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The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

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Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#511

Post by znpy »

neurostimulant wrote: post #508
sergeykish wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This criticism looks like "free as beer and I know better". 1. The old, mostly working thing waits your commit 2. That new thing can have some help too I recommend developers story about this "mostly working thing" (2014) [1]. It is quite fun and eye opening, he clearly knows his subject better than most of the comments. Wayland demo worked almost from day one. I've run it in 2010 [2]. But we need applications, that…

It took python community 10 years to migrate to python 3, and the migration process from python 2 to python 3, while tedious, is certainly a lot easier than porting a gui app from xorg to wayland. It could take some time until most app developers finally migrated their apps from xorg to wayland.

worth noting that in the python 2 to 3 story, a migration path was mostly provided along with tools that tried to automatically refactor your code, the latest 2.x release was supported for nearly a decade, and there have been directions on how to temporarily write code to work on both python2 and python3.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#512

Post by phkahler »

WesolyKubeczek wrote: post #422

What looks like "typical Linux geeks being geeks" with this situation: 1) the old, mostly working thing is being abandoned in favor of 2) that new thing which doesn't work in so many cases it's laughable, even after 11 years. How many years was it between the concept of X and a working release at Palo Alto? Note that the new situation is so perfect for passing the buck from the windowing system to the compositors, an…

>> that new thing which doesn't work in so many cases it's laughable, even after 11 years.

I've been using Wayland for years now and it works great. The one and only thing I use X for is OBS studio because they're still working out the window capture stuff, which BTW mean poking the right hole through security that X doesnt even have.

Most the things that don't work well on Wayland are old junk.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#513

Post by nialv7 »

WesolyKubeczek wrote: post #422

What looks like "typical Linux geeks being geeks" with this situation: 1) the old, mostly working thing is being abandoned in favor of 2) that new thing which doesn't work in so many cases it's laughable, even after 11 years. How many years was it between the concept of X and a working release at Palo Alto? Note that the new situation is so perfect for passing the buck from the windowing system to the compositors, an…

The standard for X was very low in the past. It's unfair to compare wayland with X, when you compare X to alternatives we had back in the 90s.

It took the X window system 30-ish years to get where it is today. Wayland only had 11 years, yet it is already better than X in many aspects.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#514

Post by msla »

moomin wrote: post #474
wegs wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Newer isn't better-designed. Unix was really well-designed, compared to so much of the modern stuff, and it does everything I need. Nineties Linux was a nice Unix. I wish we hadn't spent the past quarter-century turning it into nineties Windows, with layers upon layers upon layers of cruft. I don't get why Wayland is slow, when Enlightenment was fast on machines with 32MB of RAM, a 3dfx Voodoo, a spinning HDD, and a…

One of these days you should read the X section of the Unix Haters Handbook. Wayland is being built for the world as it is, X was built for a world that never was. In this case, it’s quite hard to not be better designed.

> X was built for a world that never was.

No. This is the thinking of people who can't see the utility of a use case they never personally use. It's the thinking of people who believe that "ssh -X" is "obsolete" because RDP exists, or that window managers can become obsolete because the fashion has moved on. X works, it's worked for decades, and saying that it's never worked doesn't negate that.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#515

Post by comex »

ivanbakel wrote: post #494
nsajko wrote: post #132

If Wayland is the future, the future is grim. People often complain that Wayland is taking a long time to catch up to X11, but that actually stems from a deeper issue: Wayland has a horrible design, for an X11 replacement, a design that leads to massive fragmentation issues across the graphical part of the Linux ecosystem. Implementing a Wayland compositor requires much more effort than implementing an X11 window man…

> These seem to be intentional design decisions (marketed as being necessary for security, but really being power-user hostile) That's an unnecessarily abrasive view: the Wayland protocol designers do not hate power users. But allowing programs to constantly take in arbitrary input & output information in the background, as well as simulate arbitrary input to other programs, is an obvious and glaring security flaw. U…

> That's an unnecessarily abrasive view: the Wayland protocol designers do not hate power users. But allowing programs to constantly take in arbitrary input & output information in the background, as well as simulate arbitrary input to other programs, is an obvious and glaring security flaw. Unfortunately, that forbids general-purpose screenshotting and key-rebinding programs - but there is no sensible middle ground.

Of course there's a middle ground: require special permission for programs that wish to do those things. For example, macOS has permission prompts for "[Application] would like to record this computer's screen." and "[Application] would like to control this computer using accessibility features."

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#516

Post by msla »

horsawlarway wrote: post #462
bitwize wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What looks like "typical Linux geeks being geeks" with this situation: I call systems like this CADT-compliant after Jamie Zawinski's Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers idea. Wayland is a system for which CADT-compliance (and maybe security) trumps nearly all other concerns. No surprise, the primary use case for Wayland is and was always GNOME -- the very system for which Zawinski coined CADT.

