Having the Lindy effect [1] in mind, I would not be too pessimistic about an early decay of this proven (albeit imperfect) technology.
The death watch for the X Window System has probably started
171–180 of 518 posts
Re: The death watch for the X Window System has probably started
#172RIP ( I don't doubt for a minute that someone will pick up the slack, but that makes me wonder, who's gonna pay for it? Would you contribute to e.g. a Kickstarter for X Windows? FWIW, I'm not sure I would, meaning no disrespect I've been hoping to ditch X for something better ever since Don Hopkins opened my eyes to NeWS, &c. ) So there's Wayland. What else? Arcan? https://arcan-fe.com/about/ On HN: https://hn.algoli…
Thank you, I hadn't heard of it before so I'll check it out! I'm not optimistic about Wayland, since early on they decided not to use an extension language, and that's not something you can have a change of heart about later, and then just nail onto the side. It would be interesting to see how Arcan uses L ua, which is a great language for that kind of stuff. It's a lot smaller and sleeker and better designed than Ja…
Instead of creating a half-assed extension language, a better solution is to have one language do both. Like Common Lisp for example.
Re: The death watch for the X Window System has probably started
#173Maybe the death watch for the traditional Linux desktop has also started...
Linux distributions have had a decade long slide in their usability and polish. Much of this has been due to an abandonment of its historical UNIX roots in favour of half-baked "modern" replacements.
Being a UNIX replacement with a full X11 server and all the rest was what made it compelling and practical in the first place.
However, it's coming to the point where it's simply getting unusable. And I say this after using Linux on the desktop as my primary user and development environment for over 22 years at this point. If I want actual UNIX, I can run FreeBSD in a virtual machine, or even on the bare metal. Otherwise, I might as well resign myself to fate and use Windows with WSL or VMs for everything else. If I'm going to be forced to use something I dislike, it might as well be something that properly supports all my hardware and I can be productive with despite its annoyances.
Re: The death watch for the X Window System has probably started
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
>they are effectively gaining control of the Linux userland. but they aren't gaining control by some dastardly power grab, they're gaining control because they're the only ones actually putting in the work. They're simply doing what they think is best for their product, while at the same time contributing their work back to the open source world. That is good, that's how it's supposed to work. The only reason they're…
> The only reason they're gaining control is becuase the rest of the linux userbase has decided that although they might complain about Red Hat's work on hacker news and deride it as "not good", it's actually good enough that nobody wants to use any alternative projects to the ones red hat works on. The decisions they're making are what prevents others from doing that. When they make a bad choice you would be willing…
> Then since no one else can justify spending the resources to replace the entire Linux userland
Well that's just it, though. Red Hat is spending the resources to maintain and build much of the Linux userland. And they are no longer willing to do so in a way that helps support the userlands for the BSDs or the buffet mentality of building the Linux userland. If people don't want to use the Red Hat userland, then they _need_ to be willing to support a whole Linux userland that resembles what they want. Fighting a set of small individual battles just keeps losing.
So far, nobody seems to have gotten traction on this, I think partly because most of the opponents are only unified in their disagreement with what Red Hat is doing and partly because I think the opponents don't have the resources Red Hat has.
Re: The death watch for the X Window System has probably started
#175I would use Wayland, but the most actively-developed tiling window manager, sway, doesn't work with the NVIDIA graphics card I own. And come to think of it, isn't that a really weird problem to have? On X, the compositor (responsible for actually drawing all the windows on the screen) and the window manager (responsible for deciding how to arrange the windows and what their title bars/borders should look like) can be…
NVIDIA doesn't support GBM, which is the standard for buffer allocation. Use nouveau. >The last issue could be solved with a reusable library that provided basic compositor functionality for window managers. This is pretty much what wlroots is.
> NVIDIA doesn't support GBM
If Nvidia don't support it, how much of a useful standard can it really be?
Re: The death watch for the X Window System has probably started
#176I would use Wayland, but the most actively-developed tiling window manager, sway, doesn't work with the NVIDIA graphics card I own. And come to think of it, isn't that a really weird problem to have? On X, the compositor (responsible for actually drawing all the windows on the screen) and the window manager (responsible for deciding how to arrange the windows and what their title bars/borders should look like) can be…
Sorry for the stupid question but how is it possible that code could support one NVidia graphics card but not another?
I understand new cards releasing new features but shouldn’t they at least be backwards compatible via the APIs of the previous generation?
Re: The death watch for the X Window System has probably started
#177How many of these Xorg developers are the original people who made X11R3 in the mid 1980's?
Somehow X didn't die without those people.
Re: The death watch for the X Window System has probably started
#178I would use Wayland, but the most actively-developed tiling window manager, sway, doesn't work with the NVIDIA graphics card I own. And come to think of it, isn't that a really weird problem to have? On X, the compositor (responsible for actually drawing all the windows on the screen) and the window manager (responsible for deciding how to arrange the windows and what their title bars/borders should look like) can be…
> I would use Wayland, but the most actively-developed tiling window manager, sway, doesn't work with the NVIDIA graphics card I own. May I suggest you buy an AMD GPU next time around; not only because they didn't try to impose their "standard" (which virtually nobody other than them implements, as far as I can tell) without implementing the de-facto standard interface, hurting their customers' access to Wayland to t…
> May I suggest you buy an AMD GPU next time around
This doesn't help anyone. I bought an expensive Nvidia GPU 6 years ago, when AMD support on Linux was really bad. What do I do, throw out a perfectly good powerful graphics card and spend another $500 to satisfy the needs of some newfangled software which doesn't solve any of my problems?
I've had 6 years to experience the horrors of Nvidia, on multiple machines. I'm never going to buy one of their cards again unless there's a massive change in their leadership. But telling people 'tough luck; basic functionality that your computers have been capable of doing for decades will no longer work because you bought the wrong brand' is simply unacceptable.
Re: The death watch for the X Window System has probably started
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Perhaps. But this is the same tired old argument that ignores the existence of any other init/daemon-manager aside from systemd. Do you mean openRC, s6 etc? They still all use bash scripts, (which as a result depend on the dev for quality and can vary quite a bit) vs systemd's clear, uniform service definitions. They don't provide much beyond starting services and are more like wrappers around sysvinit than anythin…
if your systemd isn't able to "shut things down" quickly, that's the fault of an application not responding to a shutdown signal and systemd waiting before it kills it.
For the timer-issues, perhaps. But that doesn't cover the completely black screen hangs.
Re: The death watch for the X Window System has probably started
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
NVIDIA doesn't support GBM, which is the standard for buffer allocation. Use nouveau. >The last issue could be solved with a reusable library that provided basic compositor functionality for window managers. This is pretty much what wlroots is.
> NVIDIA doesn't support GBM If Nvidia don't support it, how much of a useful standard can it really be?
It's an nvidia problem, not a standard problem.