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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

#171

Post by lmz »

LeFantome wrote: post #124
wakawaka28 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox tried to use it and was sued for trademark infringement. wxPython also has a Phoenix project. It's definitely a catchy, but overused, name.

I don’t think the problem was with “phoenix”. It was Project Phoenix (resurrection of the Netscape browser). This resulted in the Firebird browser (Firebird and Thunderbird). But Firebird was an existing database that objected to the name. So, we got Firefox instead. At least that is how I remember it.

Wasn't it renamed because of these people? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Technologies

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

#173

Post by szundi »

PunchyHamster wrote: post #162
Qwertious wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think the problem is that people wanting to build that and being in position to (being paid for by their employer), are fed up with X11. It learned no lessons from X11. It made most things harder to write and pushed more things that really every WM needs and doesn't care much to implement differently to WMs making them harder. For example, stuff like "WM need to manage raw inputs, so they can have more power over t…

[dead]

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

#174

Post by uecker »

sho_hn wrote: post #126
yepguy wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 3 justifications I remember for Wayland were security (isolating windows from each other), multi DPI, and eliminating tearing. All are now features of XLibre.

This is all playing a bit fast and loose with the details. The "isolating windows from each other" stuff in Xlibre for example is the Xnamespace extension, which requires a static config file up front and lets X clients within the namespace interact as before. This may have some utility for specific scenarios (dunno, kiosks maybe?), but is nothing like Wayland's default security model. Similarly, enabling TearTree in…

It isn't clear why any of this would require a rewrite.

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

#175

Post by gen2brain »

nish__ wrote: post #81
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!

> Wayland is still quite a way behind Windows and macOS in terms of what productivity users need What's missing?

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 icons that you have to put somewhere on the file system?

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

#176

Post by ablob »

bigyabai wrote: post #85
Qwertious wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The devs of x11" is a wide category, considering how many X11 devs weren't even born when X11 was first written. Plenty of X11 devs objected to Wayland and tried to patch X11, but when half the devs decide they want to write a replacement and put the original into maintenance-mode, there's not much you can do.

> there's not much you can do. You could fork it. X11 hasn't shipped a major release since 2005, the likelihood of a complete overhaul making it upstream was slim to none even in 2009. X11 developers were better-off focusing on stability, and the Wayland devs moved on. There was no conspiracy to kill either project.

Forking a project when the issue is that half of the staff left the project does nothing to alleviate the staffing issue, does it?

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

#177

Post by bloppe »

wewewedxfgdf wrote: post #118
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...

From the ashes of some previous project is born some new project . It's symbolic. I remember people naming new software projects this back in the 1980s for the same reason.

Ya, and that's the same reason all those other projects picked this name too

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

#178

Post by mikkupikku »

mathstuf wrote: post #105
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.

Look into river. It has the window management and keybindings able to be offered by other tools (I have an idea to implement one using XMonad's layouts). It also vastly improved battery on my Dell Pro laptop. 58% battery used in 7h45m (light compilation day, but no suspend).

That sounds cool, but TBQH the last thing I want to do is make myself dependent on some obscure piece of tech I've only heard of once before (just now.) My plan is to keep running X as long as I can manage to make it run. If river finds traction and is well known to me in 10 years then I'll consider it then.

This is one of my big problems with Wayland; the fragmentation of Wayland imposes an unacceptable cost to picking the wrong DE, whereas with X all my tools for X still work regardless of my DE.

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

#179

Post by kesor »

grim_io wrote: post #139
nish__ wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the worst argument ever. The choices in the Linux community is what's made it the best OS in the world today.

Linux on the desktop only took of because Ubuntu, with mixed results and a lot of controversy, decided to standardize and polish the experience for "normies". The distribution sprawl I largely see as a detriment to the ecosystem.

I would argue that Desktop Linux finally took off because of Steam Proton, and because of Windows 10/11 and macOS starting version fartascular or whatever their versions are named.

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

#180

Post by donio »

__d wrote: post #80

So … does xterm work? emacs? xfig? ghostview? xload? xev? oclock? xmodmap? xpilot?

I gave it a quick go and very few things work at the moment. None of the programs you listed do.

From the README:

  At the moment it can render simple applications that do GLX, EGL or Vulkan graphics (fully hardware accelerated) nested in an existing X server.
And that sounds about right. As far as I can tell it doesn't yet have a lot of the core X11 stuff that "normal" clients expect. For example xterm doesn't start because requests like X_AllocColor, X_OpenFont, X_PutImage (a few picked at random from the error output) are not implemented yet.

glxgears on the other hand does work :)

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