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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

#451

Post by krageon »

darkpuma wrote: post #444
michaelmrose wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cl…

This is exactly the kind of reasoning that has always stood in the way of real people using Linux. It makes me sad that we've come a really long way towards taking that mindset out of the OS and we seem to be moving back to it again.

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

#452

Post by PlutoIsAPlanet »

hannasanarion wrote: post #416
rambojazz wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You cannot take screenshots with wayland??

Nope! Not unless your DE has implemented their own custom screenshot solution, and your screenshot program has Code to interface with that DE.

Don't throw such bullshit. Of course you can take screenshots, and no a screenshot program does not need to be adjusted for each DE.

The screenshot program only needs to interface with the org.freedesktop.portal.Screenshot api, which works on GNOME, KDE and wlroots.

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

#453

Post by JetSpiegel »

krageon wrote: post #451
darkpuma wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cl…

This is exactly the kind of reasoning that has always stood in the way of real people using Linux. It makes me sad that we've come a really long way towards taking that mindset out of the OS and we seem to be moving back to it again.

NVidia doesn't care, why should the rest of the community subsidize their development costs?

The solution has been presented, and they reject it.

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

#454

Post by xorcist »

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.

It's important to know that there were once many implementations of X11. Xorg is the only one that hasn't failed. Everything else is unmaintained now.

This may be a matter of different perspective, but from my point of view the Xorg maintainers did a monumental work modularizing and cleaning up the codebase. They kept integrating modern extensions and have kept X11 relevant all this time. Try something pre-Xorg to compare.

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

#455

Post by nsajko »

PlutoIsAPlanet wrote: post #452
hannasanarion wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope! Not unless your DE has implemented their own custom screenshot solution, and your screenshot program has Code to interface with that DE.

Don't throw such bullshit. Of course you can take screenshots, and no a screenshot program does not need to be adjusted for each DE. The screenshot program only needs to interface with the org.freedesktop.portal.Screenshot api, which works on GNOME, KDE and wlroots.

That requires Dbus, LOL.

Also, the API is not part of the Wayland protocol. In other words, not every compositor will implement it, and if they do, it will have its costs.

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

#456

Post by johannkokos »

michaelmrose wrote: post #363
emersion wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

You can see why Nouveau devs are having difficulties with Nvidia in a Xorg developer confereence talk[1].

1. Relations with NvidiaNVIDIA changes prevent us from releasing a driver

  * Signed firmwares accessible publicly but not redistributable

  * Reverse engineering of vbios impossible
2. Communication mostly down

  * Main contact/dev left NVIDIA (Alexandre Courbot)

  * Most important requests left unanswered...

  * ... until more complete code than wanted lands publicly innvgpuweeks later
[1] https://www.x.org/wiki/Events/XDC2017/herbst_peres_nouveau.p...

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

#457

Post by akvadrako »

hannasanarion wrote: post #416
rambojazz wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You cannot take screenshots with wayland??

Nope! Not unless your DE has implemented their own custom screenshot solution, and your screenshot program has Code to interface with that DE.

That seems like a good design. A screenshot protocol can be outside the core wayland spec.

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

#458

Post by krageon »

JetSpiegel wrote: post #453
krageon wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly the kind of reasoning that has always stood in the way of real people using Linux. It makes me sad that we've come a really long way towards taking that mindset out of the OS and we seem to be moving back to it again.

NVidia doesn't care, why should the rest of the community subsidize their development costs? The solution has been presented, and they reject it.

The point I was trying to make is that your end users are fundamentally the ones suffering. You are not suffering, because you avoid the problem by throwing money at it. Nvidia is not suffering, because you as a community don't matter to their wallet.

The only people who suffer are the people we write software for. Maybe that doesn't matter to you, because you write software only for people like you. That's fair. It matters to me though.

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

#459

Post by arghwhat »

csande17 wrote: post #334
arghwhat wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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…

> If Wayland had a standard compositor interface like X has, this wouldn't be a problem at all, would it?

It does. It's called Wayland.

I suspect you might instead be thinking of a standard window manager interface to plug into a compositor, rather than the other way around.

The Wayland approach has been to just make it easier to write a compositor, instead of porting X's complexities and odd design choices.

However, nothing stops you from making a compositor with such an interface. It won't be part of Wayland, but it would be its own spec.

However, this suggestion would be a case of symptomatic treatment. The root cause of complexity is NVIDIA.

> It's only because of Wayland's design

This is not true. It just because Wayland is not X, and NVIDIA only has support for X.

Under X, every driver had its own integration, which was a pain to make, maintain and use.

For Wayland, the community got together to make a generic API that had nothing to do with Wayland, allowing applications (be it a wayland compositor or something else) to not have to think about what they're running on.

NVIDIA, however, is just trying to throw more duct-tape, taking us back to the X era.

You may ask "Why don't everyone just implement EGLStream?" - that is because EGLStream has no merit, and is just the implementation that would be easiest for NVIDIA to implement. Why would we make everything else worse, spending significant time and effort redesigning everything else, all to save NVIDIA a few bucks?

If they have actual concerns, we can solve it as a community, but considering that everyone invested significant time in this project, we are not going to throw it all away and pick a vastly inferior model just so that NVIDIA doesn't have to do anything. NVIDIA is just one GPU manufacturer out of many, and on Linux, a small one.

As for EGLStream problems: Performance and stability are the big ones. Ironically, EGLStream is bad for gaming, as we cannot do direct scanout with it (an optimization where full-screen content gets thrown directly to screen instead of going through compositing).

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

#460

Post by DocTomoe »

carapace wrote: post #110

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…

> Would you contribute to e.g. a Kickstarter for X Windows?

If that's what it takes to keep i3, sure.

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