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The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

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Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#581

Post by sergeykish »

vnlab wrote: post #577
sergeykish wrote: post #558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Python 3 changed nothing * print is function * string is unicode by default Should have been clean and easy migration path # python 2 from __future__ import print_function print(u"foo") u"" # was u"" b"" # was "" But u"" was not supported in Python 3 until PEP 414 (python 3.3) [1]. That's four years [2]: Python 3.0.0 Dec. 3, 2008 Python 3.3.0 Sept. 29, 2012 Ruby string switched from codebytes to codepoints with encod…

> Python 3 changed nothing. Sorry, have you tried to maintain a C extension for both 2/3? Or a unicode heavy application? This is a silly statement, there's a reason that major packages took a decade to migrate. There are thousands of little details that are incompatible.

From user perspective. Gains.

Nothing required big 2/3 change. Ruby and Go done it right — a series of small changes. Python 2.* had it right. The attitude of language developers was clearly stated in PEP 414 and 2to3 approach — no backward compatibility. That is nonsense, every python program had backward compatibility several minor versions deep.

Select one issue and work on it. Unicode:

    # python prev
    u"" # or from __future__ import unicode_literals
    b""
vs

    # python next
    u""
    b"" # or from __past__ import binary_literals
Facts speak for itself, change was to big for users to overcome it, price was too high. I've lived through Ruby string changes, not a big deal.

Wayland transition is nothing like Python 2/3. It is big but mostly invisible, XWayland runs X11 applications, toolkits hide implementation details, no X.Org deprecation.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#582

Post by krageon »

sergeykish wrote: post #456
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…

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…

Saying Wayland is just non-functional for reasonable use-cases without significant user workarounds (usually going back a decade in execution and clarity) isn't toxic culture, it's the truth. Yes, people can work on what they want. By the same logic, anyone can say that the direction they're taking is bad.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#583

Post by sergeykish »

krageon wrote: post #582
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…

Saying Wayland is just non-functional for reasonable use-cases without significant user workarounds (usually going back a decade in execution and clarity) isn't toxic culture, it's the truth. Yes, people can work on what they want. By the same logic, anyone can say that the direction they're taking is bad.

I believe you assert that Wayland failure is that is not ready for end user.

Strange point, it should have been burned 10 years ago than. I use X.Org, works perfectly in Arch Linux, some claim problems on in their distribution. It should be critique of that distribution.

> Chromium is making its first shy bumbling steps towards actually working on Wayland

And Firefox support is behind MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 flag. Clearly Wayland is in "early adopters" stage. Early adopters should not whine.

> By the same logic, anyone can say that the direction they're taking is bad.

You've clearly not watched presentation. Some people know better than developer of that technology. It would be insult on my job. I've had enough people stating "technical debt is not real".

> Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy Is Killing You

Open source is nothing like Google deprecating its services, anyone can run code, but it is naive to expect free indefinite support.

Truth is you are not going to maintain X.Org.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#584

Post by krageon »

phkahler wrote: post #527
p_l wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Due to how XWayland works, a lot of applications (sometimes critical ones) won't work under XWayland ever (pretty much everything that works on interaction between X clients fails hard).

>> pretty much everything that works on interaction between X clients fails hard It's supposed to fail hard. That isnt just a security hole in X, it's a total lack of security. The notion that any app should be able to monitor or manipulate any other app is archaic and wrong from a security perspective.

Maybe it's archaic and wrong to you. Maybe it's even a good idea to be able to configure this on a per-application basis. What isn't the case is that you get to know what is convenient and right in my workflow.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#585

Post by krageon »

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…

> Unfortunately, that forbids general-purpose screenshotting and key-rebinding programs

Without this, you will forever be incalculably behind the proprietary OSes and the original X server. Perhaps you're happy in that corner, great! That puts you and whoever else exists there in the same conceptual space where everyone else with impractical and unreasonable restraints on their software lives.

That's a fine space to be in, but you don't get to say that it's the "correct" choice for the average user. It's the wrong choice, because it puts the Linux ecosystem at a permanent usability disadvantage. Instead of going with this "no you can't have it" approach, it would have been entirely reasonable to go with something permissions-based (perhaps even with a default that says it won't happen). Instead, we're stuck with one part of the community yelling that this is what everyone should want and everyone else trying their hardest to ignore them. It's an unhealthy situation for everyone.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#586

Post by wegs »

nialv7 wrote: post #517
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…

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.

