Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

X12: Requirements for a successor to the X11 protocol (2013)

x.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 318 posts

Re: X12: Requirements for a successor to the X11 protocol (2013)

#181

Post by dale_glass »

kelnos wrote: post #166
dark-star wrote: post #96

The discussion about "wayland vs X11" is eerily reminiscent of the discussion of "systemd vs. sysv-init"... Some people apparently really do hate it when things change that they seemingly have no control over Edit: I fully expect to be downvoted into oblivion for this post :-D

I don't really see the parallels. For the past few months I've been investigating and working on porting parts of Xfce to be usable under Wayland. It's astonishing the number of features that are just not implementable at all on Wayland, at least not without inventing new non-standard Wayland protocols. (Another option is refactoring the desktop environment so all the individual components run in the same process as…

> Even if fixing inherent problems in X11 (security, graphics rendering, etc.) would require compatibility breaks, personally I would find that preferable to throwing the entire thing out and having to build (and build on) an entirely new system.

Why?

X11 in the current state would need to be radically redesigned anyway.

There's a bunch of stuff that long stopped making sense, like XDrawLine and similar. The networking protocol sucks horribly and just doesn't perform, even on modern, high end connections, and there's a bunch of baked in assumptions that don't match modern hardware.

Yeah, you could make X12 break compatibility, throw out all the cruft, and redesign the protocol, but at that point, what is even the point? It'll break pretty much every single application in existence anyway.

Re: X12: Requirements for a successor to the X11 protocol (2013)

#182

Post by armistace »

ravishi wrote: post #100
kstenerud wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wayland is the default on RHEL since 2019. Wayland is the default on Centos since 2019. Wayland is the default on Ubuntu and Debian since 2022. In Arch, Wayland is the default for GNOME installs. Wayland is far from "barely usable" And yes, I remember 1999. X was a pain to get working properly with many graphics cards. Some things never change...

Have you ever tried sharing your screen? Do your organization uses Microsoft Teams? It is barely usable for quite some people.

I'm on Arch on my work machine and it started working with pipewire about 3 months ago... no config necessary just works as intended both screen and window. There are some others at work on Ubuntu LTS but that is because Ubuntu is using ancient packages.

Re: X12: Requirements for a successor to the X11 protocol (2013)

#183

Post by ilyt »

Aardwolf wrote: post #162
dark-star wrote: post #96

The discussion about "wayland vs X11" is eerily reminiscent of the discussion of "systemd vs. sysv-init"... Some people apparently really do hate it when things change that they seemingly have no control over Edit: I fully expect to be downvoted into oblivion for this post :-D

Simply the fact that systemd turned logs into a binary format that can't be read with standard tools, and this was not (easily? at all?) possible ti cgange made me really strongly dislike it. systemd has its own tool to read its binary log format, but I've already seen it corrupt its own logs and fail to read it. And did they do the binary format for efficiency? Get this: I've never seen anything be inefficient due t…

I like some parts systemd does but binary format is travesty. And I do not mean "the fact it is binary is bad" but format itself. Example:

    strace systemctl status haproxy  2>&1 |grep /var/log/journal |wc -l
    356
356 files opened (whole logging dir is around 800MB) only to tell me

         CGroup: /system.slice/haproxy.service
             ├─2428 /usr/sbin/haproxy -Ws -f /etc/haproxy/haproxy.cfg -p /run/haproxy.pid -S /run/haproxy-master.sock
             └─2434 /usr/sbin/haproxy -Ws -f /etc/haproxy/haproxy.cfg -p /run/haproxy.pid -S /run/haproxy-master.sock

    Warning: journal has been rotated since unit was started, output may be incomplete.
Yes, to tell me there are no logs for the app. And it takes multiple seconds (I tested it on NAS with spinning rust).

because it opens ALL of the logfiles

    % /var/log/journal1 find . |wc -l
    356
The bug has 6 years https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/2460

If it was just "a SQLite database on some sensible rotation" + maybe pointer-per-app showing where app last logged I'd actually be thrilled.

Whole system logs instantly queryable by SQL queries ? Sign me in! Hell, while we're at it slap structured logging there (say if app opts in for it).

But this abomination is an utter waste of time.

Re: X12: Requirements for a successor to the X11 protocol (2013)

#184

Post by ilyt »

jmclnx wrote: post #114
dark-star wrote: post #96

The discussion about "wayland vs X11" is eerily reminiscent of the discussion of "systemd vs. sysv-init"... Some people apparently really do hate it when things change that they seemingly have no control over Edit: I fully expect to be downvoted into oblivion for this post :-D

The largest issue with Wayland is it has "Linuxisms". That means no work was done by the Wayland people to make it portable to other UN*X. So the BSD folks (and other UNIX people) have a lot of work to get it going. And there still seems to be confusion if or will Wayland require systemd, from what I have seen, no 100% clear direction from anyone.

Linux just adopting something BSD did - "look at them, we were there YEARS before them"

Linux just doing their thing - why you don't include us ?

Re: X12: Requirements for a successor to the X11 protocol (2013)

#185

Post by ilyt »

terrorOf wrote: post #149
wmf wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since 99% of users are on Linux anyway, that can't be the largest issue.

