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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

#101

Post by drdec »

hitex wrote: post #29
quesera wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(tangent) This is true, although entertainingly, the "server" part has always been easily confused. In X11, the "server" runs on your local machine, and the "client" frequently runs on a remote system.

The server runs on the machine that allows clients to connect to it. What is the confusing part about this?

I think most of the confusion arises because when you are tunneling X via ssh, the X client/server is the reverse of the shh client/server.

Add to that that the user manages the ssh connection while the X connection is managed for them...

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

#102

Post by zbentley »

someguyiguess wrote: post #91
glzone1 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Except for all the others (that anyone uses)…

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

#104

Post by seanw444 »

Qwertious wrote: post #70
sho_hn wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

First time I've heard of Arcan. Sounds intriguing.

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

#105

Post by mathstuf »

vidarh wrote: post #41
sho_hn wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't "actually want Wayland" because I want the simplicity of X and the ability to run my own wm, but I have no need for legacy X11 requests, for some values of "legacy". Whether this will become viable for me remains to be seen, but I need very little from my X11 server.

Look into river. It has the window management and keybindings able to be offered by other tools (I have an idea to implement one using XMonad's layouts).

It also vastly improved battery on my Dell Pro laptop. 58% battery used in 7h45m (light compilation day, but no suspend).

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

#106

Post by yepguy »

shevy-java wrote: post #93
sho_hn wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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?

The 3 justifications I remember for Wayland were security (isolating windows from each other), multi DPI, and eliminating tearing. All are now features of XLibre.

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

#107

Post by p_ing »

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…

> You can perhaps install various weird third party things, but it does not come with it by default.

A Window Manager and Window Server don't come by default with Linux... It's always an install-time option on the major distros.

> even in the early 2000s, windows was so hilariously crappy that you had to make floppy disks to even get to install the thing.

Windows in the early 2000s installed just fine without a floppy directly from CD or PXE booting.

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

#108

Post by esjeon »

grim_io wrote: post #76
iamnothere wrote: post #34

This is the kind of initiative I’d prefer to see from X preservationists. Great job, I hope it succeeds. I prefer Wayland, but there’s still a place in the world for X; it just needs new dev teams to shoulder the burden.

I disagree. The choices in the Linux ecosystem lead to unnecessary fragmentation and development/packaging nightmares. I say let X11 die, bury it, and never let it rise again. Then we can all focus on making just one display server as good as possible.

The *original* X11 should die, but the modern Linux GUI stack has long abandoned most of its features anyway. X11 was already reduced to a bit-blitter protocol long before Wayland.

So, in theory, we can embrace a rather-minimal X11 implementation that can run the modern UI, including some desktop features missing in Wayland.

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

#110

Post by mathstuf »

shevy-java wrote: post #93
sho_hn wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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?

Per-display DPI settings. No snooping on input without permission. Awareness of the lock screen (the compositor can know that the lock screen is active and provide alternate keybindings instead of having to configure the lock application as well). Locking is not blocked by context menus being open.

I ran XMonad for 15 years, but recently switched to river and am loving it.

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