There isn't a magical different userbase Linux has to serve which has somehow bizarre needs not served by thoughtfully-designed older software, but which newer, poorly-designed software somehow meets.

Yes, we need a newer web browser, but that could run on old-school Linux/Unix just fine. Aside from that, there isn't anything wrong with nineties Linux which couldn't have been brought up to modern standards with a bit more discipline.

Someone decided ALSA (or OSS, it doesn't matter) was rough to deal with, so they build Pulse and JACK on top of it, rather than a modest expansion of ALSA. Someone didn't like the network layer, so they build a userspace wrapper, and someone didn't like that, so they wrapped it up in a GUI.

At the end of the day:

1) Everything is slow, requiring literally more than 100x the resources it once did.

2) Everything is complex, with layers upon layers, and text files with comments "This is managed by my hack. DO NOT EDIT THIS BY HAND. I keep the exact same data elsewhere, in my own config file, since I couldn't be bothered to read what's in the line below."

3) Everything is brittle and hard-to-understand. I knew how nineties Linux booted. Today, the logic is distributed among dozens of layers, mostly because people wanted to reinvent new things, rather than polishing/improving/fixing old ones. Different apps go for the wrong layer, and tutorials point to the wrong ones too.

Now Ubuntu is throwing its hands up at the mess, and building snap to hide all this under yet. another. layer.

As a footnote, ALSA was just about the last time this happened right, with it replacing OSS while maintaining compatibility.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#587

Post by wegs »

sph wrote: post #556
nialv7 wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Especially in the Linux world where not asking too much of their own PC is seen as a virtue, so people are running tiling WMs from the nineties, spend their time in Emacs and say everything is fine. Meanwhile I want my Linux system to run VR, multiple 4K displays, very demanding games and bluetooth headphones. And Linux is the worst for it, because everything feels laggy and half polished there and on the proprietary…

No one is saying everything is fine. It's not.

What we're arguing is why everything is not fine.

SGIs ran VR, multiple displays, and very demanding apps in the nineties too. They did all sorts of wonky, complex, 3d input devices too. So did DEC Alphas. This is the stuff Unix was built for.

My claim is that nineties Linux was much closer to having the right architecture for it than 2020 Linux for this sort of stuff. The reinventions and onion layers didn't help; they hurt.

I think the only piece nineties Linux didn't anticipate was the level of hot-swapping hardware (USB, Bluetooth, displays, etc.), and the level of power management. Modern Linux never got that architected or integrated quite right, because it was built with hack upon hack upon kludge. It's split up in bizarre ways between kernel and user space which would be really tough to clean up right now.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#588

Post by wegs »

WesolyKubeczek wrote: post #433
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…

I've heard enlightenment can be a Wayland compositor now, could you try it? Also I think 3dfx Voodoo was the magic pixie dust, once you ever go OpenGL, you're not going back.

I ran Enlightement for maybe a month or two to try it. I mostly ran twm, fvwm, and similar at the time. Those are obviously not satisfactory for a typical user.

I gave it as an example of something which ran rather sophisticated theming/compositing/effects on hardware at least 2 orders of magnitude slower than today, and something which modern Ubuntu/Fedora struggle with.

I'd encourage you to compare the specs of the 3dfx Voodoo (the "magic dust") to even bottom-barrel integrated graphics of 2020.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#589

Post by kllrnohj »

mrob wrote: post #253
kllrnohj wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All your stuff is already composited, and if done well it doesn't add much latency at all. You're still paying it in X, just badly, and with none of the upsides (eg, no tearing). Even if you're trying to avoid a compositor, none of the UI toolkits are participating in that nonsense.

That's no reason to add another layer of avoidable compositing.

You're not. It's already there and already happening. The difference is just we all stop pretending anyone is doing anything else. As in, kill the terrible X vector crap, and add reliable compositing APIs so things like video playback in apps stops being so incredibly bad (see video in browsers sucking in linux and not anywhere else).

You know, catch up to what literally everything else is doing. Windows, MacOS, iOS, Android, etc.. are all exclusively compositor-based window management systems. And they don't have latency issues, as ways to avoid what little latency compositing adds can be avoided in cases when necessary, like front buffer rendering extensions on Android for VR. Literally only X remains stuck in the 90s.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#590

Post by wagamama010 »

RedShift1 wrote: post #561
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…

Imagine if all the work that has gone into Wayland went into Xorg... We'd have a pretty sweet graphical server.

> We'd have a pretty sweet graphical server.

Don't you mean "They"?

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