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The death watch for the X Window System has probably started

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

#261

Post by _emacsomancer_ »

rspeele wrote: post #155

I can't say it any better than JWZ did over 15 years ago. This is the result of the Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers model and is why Linux will not approach Windows or OSX in usability. Cannot link to his site: JWZ dot org /doc/cadt.html A complete teardown and rebuild of the whole ecosystem (because X succccckkks) is fun! Making something backwards-compatible, or standardized, or polished that "last 90%" so i…

> This is the result of the Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers model and is why Linux will not approach Windows or OSX in usability.

While I definitely agree with the CADT issue; despite it, the Linux desktop experience still beats the Windows or OSX one. If the Linux desktop is "a little hammer that pops up and smashes your knuckles at random", the Windows and Mac desktops are big hammers that smash various body parts at random.

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

#262

Post by snaky »

nextos wrote: post #50
neilv wrote: post #32

Quoting a quote from the article: > The reality is that X.org is basically maintained by us and thus once we stop paying attention to it there is unlikely to be any major new releases coming out and there might even be some bitrot setting in over time. We will keep an eye on it as we will want to ensure X.org stays supportable until the end of the RHEL8 lifecycle at a minimum, but let this be a friendly notice for ev…

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…

> Remember that udev and sysfs are written by the same people, working together off-list. They're free to break the exported data format on a whim, because they write the code at both ends and fundamentally they're talking to themselves. They honestly say you can't expect a new kernel to work with an old udev, and they say it with a straight face. (To me, this sounds like saying you can't expect a new kernel to work with an old version of ps, because of /proc.)

> Documentation is a threat to this way of working, because it would impose restrictions on them. A spec is only of use if you introduce the radical idea that the information exported by sysfs exists for some purpose _other_ than simply to provide udev with information (and a specific version of udev matched to that kernel version, at that).

http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0707.2/4230.html (http://www.landley.net/notes-2015.html#05-07-2015)

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

#264

Post by majewsky »

jkaplowitz wrote: post #38
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 was pretty great when I was a university student using X forwarding within the campus network between my dorm and the CS department (in either direction). Certainly not as fast as local, but extremely usable when not trying to do graphics-centric things. (Even using Eclipse was viable.) Your mileage may vary by use case and bandwidth, especially over the public internet. But if someone has a similar use case to mi…

Even if it's usable, it's probably not a good idea. X windows are not rendered by the server anymore. The client (i.e. the application) renders them and just transmits a full pixmap to the server. Depending on the redraw strategy, you could have a worst-case scenario where 60 frames per second of the entire window are transmitted completely uncompressed (except for the compression that SSH applies). You'll be sailing much more efficiently by using a VNC client.

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

#265

Post by ubercow13 »

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…

With pulse, wasn't the main complaint that it was buggy for too long after being pushed on users? Seems similar to Wayland (the ecosystem) in that regard

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

#266

Post by calcifer »

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #257
calcifer wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> wlroots is suitable for basically any use-case Except the single largest GPU vendor, yes.

A downstream compositor which wishes to implement Nvidia support could do so and integrate it with wlroots. However, there are more reasons than political not to "support" Nvidia. Their alternative has genuine technical problems that would render large parts of wlroots broken.

> Their alternative has genuine technical problems that would render large parts of wlroots broken.

If this is indeed true (and I have no reason to doubt you) then I wish you and the rest of the Sway folks would focus on those issues, instead of the political arguments because from the outside it all looks very petty when you write stuff like "Nvidia doesn't support Sway". Nvidia doesn't even know about you.

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

#267

Post by blibble »

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 as a different user than the one logged in graphically
the xauth command will let you do this (which is what ssh X forwarding does)

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

#268

Post by majewsky »

pmoriarty wrote: post #204

"Why I'm not going to switch to Wayland yet" [1] argues that: "for simple things using the compositor's screen shot tool is fine. But what if I don't like the screenshot tool for my compositor of choice? My experience with the GNOME screenshot tool (granted this was pre-wayland) was that it wasn't as good as, say, shutter, which has a lot of options, let's you easily crop and edit the screenshot from inside the scree…

The wlroots developers are working on protocol extensions to make stuff like screen grabbing work consistently across WMs: https://github.com/swaywm/wlr-protocols

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

#269

Post by ori_b »

calcifer wrote: post #245
robert_foss wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NVidia has a horrible history of Linux support. GBM works just fine, they've simply chosen not to support it.

Nvidia has excellent support, I think you are conflating Linux with open source. For decades, Nvidia had (and arguably still has) excellent support for the former, without really caring for the latter.

How long did it take to get multiple monitors working with xrandr, again?

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

#270

Post by themacguffinman »

shmerl wrote: post #242
csande17 wrote: post #79

I 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 recommend you simply to switch to AMD if you are using Linux and want a high end GPU. That's the only way for you to get a usable desktop with modern features. Or wait until Intel will release a new GPU next year, it should work well with upstream too. Nvidia has no interest in making their cards play well with Linux, so just avoid them completely to keep your sanity and don't waste your time trying to work around…

> I recommend you simply to switch to AMD if you are using Linux and want a high end GPU. That's the only way for you to get a usable desktop with modern features.

This is just not true. Gnome with Wayland is one of the most popular and modern DEs and it supports Nvidia's proprietary drivers today.

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