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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

#421

Post by phito »

reppap wrote: post #413
phito wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Screenshots are just completely broken. People always tell me to use other apps like flameshot but IME it just doesn't work and I don't want to have to mess around so much to take screenshots. I'm still using Wayland because it's what came with my distro (endeavour OS, gnome), but it's really strange how it came broken out of the box.

I'm curious what OS you are running that has broken screen shots on wayland because that hasn't been my experience on Fedora.

It's right there in my comment

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

#422

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

ptx wrote: post #415
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, like everything else in Wayland, it's per-compositor. Here's a working headless sway in a container: https://gitlab.com/yjftsjthsd-g/docker_sway-vnc (This is not a defense of Wayland, just trying to share useful information)

Hmm, you mention in the README that it only works in a privileged container. This of course negates the security benefits Wayland supposedly has over X11, so it doesn't seem ideal.

It really doesn't. The security benefits of Wayland are about isolating applications from each other, which this still has.

Also that's only really relevant to this running in a container. My point was that you can have headless Wayland.

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

#423

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

criticalfault wrote: post #416
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wayland: * straight up doesn't work on at least one of my laptops (driver problems AFAICT) * does run on the other one, but crashes at an alarming rate compared to Xorg * breaks all of my accessibility tools (some have (worse) replacements, some don't)

what laptop? what hardware? here is my state of laptops: * Dell latitude with old Intel 8gen CPU, it works fine (Linux kernel causes problems with PSR, but this has nothing to do with Wayland and disabling it fixes the problem, same thing with cstates) * Dell latitude with 10gen CPU, works fine. * Huawei d15 with Ryzen 3000 Apu, works fine. ok. for accessibility it's fair enough as a critique. I don't use it so can't…

> what laptop? what hardware?

Does it matter? Your claim is that everything works, and I am here to tell you that I am a real person running real machines that do not work. Unless you're planning to fix the particular bugs and missing features that I'm hitting I don't see where the specifics actually matter. (Anyways, the first machine is a https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Lenovo_ThinkPad_T490 with Intel graphics; this appears to work but is less stable than Xorg. The second machine is a https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Lenovo_IdeaPad_Flex_3_Chr... that doesn't run Wayland at all, which I grant is bizarre since the stock ChromeOS uses Wayland. You are welcome to point out that this is more than a little off the beaten path, at which point I will of course point out that Xorg somehow handles it just fine.)

> but most of this is on the toolkit side, not Wayland (even though here one thing is mentioned as Wayland specific, just briefly went through the post)

It varies; a11y isn't a single thing. Deep application integration to allow eg. screen readers to work well probably needs toolkit integration. But there are also things like dwell click, which is really helpful when my RSI is flaring up. In X, I just run `mousetweaks --dwell` and it works, and it works in any window manager or desktop environment, with absolutely no help needed from toolkits or applications. In Wayland, it's sometimes available on a per-compositor basis, which I would describe as purely inferior. On which note, observe that you've linked a blog post about a prototype for GNOME. They note that they're open to working with other desktop environments, but 1. that means it doesn't exist as of that blog post, and 2. I've seen how GNOME operates over the years; I fully expect portability to be a very distant second priority, and whatever they export will be an attempt to force everyone else to do everything the way GNOME does, which will go poorly. I have no interest in ever going back to GNOME, so the actual takeaway, AFAICT, is that the a11y situation on Wayland is bad and will remain bad for the foreseeable future.

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

#424

Post by bitwize »

vidarh wrote: post #414
bitwize wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny, the other day I started writing an X server of my own. While I appreciate and welcome this work, I still use and write software that makes use of old X draw calls, which I intended to incorporate into my server, unlike the author of this work. So I'm glad to see my efforts have not been made largely redundant!

I'd at least consider moving older draw calls into an xlib replacement. Not all of them are suitable for that, but e.g. sufficient font handling to beat Xorgs server side handling requires the Render extension plus ca. 1500 lines of C for a basic TrueType renderer, or half that in a higher level language, or just use FreeType which is a dependency for most X clients anyway.

It's just a hobby, won't be big and professional like Xorg. Aiming for as much protocol completeness as I can manage within those constraints.

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

#425

Post by bmacho »

throwaway92841 wrote: post #150
bsder wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There are Xorg and XLibre for pre-2016 hardware.

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

#427

Post by criticalfault »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #423
criticalfault wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what laptop? what hardware? here is my state of laptops: * Dell latitude with old Intel 8gen CPU, it works fine (Linux kernel causes problems with PSR, but this has nothing to do with Wayland and disabling it fixes the problem, same thing with cstates) * Dell latitude with 10gen CPU, works fine. * Huawei d15 with Ryzen 3000 Apu, works fine. ok. for accessibility it's fair enough as a critique. I don't use it so can't…

> what laptop? what hardware? Does it matter? Your claim is that everything works, and I am here to tell you that I am a real person running real machines that do not work. Unless you're planning to fix the particular bugs and missing features that I'm hitting I don't see where the specifics actually matter. (Anyways, the first machine is a https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Lenovo_ThinkPad_T490 with Intel graphics; th…

fair enough.

if this is so, I can admit I'm wrong. so not everything works for everyone.

For myself and members of my family, I can say that absolutely everything works on gnome. And I have several machines, spread over several cpu and gpu generations, and different form factors that confirm this. not only those 3 laptops I mentioned.

Could it be that since you are not using gnome that you are hitting those problems? My experience is exclusively gnome, so maybe this is it?

a11y aside of course... given that this was not really finished. or seriously worked on.

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

#428

Post by bayesnet »

MindSpunk wrote: post #288
gen2brain wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Window positioning? You cannot position the window, you cannot send a hint, nothing? So my pop-up with GTK4 will randomly be placed somewhere, anywhere, without any control. OK, GTK4 went further and also removed popups without the parent, so you hack that with an invisible anchor window and then write platform-specific code for sane platforms that CAN, of course, move the window. And let's not talk about window icon…

Have you considered if someone wants to make a compositor where each window is projected onto a facet of a hyper cube and must place windows in 4 dimensions? These are important use cases we should support, we should make cross platform software as difficult possible to develop for Linux by removing features that have been standard on desktop operating systems for decades.

I must correct you! Wayland has not and indeed cannot remove features because Wayland is a “protocol”. It is the compositors that are removing features.

This dilution of responsibility should make you feel much better.

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

#429

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

criticalfault wrote: post #427
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what laptop? what hardware? Does it matter? Your claim is that everything works, and I am here to tell you that I am a real person running real machines that do not work. Unless you're planning to fix the particular bugs and missing features that I'm hitting I don't see where the specifics actually matter. (Anyways, the first machine is a https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Lenovo_ThinkPad_T490 with Intel graphics; th…

fair enough. if this is so, I can admit I'm wrong. so not everything works for everyone. For myself and members of my family, I can say that absolutely everything works on gnome. And I have several machines, spread over several cpu and gpu generations, and different form factors that confirm this. not only those 3 laptops I mentioned. Could it be that since you are not using gnome that you are hitting those problems?…

Thanks.

It certainly could be GNOME vs not-GNOME. That doesn't really help me, either way, but it's not hard to imagine that different compositors have entirely different quality levels.

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

#430

Post by igneo676 »

wincy wrote: post #210
vidarh wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, most of those real gaps have been solved at this point. I'd encourage you to give it a shot now with Avahi
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