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

Phoenix: A modern X server written from scratch in Zig

git.dec05eba.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 462 posts

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

#341

Post by eptcyka »

uecker wrote: post #257
oddmiral wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even when you are national-state-level target, there are easier ways to grab the screen. For local state, it's easier to just install a wireless camera and watch your screen from behind: it leaves no trace on your computer (you may spot it wireless connection, if you lucky). Moreover, they are more interested in your communication devices (your smartphone) than in your desktop. Foreign states may exploit your noteboo…

I am not sure what you saw, but on regular Linux processes of the user can spy on each other anyway. In any case, X had the concept of untrusted clients basically forever but nobody cared to invest even the small amount of work necessary to make it work well because nobody thought it would make a different. That this was later used as a major argument against X convinced me that this is not at all about technology.

Yeah, but with how we’re moving towards running each (desktop) application in its own cgroup, thus restricting what syscalls any given application can do, soon any old user process will no longer be able to read any other process’s memory. I don’t believe that the argument about how we need not patch a hole because another one exists right besides it is sound.

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

#342

Post by vidarh »

gf000 wrote: post #318
vidarh wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, no I have my own wm in Ruby that is fewer lines of code than a typical Wayland Hello World, and that does what I want. I have no reason to want to throw that away for something that doesn't offer me any features I care about, and removes features I do. Such as the ability to just restart my wm if I make a change to it without affecting my current session at all. Unless you can show me a solution that lets me re…

It's called an extension. What's the point of mandating a (bad) IPC API?

Th point is that with X I could start with less than 100 lines and switch to using my wm, and stepwise refine it while using it.

You might consider that a bad API, but to me any solution without it is massively inferior and not something I will ever consider.

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

#343

Post by cycomanic »

coryrc wrote: post #209
eptcyka wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the issues are trivially resolved, why did the authors of X decided to abandon X? If the issues could be resolved, why were they not resolved? I am using wayland for more than 5 years now, it just works. X did not. Xscreensaver/lock screens on Qubes are still broken. What features is Wayland the protocol missing to allow supporting Xfce?

> If the issues are trivially resolved, why did the authors of X decided to abandon X? They convinced their employers Wayland would be better? > Xscreensaver/lock screens on Qubes are still broken. Most people aren't nation-state-level targets and don't worry about security to that degree. But they do like global hotkeys.

By now I am not sure if these posts can stil be given the benefit of the doubt or are just dishonest. Who were the developers pushing wayland because of their employers? Kristian Høgsberg (who was a significant xorg developer, because people always deny that wayland was written by xorg guys) originally developed wayland in his free time, it then became a freedesktop project (I would argue not a group run by corporates).

The most active implementation (particularly in the early days) is probably wlroots, started by Drew deVault (again in his free time), who is often quite vocal against corporate control.

In fact the large desktop environments, which are much more under "corporate control", were comparitavely slow to adapt wayland IIRC.

So instead of repeating this accusation, maybe actually give some evidence?

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

#344

Post by creatonez »

torginus wrote: post #259
imtringued wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, X11/Xorg is a huge monolith. There is simply no way to implement every single feature in one go and then release the competing implementation. The very thing that makes people biased towards X11/Xorg both negatively and positively is that it is a huge monolith and the only X implementation on Linux. The moment you have two implementations, you're gonna get the same complaints against the second X server…

The Linux kernel is also a monolith yet has worked forever without a rewrite. I think there is a reasonably agreed on set of things that can be removed from X, like server-side drawing primitives, and GLX

The Linux kernel was not born obsolete on arrival like the X Window System was. At least, not fully obsolete.

It will be obsolete someday, anyways.

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

#345

Post by cycomanic »

ablob wrote: post #176
bigyabai wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

So what is it, in one comment you say there were plenty of x11 devs who objected to wayland (please name and show the posts) and on the other hand you say there were not enough to keep an xorg fork going?

People are arguing that fixing the issues in X11 would have been much easier and less work than making wayland. So why could those half of x11 developers who left make wayland while the other half that was left over could not even make one release?

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

#346

Post by underdeserver »

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...

I think all the cool one-word names are used, and overused, by now.

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

#347

Post by ChocolateGod »

sho_hn wrote: post #314
coliveira wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whatever the issues with X11, it was properly designed. Wayland is the kind of software that adds features with nobody looking at the consequences. Who knows what they will break next version.

From all the criticisms leveled at Wayland, this is definitely the strangest I've ever heard. I really cannot thing of any existing functionality ever broken by a new release of wayland-protocols, neither by a plain bug nor by a bad interaction. No doubt someone else will be able to recall an example, but it's really not a common thing. This is partially because the governance model and community mindset is the oppos…

> making it a high bar

That high bar is GNOME having an uppity whenever a Wayland protocol is suggested they don't like, that even if is accepted, if Mutter doesn't implement it then its dead in the water given its the de facto default compositor on unfortunately what people consider "Linux", aka Ubuntu.

e.g. DRM leases that only got changed because Valve has the bigger underwear. Expecting games to implement DBUS (incl. when running under Wine) to access VR headsets just for GNOME is nuts.

The government model needs a change that stakeholders who ship devices to the end users that rely on them have more of a say, whether that's Google, Valve etc. Valve is now backing and pushing KDE into average joe end users is a telling.

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

#348

Post by uecker »

eptcyka wrote: post #341
uecker wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not sure what you saw, but on regular Linux processes of the user can spy on each other anyway. In any case, X had the concept of untrusted clients basically forever but nobody cared to invest even the small amount of work necessary to make it work well because nobody thought it would make a different. That this was later used as a major argument against X convinced me that this is not at all about technology.

Yeah, but with how we’re moving towards running each (desktop) application in its own cgroup, thus restricting what syscalls any given application can do, soon any old user process will no longer be able to read any other process’s memory. I don’t believe that the argument about how we need not patch a hole because another one exists right besides it is sound.

I agree. My point was only that this hole can easily be patched in X as well. So the argument was essentially "we do not bother to patch it with X, so we must rewrite X".

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

#349

Post by TingPing »

torginus wrote: post #256
kelnos wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can do per-display DPI just fine on X11 (through xrandr), it's just the major toolkits don't support it. GTK, for example, reads a single global DPI value from XSETTINGS; there's no reason why it has to be that way. The annoying thing about the other things you mention is that they honestly are not that difficult to fix. The X server can throw an error (or just silently ignore it) when one client passes the windo…

>You can do per-display DPI just fine on X11 (through xrandr), it's just the major toolkits don't support it. GTK, for example, reads a single global DPI value from XSETTINGS; there's no reason why it has to be that way. I remember people complaining about the GTK file picker not having a preview for more than a decade, and at some point it sort of became a meme. When it finally got added, the PR was like a 2-300 lin…

Does it really have to be said that a PR is built upon previous work. It was not a 400 line delta for the whole feature.
Post reply on HN