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Phoenix: A modern X server written from scratch in Zig

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

#411

Post by oblio »

criticalfault wrote: post #266
IshKebab wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Users? Obviously xorg devs want to work on something that isn't ancient and crufty. But users want something that actually works and it has taken almost 2 decades to get to that point. Actually I still have more issues on Wayland than X. Although it is at least starting to swing in the other direction - e.g. KDE's screen recording feature doesn't work on X. The button's still there but if you click it nothing happens…

Most users have no idea what is behind. They don't want X or anything X related, they want things to work. Most of the things worked before 2020, including legacy things through xwayland. Now all things work, except maybe remote apps through ssh ootb, but for this you can either use RDP or Waypipe. The only thing maybe worth discussing is video acceleration. this aside, I have been using gnome on Wayland for years an…

HiDPI scaling (not even fractional, 2x aka 200%), for some apps like OnlyOffice, VMWare Workstation, but not only, on Ubuntu 24.04. Had to switch back to X.

You can blame the apps all you want, but it's a fact of life, and Wayland has been around for 18 years.

At this point you'd hope they'd pull an early 90s Microsoft: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/05/24/strategy-letter-ii...

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

#412

Post by uecker »

eptcyka wrote: post #353
uecker wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

It was my understanding that changing the original codebase to fix it would’ve been involved enough as to warrant a rewrite.

I think this is nonsense.

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

#413

Post by reppap »

phito wrote: post #190
reppap wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really understand what is supposedly missing in Wayland for productivity users? At work I have been using gnome with the wayland backend for years at this point and I can't really figure out anything that's missing.

Screenshots are just completely broken. People always tell me to use other apps like flameshot but IME it just doesn't work and I don't want to have to mess around so much to take screenshots. I'm still using Wayland because it's what came with my distro (endeavour OS, gnome), but it's really strange how it came broken out of the box.

I'm curious what OS you are running that has broken screen shots on wayland because that hasn't been my experience on Fedora.

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

#414

Post by vidarh »

bitwize wrote: post #327
sho_hn wrote: post #11

Pretty interesting approach to make an X server that is essentially "Wayland-like" (merging display server/compositor by default, isolated apps by default, no remoting of GLX, dropping legacy protocol features to the point of breaking compat with the core protocol, etc.). Not sure who this is for, but by itself it looks like a fairly reasonable set of choices.

Funny, the other day I started writing an X server of my own. While I appreciate and welcome this work, I still use and write software that makes use of old X draw calls, which I intended to incorporate into my server, unlike the author of this work. So I'm glad to see my efforts have not been made largely redundant!

I'd at least consider moving older draw calls into an xlib replacement. Not all of them are suitable for that, but e.g. sufficient font handling to beat Xorgs server side handling requires the Render extension plus ca. 1500 lines of C for a basic TrueType renderer, or half that in a higher level language, or just use FreeType which is a dependency for most X clients anyway.

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

#415

Post by ptx »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #392
MrDrMcCoy wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Headless remote desktop, at least for KDE, is very much not possible today as far as I can tell. It's the last thing I miss from Xorg.

FWIW, like everything else in Wayland, it's per-compositor. Here's a working headless sway in a container: https://gitlab.com/yjftsjthsd-g/docker_sway-vnc (This is not a defense of Wayland, just trying to share useful information)

Hmm, you mention in the README that it only works in a privileged container. This of course negates the security benefits Wayland supposedly has over X11, so it doesn't seem ideal.

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

#416

Post by criticalfault »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #292
criticalfault wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most users have no idea what is behind. They don't want X or anything X related, they want things to work. Most of the things worked before 2020, including legacy things through xwayland. Now all things work, except maybe remote apps through ssh ootb, but for this you can either use RDP or Waypipe. The only thing maybe worth discussing is video acceleration. this aside, I have been using gnome on Wayland for years an…

Wayland: * straight up doesn't work on at least one of my laptops (driver problems AFAICT) * does run on the other one, but crashes at an alarming rate compared to Xorg * breaks all of my accessibility tools (some have (worse) replacements, some don't)

what laptop? what hardware?

here is my state of laptops:

* Dell latitude with old Intel 8gen CPU, it works fine (Linux kernel causes problems with PSR, but this has nothing to do with Wayland and disabling it fixes the problem, same thing with cstates)

* Dell latitude with 10gen CPU, works fine.

* Huawei d15 with Ryzen 3000 Apu, works fine.

ok. for accessibility it's fair enough as a critique. I don't use it so can't say. As far as I can tell this hasn't been in focus at all. but most of this is on the toolkit side, not Wayland (even though here one thing is mentioned as Wayland specific, just briefly went through the post)

https://blogs.gnome.org/a11y/2024/06/18/update-on-newton-the...

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

#417

Post by dvtkrlbs »

linsomniac wrote: post #295
reppap wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really understand what is supposedly missing in Wayland for productivity users? At work I have been using gnome with the wayland backend for years at this point and I can't really figure out anything that's missing.

>what is supposedly missing in Wayland My desktop is a bit long in the tooth (22.04), but I've long given up on trying to screen shot or screen share from Wayland. I have my Macbook sitting next to it and use it for those things, where it works basically flawlessly. Kind of waiting for 26.04 to upgrade at this point, but I'm not really expecting any of this to be better yet. edit: If I had it to do over again, I woul…

I am on KDE never had any problems taking screenshots.

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

#418

Post by ablob »

gabrielgio wrote: post #233
linuxhansl wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tangentially related... Is it just me, but is Wayland still lagging behind X11? From things like window placement, night light, etc. Things seem to work just out of the box in X11, and there are always issues in Wayland. (For me this is specifically on Fedora, and I always switch back to X11 from Wayland.)

At this point it is just you. I run two different distributions myself, I know a bunch o people on even more different distributions, set of configuration and based on empirical analysis I can assure you that no one has problem with windows placement. Out of the box I used have more problem with X11 (tearing and font rendering being the most annoyingly common ones) than I have with Wayland.

It's not just him. I've had issues with windows popping up on the wrong display and also their scaling. Works without issue on X11; and I don't even know where to start looking on Wayland.

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

#419

Post by immibis »

TingPing wrote: post #351
esjeon wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, we should introduce competition. It doesn’t feel like Wayland is improving these days. Missing features force me to hit X11 regularly, and I still get Wayland session crashes etc, while X11 could happily run over a year without crash and run all applications I need without issues.

“Wayland” cannot crash, its a protocol. Your complaints are to your compositor.

Wayland is a display system design, and is responsible for problems arising from the system design.

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

#420

Post by yxhuvud »

mihular wrote: post #377
yxhuvud wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are not wrong. But there is a new extension protocol on the way (dunno if done, very probably not rolled out if it is) that let programs solve this problem.

Uh, there are plenty of extensions. Session management perhaps? In experimental state.

Uh, was thinking of one that explicitly deals with window positioning of new windows.
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