Look, my setup works for me. Just add an option to reenable spacebar heating.
Phoenix: A modern X server written from scratch in Zig
201–210 of 462 posts
Re: Phoenix: A modern X server written from scratch in Zig
#202Pretty 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.
Tangentially related... Is it just me, but is Wayland still lagging behind X11? From things like window placement, night light, etc. Things seem to work just out of the box in X11, and there are always issues in Wayland. (For me this is specifically on Fedora, and I always switch back to X11 from Wayland.)
Well, isn't this compositor related? I've never had any window placement issues running Sway (i3 for Wayland). I never used night light on that machine, so I can't comment on that particular point, but the thing seems to work just as well as i3.
The only problem I have is with JetBrains IDEs, which seem to have shaky support. They're usable (meaning you can code), but the experience is so wonky that I basically consider they don't support Wayland.
The reason I switched from i3/x11 is that we've got some 27" 5k screens at work that are basically useless at 100%, and Sway handles different scaling settings flawlessly (except for IntelliJ, which seems lost).
Re: Phoenix: A modern X server written from scratch in Zig
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
So build on top of wlroots or something. DWL for example is super small...
Current status: > 2025-08-16: dwl IS CURRENTLY UN-MAINTAINED. AT THE PRESENT TIME, I (@fauxmight) DO NOT HAVE THE TIME OR CAPACITY TO KEEP UP WITH wlroots CHANGES. https://codeberg.org/dwl/dwl
I said build on top of wlroots, not DWL. And I only brought it up as an example of a small Wayland compositor/window manager because the poster I was replying to wants to build their own anyway. DWL is more interesting as a learning exercise than something to use.
Re: Phoenix: A modern X server written from scratch in Zig
#204Earlier 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…
Thanks for linking Arcan, looks interesting.
After a quick scan, Arcan seems to be pushing a microkernel approach, with some clients providing display server capabilities and others talking to them via shared memory. This will have the same problem as all other microkernels - nice for research, but the extra completely outweights the marginal benefits over a monolithic thing that generally has a smaller API surface to maintain.
Re: Phoenix: A modern X server written from scratch in Zig
#205Does this mean we can finally be done with the farce of pretending that Wayland is a serious contender for replacing X11?
Re: Phoenix: A modern X server written from scratch in Zig
#206Earlier 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…
Let me know when X11 handles fractional scaling across mixed dpi and refresh rate monitors, with HDR and VRR. To me, who has finally been able to drop Windows for gaming in the last 3 months, the benefits of wayland are very real.
Re: Phoenix: A modern X server written from scratch in Zig
#207Does this mean we can finally be done with the farce of pretending that Wayland is a serious contender for replacing X11?
Why is it not? I get the impression Wayland has been built by former X devs
Re: Phoenix: A modern X server written from scratch in Zig
#208Pretty 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.
Tangentially related... Is it just me, but is Wayland still lagging behind X11? From things like window placement, night light, etc. Things seem to work just out of the box in X11, and there are always issues in Wayland. (For me this is specifically on Fedora, and I always switch back to X11 from Wayland.)
Using kde on Wayland for a while now, on a Nvidia card (debian trixie, just upgraded to forky a week ago), and i can't relate to any of those issues. My only complaint is a silly kernel module warning that pollutes my syslog.
Re: Phoenix: A modern X server written from scratch in Zig
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can do per-display DPI just fine on X11 (through xrandr), it's just the major toolkits don't support it. GTK, for example, reads a single global DPI value from XSETTINGS; there's no reason why it has to be that way. The annoying thing about the other things you mention is that they honestly are not that difficult to fix. The X server can throw an error (or just silently ignore it) when one client passes the windo…
If the issues are trivially resolved, why did the authors of X decided to abandon X? If the issues could be resolved, why were they not resolved? I am using wayland for more than 5 years now, it just works. X did not. Xscreensaver/lock screens on Qubes are still broken. What features is Wayland the protocol missing to allow supporting Xfce?
> If the issues are trivially resolved, why did the authors of X decided to abandon X?
They convinced their employers Wayland would be better?
> Xscreensaver/lock screens on Qubes are still broken.
Most people aren't nation-state-level targets and don't worry about security to that degree. But they do like global hotkeys.
Re: Phoenix: A modern X server written from scratch in Zig
#210Earlier 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.
I remember Wayland scared me off of Linux when I tried to switch to Ubuntu a few years ago. I couldn’t watch a movie without jiggling my mouse every few minutes. At the time I feel like it was like “yeah that feature doesn’t exist yet” or something. So I switched back to Windows. It looks like there’s workarounds now but I’ve mostly switch to my fantastic M1 MacBook Air at this point.