Phoenix: A modern X server written from scratch in Zig • Hacker News Board

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

#91

Post by someguyiguess » Thu, Dec 25, 2025, 2:45 AM UTC

glzone1 wrote: post #51

sho_hn wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An X12 was briefly considered by the community before adopting Wayland: https://www.x.org/wiki/Development/X12/ If you take the time to read through that (very partial) list of cruft and footguns in X11 it probably makes it a little easier to understand why a clean-slate approach was able to attract momentum and why many hands-on involved developers were relatively tired of X11. Critics would of course respond that b…

Python 3 was actively antagonistic to Python 2 code for no reason other than to lecture us about how we were doing things wrong, writing code to support 2 and 3 to help transition was dumb etc etc. For example, in python 2 you could explicitly mark unicode text with u"...". That was actively BLOCKED with python 3.0 which supposedly was about unicode support! The irony was insane, they could of just no-oped the u"". I…

Python is really one of the worst designed languages. It always baffles me that people recommend it to beginners.

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

#92

Post by shevy-java » Thu, Dec 25, 2025, 2:45 AM UTC

sho_hn wrote: post #11

Pretty interesting approach to make an X server that is essentially "Wayland-like" (merging display server/compositor by default, isolated apps by default, no remoting of GLX, dropping legacy protocol features to the point of breaking compat with the core protocol, etc.). Not sure who this is for, but by itself it looks like a fairly reasonable set of choices.

> by itself it looks like a fairly reasonable set of choices.

I have not tried this myself, so I can not speak from experience, but if they have removed features that people used, then they are in a similar situation as wayland. So I don't see what the difference then would be. Perhaps your analysis was also incomplete?

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

#93

Post by shevy-java » Thu, Dec 25, 2025, 2:46 AM UTC

sho_hn wrote: post #87

Qwertious wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

> "most of the reasons given in 2011 were patched in to X11 later" This definitely doesn't match my memory, and I was there :) Most of the good reasons remain unavailable in X11 to this day. There definitely were some attempts to advance X11 that post-date Wayland, most notably the proposals by Keith Packard, but they never got much traction.

> This definitely doesn't match my memory, and I was there :) Most of the good reasons remain unavailable in X11 to this day.

You two here don't mention any of the reasons. It is hard to discuss this when there are no specifics, so what was needed, and what was not added?

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

#94

Post by SoftTalker » Thu, Dec 25, 2025, 2:47 AM UTC

s08148692 wrote: post #7

First my mind went to Phoenix (elixir framework), then to X (twitter) before it clicked what this was actually about. Some very overloaded names

Phoenix was also the name of Mozilla's browser before they changed it to Firefox

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

#95

Post by someguyiguess » Thu, Dec 25, 2025, 2:47 AM UTC

redeeman wrote: post #33

ccakes wrote: 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…

I can’t tell if this is satire.

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

#96

Post by shevy-java » Thu, Dec 25, 2025, 2:48 AM UTC

bigyabai wrote: post #86

Qwertious wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

IMO, if you have to rewrite a display server implementation then you're already proving all the protocol advocates right.

Why? People complain that the YAML specification/protocol is too complex. This may be, but I found using YAML much, much easier and nicer than XML. So to me these two things are not necessarily interconnected. You can have a great implementation and a crappy protocol; but also a great protocol and a crappy implementation.

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

#97

Post by quantummagic » Thu, Dec 25, 2025, 2:49 AM UTC

nish__ wrote: post #81

ccakes wrote: 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!

> Wayland is still quite a way behind Windows and macOS in terms of what productivity users need What's missing?

Ads in the start menu, forced screenshotting of all your activity, and AI integration in every aspect of the desktop experience.

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

#98

Post by msla » Thu, Dec 25, 2025, 2:49 AM UTC

nixosbestos wrote: post #66

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[flagged]

OK, you can't have your preferred environment because someone else has a different use-case.

Moreover, people will condescend to you and insist your setup never worked, nobody ever used it, and nobody cares that it's going away. Plus, they state that you are just being difficult, if not delusional, when you say that you are quite happy with how things are. I mean, your way never worked, so how could it have been your way at all? You must be a troll, troll. Stop trolling.

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

#99

Post by mzajc » Thu, Dec 25, 2025, 2:50 AM UTC

nixosbestos wrote: post #66

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[flagged]

Here's two complaints: it's a security theater, and it's horribly balkanized by design.

On X, I can run tools like xmacro or xdotool to automate the desktop to my heart's content. On Wayland, this isn't supported "for my security" and my remaining options boil down to either using a tool that works one level of abstraction lower (requires root and/or a daemon), or a tool made exclusively for my DE if one even exists. What used to be a cohesive environment with portable knowledge and tools is replaced by incomplete, broken, or outright missing tools and a complete lack of parity across DEs. For what? Am I supposed to be happy about this?

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

#100

Post by viraptor » Thu, Dec 25, 2025, 2:54 AM UTC

drpixie wrote: post #15

ccakes wrote: 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!

I thought for a long time that rather than move to Wayland, we could come up with a tidied-up version of X. Sounds like a good and useful project, I hope it progresses.

It was always an option, but "just" needed someone to dedicate all their time to it and pull in a group of long term maintainers. The real question is what will happen with the project in 2 years and will it be stable for day to day use.