I mean... having used both X and Wayland as daily drivers, you're fucking insane if you think you can EVER get me back on X. On Wayland I get excellent multi-monitor support (mixed scaling ratios, much better automatic detection and configuration, much better plug-and-play). I also have a touchpad on my XPS that feels just as good as a Mac. To boot, I haven't had to touch a config file related to input devices or out…

X works for me on systems with multi-month uptimes (dictated by software updates that have nothing to do with X) and networking windows over the Internet, something RDP (and, to the best of my knowledge, Wayland) is incapable of. Meanwhile, Wayland doesn't run the software I want to run and doesn't run on the hardware I own.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#517

Post by nialv7 »

wegs wrote: post #430
WesolyKubeczek wrote: post #422

What looks like "typical Linux geeks being geeks" with this situation: 1) the old, mostly working thing is being abandoned in favor of 2) that new thing which doesn't work in so many cases it's laughable, even after 11 years. How many years was it between the concept of X and a working release at Palo Alto? Note that the new situation is so perfect for passing the buck from the windowing system to the compositors, an…

Newer isn't better-designed. Unix was really well-designed, compared to so much of the modern stuff, and it does everything I need. Nineties Linux was a nice Unix. I wish we hadn't spent the past quarter-century turning it into nineties Windows, with layers upon layers upon layers of cruft. I don't get why Wayland is slow, when Enlightenment was fast on machines with 32MB of RAM, a 3dfx Voodoo, a spinning HDD, and a…

I find it really arrogant to claim "this software does everything I need, so it should never change", while in reality you are but an infinitesimally small part of the user base said software has to support.

Sure, all the software can stay where they are if all the developers had to serve is you. But that is just not the reality.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#518

Post by phkahler »

WesolyKubeczek wrote: post #468
horsawlarway wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean... having used both X and Wayland as daily drivers, you're fucking insane if you think you can EVER get me back on X. On Wayland I get excellent multi-monitor support (mixed scaling ratios, much better automatic detection and configuration, much better plug-and-play). I also have a touchpad on my XPS that feels just as good as a Mac. To boot, I haven't had to touch a config file related to input devices or out…

Cannot say Wayland works smoothly on my triple-monitor setup. One of the monitors sometimes stops working randomly, and wakes up to display Plymouth screen when I reboot the thing. Dell Precision 7520 with an AMD GPU. The degree of flakiness is different depending on whether you're on Plasma or GNOME, but it's there nonetheless.

>> Cannot say Wayland works smoothly on my triple-monitor setup.

How does X work on that setup?

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#519

Post by nialv7 »

znpy wrote: post #38

I am not necessarily against Wayland or new things in general. But it bothers me when no clear upgrade path is defined ("drop your stuff" is not acceptable) and a half-hassed incomplete solution is proposed instead, and backwards compatibility is pretty much disregarded. For what concerns my personal computing, I'll stay on Xorg until XFCE supports Wayland. Then I'll update.

> when no clear upgrade path is defined

This is not true. Developers have been working actively on Xwayland, and I believe it can run most of the applications now, even with hardware acceleration. Is that not a clear upgrade path for you?

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#520

Post by cycloptic »

nsajko wrote: post #478
cycloptic wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Check ydotool for an xdotool replacement: https://github.com/ReimuNotMoe/ydotool The lack of a common screenshot protocol isn't related to security. The desktops just haven't been able to agree on a common protocol (yet?)

You're missing the point, which is that all of this should have been a part of Wayland, because "the desktops" will never agree on a common protocol. Also, you're wrong that this isn't related to security, I can't be bothered to dig up some quotes right now, but it is/was actually very common to explain the lack of a screenshot feature on Wayland with security, and even to dismiss the feature altogether as a security…

Making it a part of Wayland would not have accomplished much. If the desktops really couldn't agree on a common protocol then you would end up with a bad standard that no desktop implements. See wl_shell for another reason why doing this in the core protocol would have likely been a mistake.

I don't know who was painting it as a security issue but they're mostly wrong. The security issue is in restricting use of those capabilities to only privileged applications. Maybe other (embedded?) compositors left that out entirely for security reasons, but GNOME and KDE always had plans to include screenshots, and wlroots has it too. Weston even had its screenshooter protocol for a while now but the other desktops decided not to use it and went their own way, for various reasons. (Full-featured screen capture is actually not as simple as you'd think, and it gets messier when pipewire and zero-copy capturing are on the table)

Edit: Check here for some background https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland/-/issues/32

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