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The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

phoronix.com

311–320 of 714 posts

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, X forwarding doesn't work that well in my experience, unless you have a very stable connection, with quite a bit of bandwidth (~1Mbps at the very least). I've had more success using xpra for forwarding, as I'm often connecting over Wi-Fi (hostel, campus rooms...). It's also rather complicated to set-up on the server side (xauth, magic cookie, etc). waypipe, on the other hand, was a breeze to use, even thoug…

To me, it’s been a while since 1Mbps was “quite a bit of bandwidth”, even for WAN connections.

Outside of major metros, in the US a lot of towns only offer up to 5Mbps down, and only then if you pay out the nose. Not sure if it matters for X forwarding, but upload caps are also ridiculously low even on otherwise reasonable connections.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can use a library like that or you can draw your own decorations. There unfortunately is no other option. I don't see it as being likely that GNOME will support SSD any time soon, it just isn't designed for that.

> There unfortunately is no other option. Gnome could stop being unreasonably obstructionist, but that indeed seems unlikely.

What would it take for something not to qualify as being "unreasonably obstructionist" to you? If there's an open source desktop project that has infinite resources to redesign and rewrite everything at will at a moment's notice, then please let me know. I'll gladly use it. Hell, I'll sign up as a developer.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#313
post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, there are plugins somewhere that support all kinds of basic functionality. I can already see how nice will be to keep a system like this up to date. Do the developers expect to incorporate those plugins at the main code at some time?

Wayland isn't a code base but a protocol.

Wayland is both a code base and a protocol unless you are being unreasonably technical about terminology (distinguishing between wayland and libwayland) to the point where you are deceiving casual readers.

It is for all practical intents not possible to implement a useful wayland compositor without relying on libwayland, because mesa links to libwayland and expects to be passed pointers to data structures defined in libwayland.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apologies; I misunderstood one of your links and thought sway had been renamed to wlroots. To be clear the "adventure" I'm talking about is for replacing desktop environment niceties like the ones provided by gsettingsd and the tight integration provided between devices and the system management tools offered in full desktop blown environments like Gnome and KDE. I used i3 for six or seven years and it was never as n…

wlroots excellent performance => bottleneck is not Wayland. Gnome will catch up some day.

Gnome hasn't provided a good desktop experience since 2011. By the time they figure out how to stop sucking insofar as Wayland performance they will surely have discerned new ways to err.

There are other environments that have worked well for a decade and will work well for the next decade.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#315
post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what it's worth, whenever I tunneled X over a non-local SSH connection, it was slow as molasses. That's because almost all contemporary GUI applications render to a bitmap anyway. Those that actually use the outdated X vector graphics operations look like utter garbage compared to anything post-1995. Frankly, I'd rather my applications are at least somewhat aesthetically pleasing.

Those that actually use the outdated X vector graphics operations look like utter garbage compared to anything post-1995. Frankly, I'd rather my applications are at least somewhat aesthetically pleasing. That is entirely subjective no? Personally I think Motif is one of the pinnacles of GUI design.

I also agree, and even if I did think that the modern stuff with the impossible to see borders and the buttons that you can't tell were up and down looked better (I don't), I'd still prefer smooth remote operation.

Alas. That isn't the way the world has went, and it's extremely expensive to be weird.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#316
The best Linux desktop environment is Windows 10 (with WSL2) That's why some journalists have already called 2020 "Year of Linux On Desktop".

Let's be honest, Linux has a good (but not great) kernel, good-to-great apps on server side, and the crappy UI side (Wayland, windows managers, desktop environments)

The best way to interact with Linux is throught API or commandline. Leave UI stuff for more competent folks (Microsoft or Apple)

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#317
post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are asking us to literally draw conclusions from hypothetical benchmarks where the opposite results will exist. I am sympathetic to the idea that things needed to start over. I'm annoyed with the lack of honesty and self critical approach. As framed by you, Wayland is above criticism. Which immediately raises my suspicions.

I have not said that Wayland is above criticism. I have said that the criticism which has been raised thus far is largely invalid, and that the benchmark you pointed to is flawed. If you insist on using flawed benchmarks as evidence for the inferiority of a technology simply because no less-flawed benchmark exists to provide a counterpoint, you are wrong .

What percentage of Wayland users are on Gnome? It seems likely to me that Gnome is likely to be 90-99% of peoples experience with Wayland.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#318
post #67

Sure X.org is abandonware but there are serious problems Wayland still hasn't solved that X has. 1) Wayland is really slow. I don't know if it's the compositing or what but it's unusable on lighter hardware that X ran fine on. 2) Widget toolkits handling window decoration is awful. Before the large number of toolkits just meant some controls were a little different but now basic behavior changes based on how programm…

I am forced to use ms teams for work. Every time I attempted to share my desktop, teams would crash. I thought it was just because teams sucks. As it turns out, it seems to be that running under wayland was actually causing it. Everything works fine under x.org. After I was running with x.org for a couple days, I realized there are quite a few little oddities that I just lived with and didn't realize it was because w…

Teams is an Electron app (like Skype, Signal, VS Code, Atom, etc), which is based on Chromium. Chromium doesn't have Wayland support yet so those run via XWayland. Things should get better once Chromium supports Wayland properly (soon, as it finally entered beta in 2020-09):

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Chrome-8...

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#319
post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Protocol limits what is possible. Legacy defines performance. Gnome is X11 first. Wlroots in Wayland first. It should be possible to optimize Gnome. Wayland was created because of horrible X11 performance [1]. It is not Waylands prime time yet but X.Org still works and maintained. Phoronix.com should have checked contributions [2]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWQh_DmDLKQ [2] https://github.com/freedesktop/xor…

These are appealing arguments. But our industry is flooded with appealing arguments losing to pragmatic compromises.

Our industry is flooded with critics who do not contribute.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There unfortunately is no other option. Gnome could stop being unreasonably obstructionist, but that indeed seems unlikely.

What would it take for something not to qualify as being "unreasonably obstructionist" to you? If there's an open source desktop project that has infinite resources to redesign and rewrite everything at will at a moment's notice, then please let me know. I'll gladly use it. Hell, I'll sign up as a developer.

Have GNOME devs yet acknowledged that XFCE exists? In one now infamous exchange with Transmission developers a GNOME dev claimed that he didn't even know what XFCE was and, furthermore, that cross platform applications like Transmission should choose whether they would be "GNOME apps or XFCE apps", suggesting that they can't be both. The context of this exchange was that GNOME developer asking that a feature be removed from Transmission because GNOME would no longer support it.

That's just one example, but GNOME has a reputation for not respecting Linux desktop diversity for a reason.

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