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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

#151

Post by MrDrMcCoy »

nixosbestos wrote: post #61
superkuh wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I love Wayland a lot, but as far as I can tell the available remoting solutions still cannot enable a headless LXC container to serve a KDE Plasma Wayland desktop. I spent the last couple days trying to cobble some solution together for it and failed miserably. If you know a way, I would be most grateful :-)

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

#152

Post by MrDrMcCoy »

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.

Headless remote desktop, at least for KDE, is very much not possible today as far as I can tell. It's the last thing I miss from Xorg.

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

#153

Post by throwaway92841 »

tuna74 wrote: post #142
mzajc wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[dead]

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

#154

Post by maxdamantus »

mathstuf wrote: post #110
shevy-java wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> Per-display DPI settings

fwiw, Xorg already had this, since you can set the DPI for each display through RandR/xrandr. In both X11 and Wayland it's up to the toolkit to actually detect the setting and rasterise accordingly.

Wayland actually went backwards in this respect by using "integer scales" (eg, 1, 2, 3) instead of fine-grained DPIs (eg, 96, 192, 288), so using a scale of 1.5 would result in downscale blur (toolkit sees scale as 2, then the compositor scales it down to 75%), whereas in Xorg you could just set the DPI to 144, and the toolkit could theoretically render at the correct resolution. As far as I know Qt was the only toolkit to actually do this automatically, but that's not X11's fault.

Wayland has at least since fixed this in the form of "fractional scaling" [1], but here's [0] an old thread on HN where I complained about it and provided screenshots of the resulting blur.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32021261

[1] Doing some quick searching it seems like this is still unsupported in Gtk3/Gtk4, maybe planned for Gtk5? Apparently Firefox has only just added support (December 2025), 3 years after the fractional scaling protocol was released. Seems ridiculous to me that Wayland failed to get this right from the start.

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

#155

Post by roenxi »

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…

If we're hypothesising a perfect world, ideally they standardise some way of sharing framebuffers between programs into Wayland. I suppose maybe they already have I gave up on the ecosystem in the early 2020s. That seems like it should be long enough ago now that they've got even advanced features like screenshots under control and rolled out.

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

#156

Post by mths »

socketcluster wrote: post #116

The name Phoenix is overused. There is an Elixir framework called Phoenix. I think I also heard of other projects with that same name before. It's a bit like the name 'Apollo'; besides the moon landing project, I know like 2 dev projects called that and also there is a sales SaaS platform with that name. Surely people should run a search first before choosing a name...

Better not ask them to think outside the box or they'll come up with something like fushichou.

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

#158

Post by akho »

figmert wrote: post #119
redeeman wrote: post #33

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…

As someone who came from Windows, and has used Linux as my primary OS for 15 years, and MacOS here and there (cos work provided laptop), I can tell you that Linux was not ready for prime time 15 years ago. Today, I feel it is, but definitely not 15 years ago.

I use Linux on the desktop since 1997, and there was no point where Windows was even slightly more attractive.

I don't know what "prime time" means here.

edit: apart from, you know. Applications and drivers for random hardware.

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

#159

Post by kelnos »

LeFantome wrote: post #128
vidarh wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the server/compositor. Not for the client, or if you want to write a wm and is forced to write a compositor. And actually I'm not even even convinced about the server if talking about a minimal server like this that insists on DRI/GBM, and ditches all the old rendering cruft.

Well, you are not really forced to write a compositor these days as there are libraries that do all the heavy lifting for you. Check out Louvre for example. Or Smithay if you like Rust. And if you want a bit more depth, there is wlroots of course (or the hyprland version). It is not really any harder than writing an X11 WM.

wlroots and smithay (I'm not familiar with louvre) do a lot of the difficult work for you, that most compositors will do without much variation but there's still a lot that compositor writers still have to do. It's still a significantly larger task than, for example, writing an X11 WM.

(Well, writing an X11 WM that also includes a built-in compositor is a bit more than just the WM, but I'd say still less than writing a Wayland compositor using wlroots or smithay. For example, xfwm4's compositor is around 5300 lines of C, which is... not nothing, but not crazy either.)

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

#160

Post by PunchyHamster »

sho_hn wrote: post #23
wmf wrote: 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…

From my perspective X just got to the point where it just works for me few years ago and Wayland is just introducing more issues than it solves (to be clear it solves no current issue for me, only one that I think might be better for me is handling different refresh rate displays and maybe fractional scaling... and that could probably be done within X11)

Like, why simple "copy the screen" got suddenly so complicated? Why every WM suddenly needs a bunch of features that before were just handled by display server, where they belong ? Why some(most) WMs handle title bars but GNOME doesn't ? Why someone decided title bar management is optional to window manager ?

X11 might need to go but Wayland have learned no lessons from it. It's just knee-jerk "if X11 done it this way, let's do it differently"

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