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Understanding the working of X11 from the ground up (2017)

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Re: Understanding the working of X11 from the ground up (2017)

#51

Post by fao_ »

progman wrote: post #25
pcr910303 wrote: post #17

This is a bit of topic but: Every time I see the X11 protocol, I realize that the UNIX philosophy (everything is a file) is dead. It’s a pity that instead of improving the speed of the file system, everyone started to ignore it, hence making it’s speed even less important, and on and on... And now nobody uses the file system for these purposes.

> Every time I see the X11 protocol, I realize that the UNIX philosophy (everything is a file) is dead. As "dead" as Android (which is based on Linux, a Unix clone) and OSX (a BSD Unix) and iOS (child of OSX)? Why does Microsoft vibrantly support Linux in Windows 10 (an abomination to Ex-CEO Steve Ballmer) if Unix is "dead"? I think the very opposite is true. Some developers realized that the KISS principle (includin…

Support of Linux != support of UNIX and the UNIX Philosophy.

Lennart Poettering, who is the mind behind Systemd, Pulseaudio, and a lot of major new technologies explicitly disavows the UNIX philosophy.

Re: Understanding the working of X11 from the ground up (2017)

#52

Post by seba_dos1 »

fao_ wrote: post #49
geofft wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it can be, see /tmp/.X11-unix/.

Original parent commented that UNIX was dead, given that Wayland does not seem to have an accessible interface from the file system, and nor does SystemD, Pulseaudio, or any of the major new things on the desktop system, I am inclined to agree. Of course Xorg is accessible from the filesystem, but it's probably one of the last technologies to have such an interface.

Umm, but Wayland and PulseAudio do have accessible interfaces from the file system... Wayland even requires it, as opposed to X11 which could work over TCP socket as well. No idea about systemd though (I think it uses dbus?)

Re: Understanding the working of X11 from the ground up (2017)

#53

Post by cycloptic »

fao_ wrote: post #49
geofft wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it can be, see /tmp/.X11-unix/.

Original parent commented that UNIX was dead, given that Wayland does not seem to have an accessible interface from the file system, and nor does SystemD, Pulseaudio, or any of the major new things on the desktop system, I am inclined to agree. Of course Xorg is accessible from the filesystem, but it's probably one of the last technologies to have such an interface.

There is a Wayland compositor called Wio that is looking for help in implementing a file system interface for window management, similar to the one in Plan 9. If you have experience writing FUSE file systems and want to help out, please contribute! Previous HN discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19797152

Re: Understanding the working of X11 from the ground up (2017)

#54

Post by geofft »

fao_ wrote: post #49
geofft wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it can be, see /tmp/.X11-unix/.

Original parent commented that UNIX was dead, given that Wayland does not seem to have an accessible interface from the file system, and nor does SystemD, Pulseaudio, or any of the major new things on the desktop system, I am inclined to agree. Of course Xorg is accessible from the filesystem, but it's probably one of the last technologies to have such an interface.

On my machine systemd is configured by creating files in /etc/systemd, /lib/systemd, and potentially /run/systemd (even temporary/generated config turns into files) and then sending a message to /run/dbus/system_bus_socket. How does it work on your system?

Re: Understanding the working of X11 from the ground up (2017)

#55

Post by krychu »

shmerl wrote: post #2

> I've made a personal decision to leave the Linux, X11, and Wayland worlds mostly behind. I understand X11 has a lot of unfixable problems, but what's wrong with Wayland world?

Does he mean he's no longer working/interested in writing about these topics, and moved to other things?

Or does he mean he abandoned these techs and moved to something other alternatives?

If the latter, I wonder what these other alternatives are?

Re: Understanding the working of X11 from the ground up (2017)

#56

Post by datenwolf »

seba_dos1 wrote: post #52
fao_ wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Original parent commented that UNIX was dead, given that Wayland does not seem to have an accessible interface from the file system, and nor does SystemD, Pulseaudio, or any of the major new things on the desktop system, I am inclined to agree. Of course Xorg is accessible from the filesystem, but it's probably one of the last technologies to have such an interface.

Umm, but Wayland and PulseAudio do have accessible interfaces from the file system... Wayland even requires it, as opposed to X11 which could work over TCP socket as well. No idea about systemd though (I think it uses dbus?)

These are only sockets through, through which you have to multiplex-serialize all the commands.

In the Plan9 model, each and everything is represented by an individual file system entry. In Rio (Plan9's windowing system) every window is represented by a directory in a 9p tree, and you draw to it by opening a framebuffer file inside the window directory and manipulating that.

Furthermore, terminals know about their windows, and can hand it over to whatever is started inside them, which essentially makes it possible to open windows "inside" a shell environment.

It's kind of a unified screen/tmux environment, and you can stack, mix and match how you desire.

Re: Understanding the working of X11 from the ground up (2017)

#57

Post by datenwolf »

mmrezaie wrote: post #27
pcr910303 wrote: post #17

This is a bit of topic but: Every time I see the X11 protocol, I realize that the UNIX philosophy (everything is a file) is dead. It’s a pity that instead of improving the speed of the file system, everyone started to ignore it, hence making it’s speed even less important, and on and on... And now nobody uses the file system for these purposes.

How do you think it should have evolved? I personaly think posix way of filesystem needs to be changed into specialized oject filesystems, but I am not sure what object filesystem for a UNIX OS should look like specially since it needs to be generalized into something all the other sub-systems can benefit from.

Just have a look at Plan9.

Re: Understanding the working of X11 from the ground up (2017)

#59

Post by the_why_of_y »

makomk wrote: post #35
sprash wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My window manager won't work, my hotkey daemon won't work, my screenshot tool won't work, any X11 program that draws to the root window won't work. Xwayland is obviously not a working solution to fix the ecosystem problem. Who is inaccurate now? > debate the merits Wayland has no merits. That is kind of the problem. It is just a reimplementation of stuff that worked.

Also, even the limited X11 support which there currently is under Wayland will probably go the way of the dodo because it involves about the same amount of code as supporting X11 natively. For example, it requires every Wayland compositor to be a X window manager with all the complexity that implies, plus running a full hardware-accelerated X server and the OpenGL driver support for that. I can't imagine the desktop…

Xwayland doesn't need a hardware specific DDX driver, because firstly, many of the features can be implemented by forwarding to the Wayland server, and secondly, the drawing operations (which don't exist in Wayland) have been implemented hardware independently, based on OpenGL, in the GLAMOR backend.

https://blog.mecheye.net/2014/04/xwayland/

https://wayland.freedesktop.org/docs/html/ch05.html

If hardware vendors don't have to care about it, then Xwayland should not create a huge maintenance burden and thus I'm pretty confident it will be available until 2030; enterprise distros likely won't be able to remove it earlier anyway.

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