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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

#441

Post by Sammi »

hedora wrote: post #196
notatoad wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>they are effectively gaining control of the Linux userland. but they aren't gaining control by some dastardly power grab, they're gaining control because they're the only ones actually putting in the work. They're simply doing what they think is best for their product, while at the same time contributing their work back to the open source world. That is good, that's how it's supposed to work. The only reason they're…

I think they are gaining control via a “dastardly power grab”, as you put it. Software that I have relied on for decades no longer runs, and it is invariably because someone at RedHat consciously decided to break compatibility with the existing Linux ecosystem in some functionality regressing way. This has happened with the Linux kernel, pulse audio, dbus, systemd, logins, systemd logger, wayland, gtk2->3, and countl…

Don't attribute to malice what can easily be explained by just not caring. The Red Hat people are getting their work done. Fixing their use cases for their users. Their salaries don't depend on upholding some holy Unix virtues. They depend on making Red Hat users happy and willing to pay.

Whenever you want to understand why someone does something then you should always ask what their motivations are. What do they want and what do they need? What forces are acting on them? What is motivating them? I cannot come up with a reason why Red Hat people would want to maliciously break the Unix model. But I do see how they don't have much motivation to uphold it either.

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

#442

Post by michaelmrose »

darkpuma wrote: post #398
michaelmrose wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wherein "death watch" is expected to work without difficulty for the next decade or longer. They aren't pretending they support Linux, BSD, Solaris, Mac, Windows for a decade after each card is released. While this was true ATI/amd were shipping garbage that barely worked for a few years. This has only changed in recent years. We are a few years having one dedicated gpu maker in the fold and are already talking about…

It really doesn't matter to me if Nvidia drops out of the linux desktop market or not. I've never owned their hardware and never will, so it makes not an iota of difference to me. I'm just observing that Redhat is the trendsetter and if they say X is legacy, that makes it so. Unless Nvidia or Nvidia customers decide to pick up where Redhat is leaving off and pay for developers to work on X, but I sincerely doubt that…

I think having a substantial chunk of potential machines no longer work would be a meaningful difference to the overall actual and potential user base regardless of how you feel personally. I think we should therefore act in everyone's interests.

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

#443

Post by boudin »

chrisseaton wrote: post #354
chungy wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Steam is a pretty niche userbase and not at all representative of the desktop market at large.

I don't think so - I see nobody with a desktop computer these days except gamers or people running CAD or modelling who are basically doing the same thing as running a game.

And all people using a computer for work...

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

#444

Post by darkpuma »

michaelmrose wrote: post #442
darkpuma wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really doesn't matter to me if Nvidia drops out of the linux desktop market or not. I've never owned their hardware and never will, so it makes not an iota of difference to me. I'm just observing that Redhat is the trendsetter and if they say X is legacy, that makes it so. Unless Nvidia or Nvidia customers decide to pick up where Redhat is leaving off and pay for developers to work on X, but I sincerely doubt that…

I think having a substantial chunk of potential machines no longer work would be a meaningful difference to the overall actual and potential user base regardless of how you feel personally. I think we should therefore act in everyone's interests.

Who's going to put up the money? Not Redhat, they don't want to pay for it anymore. Will the nvidia users? Will they be willing to pay for their card twice? Will Nvidia pay for the continued development of X, when they already seem to loath spending money on linux?

If nobody picks up the slack, the paths ahead seems pretty clear. Either Nvidia produces a proper driver, or their support for the Linux desktop can be classified as legacy at best. Feeling upset about this situation doesn't change the nature of it.

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

#445

Post by krageon »

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.

Nouveau drivers are pretty terrible (performance-wise) and didn't support the card that I am using last time I could find any real info about it (admittedly more than a year ago, I use a GTX 1070). This uncertainty is a fact of your life if you use nouveau, which is precisely not what I'm looking for on my main workhorse machine.

This is leaving aside all of the trouble that you have with running Nvidia's ML stuff when you don't use their own driver (impossible, AFAICT).

Both of those things are blocking issues for me, which in turn means that using anything that doesn't support regular nvidia drivers is a no go.

