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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

#461

Post by ptx »

DonHopkins wrote: post #250
phkahler wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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. I don't see a need for an extension language for a compositor. A miminum of DE features will be implemented in Wayland compositors and everything else will be other programs - write them in what you like. Or am I wrong…

The extension language is most useful for the window manager, which should be running in the same address space as where the events are being generated and processed.

I think this was tried with GNOME Shell and turned out not to be such a good idea. It runs JavaScript in its Wayland compositor/window manager and that reportedly causes unreasonable problems with lag and unresponsiveness. The Purism people were advised to write their own compositor/shell instead for the GNOME/GTK-based Librem 5 phone.

Maybe that's a Wayland problem though, with the way it combines the windows manager with everything else into one process.

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

#462

Post by Crinus »

arghwhat wrote: post #337
calcifer wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nvidia has excellent support, I think you are conflating Linux with open source. For decades, Nvidia had (and arguably still has) excellent support for the former, without really caring for the latter.

Are you referring to the small decade it took them to support KMS so that their driver behaved even remotely like a modern one? Or perhaps their marvelous installation methods of running a random script as root that rewrites configuration files, and its configuration interface that likewise also rewrites configuration files in attempts to get multi-monitor setups working that until recently hardly ever worked? Maybe…

I think he refers to the fact that Nvidia's drivers provided excellent OpenGL support for multiple years compared to the absolute dumpsterfire that fglrx was. Before Valve decided to pay attention to Linux and thus prod AMD to improve their drivers, if you wanted anything approaching serious 3D performance on Linux, you had to use Nvidia. Anything else would be a waste of money.

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

#463

Post by arghwhat »

michaelmrose wrote: post #367
arghwhat wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intel and AMD maintain open source drivers that have supported this for ages. It's only NVIDIA that still tries to shovel outdated proprietary drivers without support for community developed standards down our throats. Adding that their proprietary drivers are not particularly good, NVIDIA is not a very popular choice for a Linux machine. Just remember that it took them almost a decade to add KMS support.

It's an interesting position to suggest that nvidia which has no obligation to support you in any way shape or form is shoveling anything down your gullet by not supporting the standards you prefer. You could vote with your wallet but there aren't enough Linux users to move anyone's needles as far as gpus.

> but there aren't enough Linux users to move anyone's needles as far as gpus.

Well, for server and ML payloads, we are the vast majority. Things like Google Stadia is certainly enough to move needles, and if AMD ends up able to compete in ML with future products, then we'd be able to make a huge dent in NVIDIA revenue.

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

#464

Post by Crinus »

PlutoIsAPlanet wrote: post #449
earenndil wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It doesn't matter how it is going to exist, what matters is for it to exist.

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

#465

Post by kasabali »

asveikau wrote: post #384
major505 wrote: post #376

I would die a happy man, if I never had to open an xorg.config again.

Recent releases encourage you to remove xorg.conf altogether and let it figure out the config itself. Works pretty well from what I have seen.

I must add ”recent” here means more than 10 years. Last release that required an xorg.conf file was released in 2006 or 2007?

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

#466

Post by crazyloglad »

earenndil wrote: post #417
crazyloglad wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Just curious, who is paying you to work on arcan?

Some (most) details from recent years are subject to NDAs of various sorts - the rough areas are in some computer vision projects for automated IoT/mobile device testing, runtime "VJ-ing" with watermark injection/removal and embedded device forensics.

'Desktop/display server' parts is just a sidetrack that I do to get about as far away from what is otherwise happening in that space as possible, I need a sane work environment that doesn't keep making decisions behind my back or is laughably unreliable, and this turned out to be the easiest, albeit time-consuming, route.

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

#467

Post by arghwhat »

Crinus wrote: post #462
arghwhat wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you referring to the small decade it took them to support KMS so that their driver behaved even remotely like a modern one? Or perhaps their marvelous installation methods of running a random script as root that rewrites configuration files, and its configuration interface that likewise also rewrites configuration files in attempts to get multi-monitor setups working that until recently hardly ever worked? Maybe…

I think he refers to the fact that Nvidia's drivers provided excellent OpenGL support for multiple years compared to the absolute dumpsterfire that fglrx was. Before Valve decided to pay attention to Linux and thus prod AMD to improve their drivers, if you wanted anything approaching serious 3D performance on Linux, you had to use Nvidia. Anything else would be a waste of money.

Fair enough: That was indeed true many years ago.

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

#468

Post by posix_me_less »

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…

You can (kind of) sandbox Firefox with X11 today. Just run it as untrusted X11 client with privileges of untrusted uid. Downsides:

* this does not always work for other programs, and for Firefox you need to turn off bell events in about:config to avoid random crashes;

* (this may be upside depending on what your expectations are) X clipboard is still shared in the host->client direction.

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

#469

Post by pjmlp »

jcranmer wrote: post #360
csande17 wrote: post #334

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…

There are plenty of OSes that don't support POSIX, or if they do, they only support the parts they care about.

So no, Windows isn't the only one that doesn't care.

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

#470

Post by pjmlp »

nqzero wrote: post #377
jcranmer wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

In an age where POSIX is sliding into irrelevance in what concerns mobile and embedded OSes.

"POSIX Has Become Outdated"

https://www.usenix.org/system/files/login/issues/login_fall1...

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