no guarantee that it even uses XRandR. It's definitely not a…

That's a whole lot of "nothing" it has to do with randr: https://xcb.freedesktop.org/manual/group__XCB__RandR__API.ht... But, yes, software using Xcb does have to actually do it correctly for it to work, like nearly all aspects of software development.

Like everything else in XCB, those are just stubs autogenerated from the wire protocol definition. The client has to actually implement the protocol semantics including duplicating a lot of logic that's already present in Xlib. There's no performance benefit to this either. For that reason XRandR is probably one of the most useless and least beneficial things to use XCB for. Signed, someone who actually did try this at one point and ended up reverting back to Xlib.

>But, yes, software using Xcb does have to actually do it correctly for it to work,

There isn't a way to do this correctly, it's a hack. The difference is that Qt attempts to do it automatically, compared to XCB that intentionally does nothing for the programmer because it's a low-level binding.

Re: Gnome developer proposes removing the X11 session

#119

Post by bandrami »

E1Q6Y57O wrote: post #118
bandrami wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a whole lot of "nothing" it has to do with randr: https://xcb.freedesktop.org/manual/group__XCB__RandR__API.ht... But, yes, software using Xcb does have to actually do it correctly for it to work, like nearly all aspects of software development.

Like everything else in XCB, those are just stubs autogenerated from the wire protocol definition. The client has to actually implement the protocol semantics including duplicating a lot of logic that's already present in Xlib. There's no performance benefit to this either. For that reason XRandR is probably one of the most useless and least beneficial things to use XCB for. Signed, someone who actually did try this…

> There isn't a way to do this correctly, it's a hack

Hacks are often the correct way to do things.

JFC this is annoying. I'm telling you "it works for my professional use case on X11 and doesn't on Wayland" and you keep trying to gaslight me about this by saying it's impossible.

This doesn't work on Wayland. It does work on X11. You can stomp your feet until you're blue in the face but that won't change this basic fact.

If (for whatever reason; I'm still mystified why you care about this) you really really think it's important to get me to switch display servers, make it work on Wayland. Otherwise just let me have my preferences which I largely maintain and package.

Re: Gnome developer proposes removing the X11 session

#120

Post by M95D »

BeetleB wrote: post #27
JoshTriplett wrote: post #6

GNOME (and many others) have spent years telling anyone who has issues with Wayland that lead them to run an X session to report bugs, and has put a lot of effort into fixing those bugs. This seems like a reasonable next step. > This plan seems to The Reg's FOSS Desk to be strong-arming people into adopting Wayland. Or, more reasonably, to maintain less code for alternate paths in favor of fixing the issues that lead…

> Every bit of effort spent fixing a bug in X to help the fraction of users still using it is effort that could have gone into fixing the bugs in Wayland that leave people using X in the first place. What fraction is that? I thought X still had the larger user share.

They don't care about user shares. Why would they?
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