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

#446

Post by pmontra »

pmontra wrote: post #234
phkahler wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wayland is actually more sensible than X. People used to say X had become an OS itself, having memory management, font management, a full drawing API (not used by modern GUI toolkits), and more. One thing transitions like this do is cause the death of unmaintained programs. In some cases that's good, others bad. But ultimately if no one cares enough to modernize it that says something. But we also shouldn't keep deve…

> People used to say X had become an OS itself, having memory management, font management, a full drawing API (not used by modern GUI toolkits), and more. That's OK. I used X terminals from HP in the early 90. 1024x1024 monochrome with an Ethernet connection. Their only purpose was to manage the screen, mouse and keyboard. I don't know which OS they were running on (something proprietar?) but probably X11 was the onl…

I googled for those X Terminals: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_X-Terminals

We probably had the 19i because I'm sure it was 1 bit per pixel, so it was 1280x1024.

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

#447

Post by pmontra »

calcifer wrote: post #282
boudin wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Expect supporting wayland properly, which all other major vendors have been doing for quite a while. I wouldn't call this excellent at all...

> Expect supporting wayland properly Doing what everyone else does != doing it properly > I wouldn't call this excellent at all So far Wayland support is most further in Gnome and even there a lot of features are still missing/broken despite Wayland being well over a decade old at this point. A lot of very basic features (remote desktop, screen sharing, exclusive fullscreen, keyboard/mouse shortcuts) are still in the…

Screen sharing is quite important in my workflow. Fellow developers and customers will send me buying Windows or a Mac if all screen sharing applications on Linux stop working. I'm using Slack and Meet. Skype is almost abandoned among my customers.

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

#448

Post by krageon »

snazz wrote: post #323
calcifer wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Expect supporting wayland properly Doing what everyone else does != doing it properly > I wouldn't call this excellent at all So far Wayland support is most further in Gnome and even there a lot of features are still missing/broken despite Wayland being well over a decade old at this point. A lot of very basic features (remote desktop, screen sharing, exclusive fullscreen, keyboard/mouse shortcuts) are still in the…

> A lot of very basic features (remote desktop, screen sharing, exclusive fullscreen, keyboard/mouse shortcuts) are still in their infancy. - remote desktop: good point. Considering that screen recordings work fine, I don't see a technical reason that a Wayland remote desktop setup couldn't work. - exclusive fullscreen: what do you mean by this? Using Firefox, F11 and Super-F both work in Sway and F11 works with GNOM…

> The fact that a random process can no longer read all of your keystrokes seems like a plus

It is a plus, unless you write software that allows for global keyboard/mouse shortcuts (which I have done). In which case it is just a huge pain in the ass to not have it, and then hearing from some developers that you can just "add a shortcut to your window manager" is incredibly frustrating. It's not like you can trust an average end-user to actually do so, even the ones that do run linux. Then you will get complained at for not having functionality that existed at some point in the past.

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

#449

Post by PlutoIsAPlanet »

earenndil wrote: post #401
snazz wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A lot of very basic features (remote desktop, screen sharing, exclusive fullscreen, keyboard/mouse shortcuts) are still in their infancy. - remote desktop: good point. Considering that screen recordings work fine, I don't see a technical reason that a Wayland remote desktop setup couldn't work. - exclusive fullscreen: what do you mean by this? Using Firefox, F11 and Super-F both work in Sway and F11 works with GNOM…

Exclusive fullscreen = application runs directly on the screenbuffer, bypassing the compositor. Not just that a window happens to be taking up the whole screen.

This is never going to exist the same way it did in X, which was a hack around the X display model.

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

#450

Post by krageon »

boudin wrote: post #246
rat9988 wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a standard problem. You can't be a standard if the market does't care about you. You are just a specification and guidelines.

Intel and AMD cares about it. If the Linux desktop market would grow, Nvidia would quickly change their mind. Now, this market growing is another question... But for me, nvidia gpu are just not a possibility because they lack good drivers on Linux.

> If the Linux desktop market would grow

You can think of any number of fantasy scenarios that would make one of the biggest GPU vendors care about your standards, but sadly that is not the world we live in. The world we live in is one where Nvidia has the best game support on the market (far, far better than AMD - let's not even think about Intel here) and therefore anyone who still plays games on a PC will own one of them unless they are some sort of AMD advocate.

At the end of the day, nobody wants to be reading "we don't support this because they're not nice to us". That's going straight back to the linux dark ages of 15 years ago, where you needed to care about all sorts of weird and arcane details to get a functioning desktop system.

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