What a typical Linux user mindset! That IS one of the largest issues for non-Linux users. Linux is by large margin a niche OS in desktop market share. So it is no issue if all programs are developed only for Windows and/or Macintosh. Right?

...what would wayland on windows even do ? Windows already does what wayland does, it would be entirely unnecesary layer

Re: X12: Requirements for a successor to the X11 protocol (2013)

#186

Post by kelnos »

messe wrote: post #139
oleg_antonyan wrote: post #14

X is almost 40yo, stable, reliable, difficult to maintain. Wayland is 15yo, barely usable. Any old timers remember 1999 when X was 15? Wayland is like IPv6 of desktops

> Wayland is 15yo, barely usable It's the default on several distros. I regularly play AAA games on my gentoo gaming PC, using proprietary NVIDIA drivers, on KDE Plasma, with little or no performance differences compared to X11. Even the Steam Deck, arguably the most popular linux PC, runs its default UI on Wayland.

A little weird to classify the Steam Deck as a "personal computer". It's a special-purpose handheld gaming device that just happens to run Linux & Wayland under the hood.

While I wouldn't call Android phones "personal computers" either, they're much closer to being the "most popular Linux PC" than a Steam Deck is.

Re: X12: Requirements for a successor to the X11 protocol (2013)

#187

Post by ilyt »

vetinari wrote: post #106
ranger207 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I'm a big fan of systemd but I can accept that when it first came out it was probably a lot worse than it is today. Similarly, Wayland has a bunch of good ideas, along with a bunch of functionality that isn't there yet. Of course, Wayland also has the problem that it's intentionally excluding some useful features that X had, like global hotkeys and screensharing. I think systemd and Wayland are actually opposit…

> Of course, Wayland also has the problem that it's intentionally excluding some useful features that X had, like global hotkeys and screensharing Screensharing has been supported for some time already. Some apps support it, some don't. It is up to the apps to use the respective APIs, the times of free reign over framebuffer is over.

> Screensharing has been supported for some time already. Some apps support it, some don't. It is up to the apps to use the respective APIs, the times of free reign over framebuffer is over.

See, that's the problem, it's putting unnecessary load on everything else using it.

It should have that API and it should have API that just allows dedicated app to allow/deny permissions to use that API. Not put everything on WM to duplicated more and more code for no good reason and making WM developer harder

Re: X12: Requirements for a successor to the X11 protocol (2013)

#188

Post by [deleted] »

dale_glass wrote: post #178
Aardwolf wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simply the fact that systemd turned logs into a binary format that can't be read with standard tools, and this was not (easily? at all?) possible ti cgange made me really strongly dislike it. systemd has its own tool to read its binary log format, but I've already seen it corrupt its own logs and fail to read it. And did they do the binary format for efficiency? Get this: I've never seen anything be inefficient due t…

The binary log format has a huge advantage: it allows for arbitrary amounts of fields containing arbitrary content. Unlike syslog, journald is trivial to parse unambiguously, and you can even dump binary data like crash logs into it if you really want to. It also parses universally -- you always know what the timestamp is, you don't need to craft a per-service regex. I'm not sure what would be a better alternative. I…

[deleted]

Re: X12: Requirements for a successor to the X11 protocol (2013)

#189

Post by kelnos »

destructionator wrote: post #117
vetinari wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've seen commentary from people who have worked intimately on both protocols and implementations of both who consider Wayland to have the better architecture. For those interested in details: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWQh_DmDLKQ

This link comes up in literally every Wayland thread and it is even more bullshit now than it was in 2013 when it was first posted (and it was bullshit then too). It is titled "the real story" but it is quite the opposite. A few key points: 1) he laughs at how X has a bunch of extensions. https://wayland.app/protocols/ hypocrites much. In 2013, since it was completely unusable, it probably didn't have many. But turns…

> Graphics are actually a relatively small part of a graphical user interface, something Wayland is still slow to learn.

This I think is a key insight. I talk about this in another post, but I've been working on "porting" parts of Xfce to Wayland, and there are so many things missing in Wayland that have nothing to do with "graphics" that means that Xfce+Wayland will be missing a lot of useful features until/unless Wayland protocols are invented or extended to make them work.

Re: X12: Requirements for a successor to the X11 protocol (2013)

#190

Post by messe »

kelnos wrote: post #186
messe wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wayland is 15yo, barely usable It's the default on several distros. I regularly play AAA games on my gentoo gaming PC, using proprietary NVIDIA drivers, on KDE Plasma, with little or no performance differences compared to X11. Even the Steam Deck, arguably the most popular linux PC, runs its default UI on Wayland.

A little weird to classify the Steam Deck as a "personal computer". It's a special-purpose handheld gaming device that just happens to run Linux & Wayland under the hood. While I wouldn't call Android phones "personal computers" either, they're much closer to being the "most popular Linux PC" than a Steam Deck is.

I did say "arguably".

I mean more in the sense of the hardware it uses, i.e. it's PC-compatible (x86) hardware that runs a desktop linux distribution by default.

Post reply on HN