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

The death watch for the X Window System has probably started

utcc.utoronto.ca

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 518 posts

Re: The death watch for the X Window System has probably started

#231

Post by therein »

AnonymousPlanet wrote: post #159
izacus wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see this a lot and now I need to ask: do you actually use it and find it usable? Every time I've tried it, it was plagued with problems (fonts, HiDPI issues, different environments) and horrible performance. I mostly had to resort back to NX, which is okish, but not better at all than Windows' RDP or better VNC solutions. So what's the big draw here?

It's not only ssh. I start GUI applications as a different user than the current desktop user constantly. It's a way for me to separate uses from each other. It gives you a huge amount of flexibility. I do a lot of these things with Linux, you cannot do in Windows: - Log in, start an arbitrary program. Then log out, without the program stopping - Start a GUI application as a different user than the one logged in grap…

> Start a GUI application that resides inside a container

I do this all the time to confine an application to a network namespace.

It is great for forcing some GUI applications (for example a browser) through VPN while keeping everything else going over the default route.

This way you can make sure the browser in your network namespace can only use the VPN.

Re: The death watch for the X Window System has probably started

#232

Post by namibj »

LaGrange wrote: post #140
rrss wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://github.com/swaywm/sway/blob/9670ccee683ab985e89eb043...

"--my-next-gpu-wont-be-nvidia" --ill-pass.

It's implying I have a choice in the accelerators I could rent in a cluster... Yes, it's about using an intel GPU for display and a nvidia GPU to provide local development (latency being the primary reason).

Re: The death watch for the X Window System has probably started

#233

Post by wmf »

sprash wrote: post #183
kaendfinger wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waypipe does this in a really similar way to x forwarding. https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe/

No not really similar. It is basically a raw video that transfers the full window content over the wire. X11 is capable of drawing primitives. Even though the most popular toolkits (Gtk, QT) sadly did not use them, those who did (e.g. Athena, Tcl/Tk) worked perfectly over the network, even modem lines. If Wayland would contain modern drawing primitives like those that Cairo offers which could easily be serialized, we…

It is basically a raw video that transfers the full window content over the wire.

Because that's more efficient.

If Wayland would contain modern drawing primitives like those that Cairo offers which could easily be serialized, we would have real network transparency even over slow low bandwidth connections.

Nope, drawing commands for a modern UI are more bytes than the window contents. This is a deeply counterintuitive topic and it's unfortunate that nobody implemented waypipe until recently so it was impossible to measure.

Re: The death watch for the X Window System has probably started

#234

Post by pmontra »

phkahler wrote: post #75
nextos wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My concern at the moment with Wayland (and Systemd, Pulseaudio, DBus and a few others) is that Linux is loosing modularity. All these dependencies seem to be getting more or less mandatory. Running a distribution without them is getting harder. Given that they are all getting pushed by the same group of people at Red Hat, it is concerning as they are effectively gaining control of the Linux userland. And given that t…

Wayland is actually more sensible than X. People used to say X had become an OS itself, having memory management, font management, a full drawing API (not used by modern GUI toolkits), and more. One thing transitions like this do is cause the death of unmaintained programs. In some cases that's good, others bad. But ultimately if no one cares enough to modernize it that says something. But we also shouldn't keep deve…

> People used to say X had become an OS itself, having memory management, font management, a full drawing API (not used by modern GUI toolkits), and more.

That's OK. I used X terminals from HP in the early 90. 1024x1024 monochrome with an Ethernet connection. Their only purpose was to manage the screen, mouse and keyboard. I don't know which OS they were running on (something proprietar?) but probably X11 was the only application they were running.

Re: The death watch for the X Window System has probably started

#235

Post by phkahler »

sprash wrote: post #183
kaendfinger wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waypipe does this in a really similar way to x forwarding. https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe/

No not really similar. It is basically a raw video that transfers the full window content over the wire. X11 is capable of drawing primitives. Even though the most popular toolkits (Gtk, QT) sadly did not use them, those who did (e.g. Athena, Tcl/Tk) worked perfectly over the network, even modem lines. If Wayland would contain modern drawing primitives like those that Cairo offers which could easily be serialized, we…

Very little modern software uses the X drawing functions. GTK uses Cairo, but so does X (that's where it came from, the library behind the X drawing API). But apps will use the GTK implementation of Cairo (client side) because it works on other platforms as well (windows and OSX). In most cases it doesn't actually make sense to put your drawing functions in the display server any more.

Re: The death watch for the X Window System has probably started

#236

Post by wmf »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #209
logicprog wrote: post #134

I'm really not very sad to see X go. It was old, creaky and insecure. As advanced and cool as it may have been at one time, and as much as I respect the people who worked on it, it's time for it to go. As for the people complaining about Wayland possibly missing some of X's features, remember that it takes time for something to mature, to accrete features and fixes, and Wayland hasn't had that time yet. If we give it…

> As for the people complaining about Wayland possibly missing some of X's features, remember that it takes time for something to mature, to accrete features and fixes, and Wayland hasn't had that time yet. It has been a decade, precisely how long does it need to catch up? I ask because from what I can tell it is still missing features that were standard in Windows Vista in 2008, when that OS switched to DWM and WDDM…

Most developers have been sitting on the sidelines until Wayland is on by default. I would expect to see the long tail of features added after that.

Re: The death watch for the X Window System has probably started

#238

Post by brohee »

sprash wrote: post #222
soulofmischief wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

X does suck, it's incredibly insecure and the workarounds for regaining some sense of application isolation are obtuse and resource-draining. I could go into all the little technical details but the fact is, X has been around for decades and its core was made for much simpler machines. It's time for something new. This isn't attention-deficit developers at play. People have spent a lot of time on the Wayland ecosyste…

> it's incredibly insecure I hear this all the time. But so far there was not even one incident where major hack was done via X11. The reason for that is that people who use X also exclusively use trusted apps. The Wayland security model makes many generic tasks insanely complicated. The real world security gains will be zero. Security through obscurity never worked.

You only have to ssh to a compromised machine with X11 forwarding enabled to be quite exposed...

Re: The death watch for the X Window System has probably started

#239

Post by simion314 »

PlutoIsAPlanet wrote: post #81
simion314 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But I think it's a bonus that applications can't listen into keys when they're not in focus. There are applications that do not run as a window, in present I have a global shortcuts that run a bash or python script, I know I am a power user so I will need a way to whitelist my use case.

Then that should be done through a mechanism provided by the desktop environment. GNOME and I'm pretty sure KDE too has a method to set custom keyboard shortcuts that can execute commands.

This is not enough. you fix this use case but there are many others, maybe I want to make a voice/video chat app or a remote desktop app, I will need full control of the display and keyboards not some gimped implementation that is DE specific.

Wayland needs to offer full access to "power users applications" if not we end up where Windows will be more friendly for the users that need this type of applications

Re: The death watch for the X Window System has probably started

#240

Post by dTal »

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #153
rrss wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that check were not there, would intel for display + nvidia for compute work? Better chance than now.

The flag is there for you to override if you think you know better. We don't answer questions or provide support for any use-case with the proprietary driver.

Refusing to run if a particular kernel module is loaded (even if you don't touch it at all) is overstepping. You should at least provide an override flag.
Post reply on HN