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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

#141

Post by grim_io »

ori_b wrote: post #132
grim_io wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Which one? The Gnome Wayland, the KDE Wayland, the xroots wayland, Weston, or one of the others? Each one is an independent implementation of a Wayland compositor, with a differing, incompatible set of extensions. X11 was a single, pretty janky implementation. Wayland is the worst of both worlds -- it's cleaned up a little, but it's still kinda janky. In exchange for a little bit of cleanup, mainly around bitmap font…

Sure, but I don't see a world where keeping X11 alive, in addition to all of this, makes anything better or easier, for anyone in the medium to long term.

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

#142

Post by tuna74 »

mzajc wrote: post #99
nixosbestos wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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 is the point of automating another UI/Desktop than the one you are actually using? If you allow people to build different type of systems you can't expect them to function the same and have the same API.

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

#143

Post by [deleted] »

grim_io wrote: post #141
ori_b wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which one? The Gnome Wayland, the KDE Wayland, the xroots wayland, Weston, or one of the others? Each one is an independent implementation of a Wayland compositor, with a differing, incompatible set of extensions. X11 was a single, pretty janky implementation. Wayland is the worst of both worlds -- it's cleaned up a little, but it's still kinda janky. In exchange for a little bit of cleanup, mainly around bitmap font…

Sure, but I don't see a world where keeping X11 alive, in addition to all of this, makes anything better or easier, for anyone in the medium to long term.

[deleted]

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

#144

Post by OsrsNeedsf2P »

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…

> 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.

There's some truth to this. I've been installing fresh Windows 11s on family computers this holiday season, and good lord is it difficult to use.

The number of tweaks I had to configure to prevent actively hostile programs from ravaging disk read/writes (HDD pain), freezing and crashing, or invasive popups was absurd.

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

#145

Post by MangoToupe »

sho_hn wrote: post #120
MangoToupe wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Windows is reasonably OK, but MacOS' window management has always been really terrible . Just think through the many different iterations over the years of what the green button on the deco does, which still isn't working consistently, same as double-clicking the title bar. Not to mention that whatever the Maximize-alike is that you can set title bar double click too (the options being Zoom and Fill, buried in settin…

> Windows is reasonably OK,

Doesn't windows conflate window and process? That should kick it to the bottom of the bin by default.

> There may be many other ways in which MacOS shines as a desktop OS

May I suggest examining why your keyboard has a "home" key

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

#146

Post by shakna »

wmf wrote: post #21
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.

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

Until Wayland actually has an accesibility story, X is really the only choice. Don't think most grassroots projects will have that.

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

#147

Post by OsrsNeedsf2P »

reppap wrote: post #73
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 don't really understand what is supposedly missing in Wayland for productivity users? At work I have been using gnome with the wayland backend for years at this point and I can't really figure out anything that's missing.

Autoclickers and screen macros on Wayland are all janky

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

#148

Post by [deleted] »

shevy-java wrote: post #92
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?

[deleted]

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

#149

Post by esjeon »

gldrk wrote: 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.

We get the window management APIs back perhaps, unlike the eternally broken Wayland ecosystem.

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

#150

Post by throwaway92841 »

bsder wrote: post #138
viraptor wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The fact that you can "assume Vulkan exists" helps a lot (both hardware and software renderers exist). Do remember--Wayland predates Vulkan by almost a full decade. In addition, you can offload OpenGL compatibility to Zink (again leaning into Vulkan). > pull in a group of long term maintainers. "Use new cool language" seems to be a prerequisite for this nowadays ... At least Zig is very compatible with C.

You can't "assume Vulkan exists". Any pre-2016 hardware won't have proper hardware support for Vulkan and that's a lot of hardware still in use. Software renderers are unworthy of any serious consideration due to the perfomance drawbacks.

Just use OpenGL. I don't know when this trend to overcomplicate everything using Vulkan began, but I hate it.

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