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Phoenix: A modern X server written from scratch in Zig

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Re: Phoenix: A modern X server written from scratch in Zig

#61
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For people who absolutely have to have X11 this looks like a better plan than XLibre.

The people who absolutely have to have X11 like myself usually have reasons. It sounds like currently a lot of those reasons for using X11 would prevent using this X server. Like reliable non-fragmented and widely supported screenreader protocol. Or the ability to do keyboard and mouse sharing. >Applications will be isolated from each other by default and can only interact with other applications either through a GUI…

Accessibility? Sure. Everything else? Nah, I'm sorry. There are countless ways to do remoting with Wayland. There are countless ways to do kb+mouse sharing.

Re: Phoenix: A modern X server written from scratch in Zig

#62
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who want to use X11 are likely to be the same people using older software and hardware, which this doesn't support.

I don't use any old hardware, and I have argued for a new X server following almost exactly the steps this project outlines.

Good news. The devs of x11 agree and made a replacement called... Way... Oops

Re: Phoenix: A modern X server written from scratch in Zig

#64
post #9

If you are not going to implement X11 drawing ops and XRender (which I, and many others, still use heavily), what's even the point? Any 'modern' program that only does client-side rendering already supports Wayland. AFAIK GTK 3 doesn't even support DRI on X11 unless you somehow trick it into using the abandoned OpenGL Cairo backend, but that's not modern enough apparently.

If I could give a comment HN Gold, it would be this comment. 3 times.

Re: Phoenix: A modern X server written from scratch in Zig

#65
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't use any old hardware, and I have argued for a new X server following almost exactly the steps this project outlines.

Good news. The devs of x11 agree and made a replacement called... Way... Oops

Yeah, no, the X11 devs made pretty much all the wrong tradeoffs for me.

Re: Phoenix: A modern X server written from scratch in Zig

#66
post #5

Complements XLibre[0], an active fork of the X11 server from Xorg. XLibre is trying to advance the existing implementation which Xorg abandoned, whereas Phoenix is writing a new, compatible server from scratch. 0. https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver

XLibre is a joke. They're making changes for the sake of changes: for example, commit aefde9 strips out vendoring in an ad-hoc, incomplete fashion (introducing a minor spacing bug in the process); and commit aafd986 replaces `int` with `unsigned int` (instead of `size_t`), failing to properly fix the bug that the compiler warnings identified (albeit, also removing an unrelated C footgun along the way, so this does lo…

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Re: Phoenix: A modern X server written from scratch in Zig

#67
post #13

This is a great project! I like and use Wayland but the portal protocols and extension mechanism does leave a lot to be desired. Wayland is still quite a way behind Windows and macOS in terms of what productivity users need An X11 rewrite with some security baked in is an awesome approach. Will be watching!

BS, windows and macos cant even do proper window managing for a start, and then it just goes downwards from there on.. You can perhaps install various weird third party things, but it does not come with it by default. If you took people who absolutely never tried any computing, and gave them macos, windows, and for example Plasma, they would NOT consider windows or macos to be ready for the desktop. If you go 15 year…

15 years back people were given Windows macOS and Linux and people voted which OS were ready for the Desktop and which were not. The only BS is your inflammatory contribution to this topic.

Re: Phoenix: A modern X server written from scratch in Zig

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BS, windows and macos cant even do proper window managing for a start, and then it just goes downwards from there on.. You can perhaps install various weird third party things, but it does not come with it by default. If you took people who absolutely never tried any computing, and gave them macos, windows, and for example Plasma, they would NOT consider windows or macos to be ready for the desktop. If you go 15 year…

[flagged]

I don't use a Mac, but have you ever used Windows?

I mean, maybe you have, but if you are not fussy then at worst MacOS is quirky and Windows and Linux are identical and merely have different icons.

If you pay a little bit of attention you will notice that on linux things seem more flexible and intuitive.

If you are very finnicky, there is nothing that comes close to X11 window managers when it comes to window management flexibility, innovation and power.

Re: Phoenix: A modern X server written from scratch in Zig

#70
post #23
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For people who absolutely have to have X11 this looks like a better plan than XLibre.

It depends on whether their reasons for "absolutely having to have X11" hinge on actual compatibility with e.g. old binaries or wanting full remoting without streaming pixels. This project would satisfy people who really actually want Wayland, but were upset by transitional pains or interactions they had around it and want to stick with X11 just-cause while getting some similar benefits. This arguably does describe s…

Wayland made writing WMs needlessly hard, and the benefits of Wayland were frankly not real - most of the reasons given in 2011 were patched in to X11 later. All the Wayland rewrite got us was a situation where Wayland is both bleeding-edge and obsolete simultaneously. Say what you like about X11, but by the time people unironically pushed for mass Wayland adoption, X11 was stable and boringly so.

The future of WMs is, IMO, Arcan - https://arcan-fe.com/ - but that's an ambitious project and I don't blame the main developer for deliberately going out of his way to avoid advertising it before it's ready. In the meanwhile, Wayland and X11 both more-or-less work with the occasional major pain in the ass.

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