Live data from Hacker News

The death watch for the X Window System has probably started

utcc.utoronto.ca

371–380 of 518 posts

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

#371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I haven't heard of Wayland being buggy?

Wayland is so buggy and makes X look like the Pinnacle stable software development.

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

#372
post #73

One of the comments on the article ( https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/XDeathwatchSta... ) is also possibly of interest, suggesting possible technical routes for using existing windows managers on Wayland: > There is XWayland, and apparently it will support handling the root window, not just application windows: https://wayland.freedesktop.org/xserver.html > The missing piece of the puzzle is Xweston, whi…

Again -- XWayland is Xorg. The xorg-server codebase contains a number of components, one of which is a front end called DIX (Device Independent X) that handles protocol-level stuff, another of which are several backends collectively called DDX (Device Dependent X) that handle drawing to the actual video hardware or other graphics layer. One of these DDX backends is 'xwayland'. So the XWayland server incorporates the…

Problem with your suggestion is that Wayland won't be around in 15 years while Xorg will still be km kicking.

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

#373
post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe a dumb question but why do people want to use Wayland if it's that horrible?

For a bunch of stupid, hysterical reasons, the Open Source X11 server still has all the warts of early-1990s release. XFree86 used the MIT X.Org core dump to implement open X11 on Linux, but outside of certain new things (DRI, XRender extension) it remained stuck in "world is dumb framebuffers with optional bitter" design. Over time, a lot of useful stuff was broken and supported less and less, then reimplemented in…

I wonder why the SGI stuff for X was not open sourced?

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

#374
post #173

Maybe the death watch for the traditional Linux desktop has also started... Linux distributions have had a decade long slide in their usability and polish. Much of this has been due to an abandonment of its historical UNIX roots in favour of half-baked "modern" replacements. Being a UNIX replacement with a full X11 server and all the rest was what made it compelling and practical in the first place. However, it's com…

> Otherwise, I might as well resign myself to fate and use Windows with WSL or VMs for everything else. If I'm going to be forced to use something I dislike, it might as well be something that properly supports all my hardware and I can be productive with despite its annoyances.

I was going to make my own top-level comment, but you've said everything I wanted to say.

The day X dies is the day I switch back to Windows. I can simply use WSL and KDE Applications to get something very close to the parts of Linux I like.

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

#375

RIP ( I don't doubt for a minute that someone will pick up the slack, but that makes me wonder, who's gonna pay for it? Would you contribute to e.g. a Kickstarter for X Windows? FWIW, I'm not sure I would, meaning no disrespect I've been hoping to ditch X for something better ever since Don Hopkins opened my eyes to NeWS, &c. ) So there's Wayland. What else? Arcan? https://arcan-fe.com/about/ On HN: https://hn.algoli…

Thank you, I hadn't heard of it before so I'll check it out! I'm not optimistic about Wayland, since early on they decided not to use an extension language, and that's not something you can have a change of heart about later, and then just nail onto the side. It would be interesting to see how Arcan uses L ua, which is a great language for that kind of stuff. It's a lot smaller and sleeker and better designed than Ja…

I get paid to work on Arcan so I don't think factorio would have that big of an impact ;-)

The initial choice of Lua for Arcan was based on its use, at the time (2004-2005ish), in World of Warcraft. The UIs that people were hacking together in WoW even with little to no serious programming experience was way more advanced than what would ever be needed for desktop interfaces so it seemed like a good fit. Even for other projects, Lua is still my goto "safe" keyword for C.

There are more interesting properties though, especially how the VM- bindings integrate with C. Stay away from using too much metatable magic etc. and what you get is an ok "protocol+binding" in one. Substitute the stack for socket read/write, add an identifier to function translation and you can chose between in-process or stronger separation. The reality is slightly more involved, but not by much.

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

#377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> NVIDIA's solutions is so fundamentally different that you'd basically maintain two compositors internally: One that handles every sane driver, and one that handles NVIDIA. If Wayland had a standard compositor interface like X has, this wouldn't be a problem at all, would it? You could write your compositor that talks to the hardware using your "sane" interface, and someone else could write a compositor that uses th…

> It's only because of Wayland's design that "GPU manufacturer creates nonstandard interface to their driver" is some giant, existential, ecosystem-fragmenting threat to the open-source community. That's not how I think of it. By analogy, consider POSIX. Every major operating system supports the POSIX interface--all of them, except one that is. But no one goes around calling that one OS a "giant, existential, ecosyst…

> no one goes around calling that one OS a "giant, existential, ecosystem-fragmenting threat to the open-source community."

we did do that, and they were, but for the most part, for the moment (at least) we've won - so it's no longer on the tip of our tongue

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

#378
post #109

This is troublesome, and it feels like "progress" for the sake of "progress" rather than actual improvements. The X Window System is time-tested technology, while Wayland, from what I've seen and read, is not. This isn't a good thing to me, especially considering NVIDIA hardware doesn't seem to be well supported. Someone come along and correct me, please.

Thanks for downvoting, everybody.

You aren't supposed to downvote because you disagree, you're supposed to downvote because I'm not contributing to the discussion.

This place is an echo chamber that favors cliques and follows its own arbitrary rules while being hostile to others. lobste.rs is so much better.

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

#380
post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

OP explicitly mentioned Sway (based on wlroots), not Gnome (mutter). Besides, even Gnome can't handle XWayland with Nvidia today. And if you play games, especially in Wine, that's still a requirement. While Gnome developers bent under Nvidia's pressure, other compositor developers aren't interested in accommodating exceptions for blobs and wasting their resources on that. TL;DR: just ditch Nvidia and forget about all…

Well, they don't play as nice as AMD, but they do at least give you working drivers. They do have place for consumers, there are valid use cases for Nvidia on Linux, such as:

1) top performance available on the market;

2) off-the-shelf passive cooled 4K capable cards (GT 1030);

3) (significantly) better performance per watt and less noise for high-end cards.

I still prefer AMD for their play-nice attitude with Linux and seemingly better track record on behaviour towards consumers, but Nvidia for the last years have been offering better hardware.

Post reply on HN