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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

#381

Post by DonHopkins »

crazyloglad wrote: post #375
DonHopkins wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 oth…

Don't be so sure you won't miss work if you haven't yet tried Factorio! ;)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20362179

WoW was what convinced me how practical and powerful Lua really was, too. And that there were people out there that knew how to program it really well.

The WoW "Auctioneer" mod in particular was quite advanced and elegantly written. It would analyze the prices of items in the auction house over time, and help you price and sell your own items competitively. Not just lots of fancy user interface, but some respectable data wrangling and number crunching too.

One important thing about Lua is how cleanly and efficiently it integrates with C code. TCL/Tk also has this virtue, but TCL was a terribly designed (but brilliantly implemented) programming language. While both Lua's design and implementation are quite excellent. It also has a great community, plus RMS never declared a holy war on it, either!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14944103

https://vanderburg.org/old_pages/Tcl/war/0000.html

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

#382

Post by altfredd »

xorcist wrote: post #169
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…

The CADT development model is very real, but it's not really a good description of the Xorg situation. The most active Wayland developers are not only also Xorg developers but have been so for a very long time. They know their history. X11 has some fundamental problems. It's not fun using a modern desktop where it is impossible to sandbox individual applications. Firefox frequently processes untrusted data and is run…

> The most active Wayland developers are not only also Xorg developers but have been so for a very long time

Amusingly, I often hear this argument from Wayland proponents. Do they realize, that those very same developers have failed at maintaining Xorg code base and fixing it's bugs in backward compatible way?

To run a project into the ground and wash one's hands of it... is not worthy of endorsement.

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

#383

Post by yyyk »

saghm wrote: post #364
michaelmrose wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know it's not the devopers fault that they can't reverse engineer nvidias closed source crap but nouveau has always been garbage. Nvidia should adopt and fix it or at least help.

> Nvidia should adopt and fix it Or even better, just open source their own driver

Probably not possible (or at least not trivial at all) due to third-party licensing agreements. AMD/ATI didn't open source their closed driver but instead supported the open source one.

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

#385

Post by shmerl »

effie wrote: post #380
shmerl wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Given all the above, I'd call them "working", not working :)

> top performance available on the market;

Not anymore with new Navi cards. And competition in the Linux market will probably get even stronger with Intel releasing new GPUs with open drivers next year. I.e. there will be no reason to buy Nvidia anymore with all the blob downsides that aren't going to disappear.

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

For gaming 4K is really a read herring today, and for regular non gaming desktop use case, you don't need strong GPUs even for 4K.

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

Also not anymore with Navi.

So I'd say things today look pretty bad for Nvidia on Linux, and they'll be gradually losing Linux desktop market, until they will start playing nice with upstream. Time will tell if they actually will. I don't think they care though. And neither Linux users would care to use them.

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

#387

Post by new_realist »

emersion wrote: post #88
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…

NVIDIA doesn't support GBM, which is the standard for buffer allocation. Use nouveau. >The last issue could be solved with a reusable library that provided basic compositor functionality for window managers. This is pretty much what wlroots is.

Or use X11, which is what people will actually end up doing.

At the end of the day, X, GNOME and KDE have all figured out how to work with NVIDIA binary drivers, but wlroots has not.

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

#388

Post by danShumway »

altfredd wrote: post #382
xorcist wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The CADT development model is very real, but it's not really a good description of the Xorg situation. The most active Wayland developers are not only also Xorg developers but have been so for a very long time. They know their history. X11 has some fundamental problems. It's not fun using a modern desktop where it is impossible to sandbox individual applications. Firefox frequently processes untrusted data and is run…

> The most active Wayland developers are not only also Xorg developers but have been so for a very long time Amusingly, I often hear this argument from Wayland proponents. Do they realize, that those very same developers have failed at maintaining Xorg code base and fixing it's bugs in backward compatible way? To run a project into the ground and wash one's hands of it... is not worthy of endorsement.

> To run a project into the ground and wash one's hands of it... is not worthy of endorsement.

But to run a project into the ground and not wash one's hands of it is an even worse endorsement.

You might not trust the Xorg devs to develop you a new window system, but at least you'd trust them to know if their own, existing code has fundamental problems.

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

#390

Post by [deleted] »

arghwhat wrote: post #319
csande17 wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are the technical problems documented anywhere where non-NVIDIA-driver-developers can learn about them? Most of the discussion I've read online argues that to support NVIDIA's solution, everyone would need to add if(nvidia) checks to their code and maintain them forever. But this argument only really holds in Wayland's bizarro-world where all programs that arrange windows must also bake in code that interfaces direct…

> Most of the discussion I've read online argues that to support NVIDIA's solution, everyone would need to add if(nvidia) checks to their code and maintain them forever. This is a severe misunderstanding of NVIDIA's solution. 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. Nothing in wayland is…

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