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Gnome developer proposes removing the X11 session

theregister.com

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Re: Gnome developer proposes removing the X11 session

#61

Post by janosdebugs »

jjav wrote: post #46
janosdebugs wrote: post #19

This is going to leave so many people by the wayside. (Pun totally intended.) Late 2020, my jaw dropped on the floor when a developer from CERN showed up and said that X11 support was needed in ContainerSSH for their use case and then developed it. (The LxPlus service, which acts as a dev host for researchers.) I thought X11 forwarding was well and truly a thing of the past. Yes, I know that waypipe is a thing, but i…

> I thought X11 forwarding was well and truly a thing of the past. Am I misunderstanding what you're saying? That's kind of the whole point of using X, the primary use case.

X forwarding over SSH always struck me as a bit of an edge case. I used it maybe 5 times in the last 20 years. Most people probably never knew this was a thing.

Re: Gnome developer proposes removing the X11 session

#62

Post by justinclift »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #6

GNOME (and many others) have spent years telling anyone who has issues with Wayland that lead them to run an X session to report bugs, and has put a lot of effort into fixing those bugs. This seems like a reasonable next step. > This plan seems to The Reg's FOSS Desk to be strong-arming people into adopting Wayland. Or, more reasonably, to maintain less code for alternate paths in favor of fixing the issues that lead…

If the article is still correct, and Wayland doesn't work with the Nvidia binary drivers then that's a hard blocker for at least myself. :/

That being said, I'm still using Ubuntu 20.04 LTS on my desktop as I prefer stable systems. That way I can put time into the things I'm interested in more. :)

So, as long as it all works nicely by the time I need to change from Ubuntu 20.04, then I likely won't particularly care if it's wayland or X underneath.

Re: Gnome developer proposes removing the X11 session

#63

Post by jjav »

janosdebugs wrote: post #61
jjav wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I thought X11 forwarding was well and truly a thing of the past. Am I misunderstanding what you're saying? That's kind of the whole point of using X, the primary use case.

X forwarding over SSH always struck me as a bit of an edge case. I used it maybe 5 times in the last 20 years. Most people probably never knew this was a thing.

I use it every day all day ever since it was introduced in ssh (can't remember when). Before that used to just forward in plaintext over the network (different times).

Re: Gnome developer proposes removing the X11 session

#64

Post by Fluorescence »

r0l1 wrote: post #51
uxp8u61q wrote: post #49

As someone who used to be a diehard Linux user and supporter, and then switched back to windows after about a decade, this thread is a good reminder of why I switched back. I've been hearing about the year of the Linux desktop for... Years... And yet here are people who suggest I should put up with an incomplete, partially broken display server, because they don't want to deal with maintenance of the old one. And in…

I am using wayland since 5 years and never looked back to X11. I think it is the right way and time to remove the old insecure X11 backend. GNOME should not be bloated with legacy stuff.

Your experience is not universal. On an intel cpu/gpu laptop, I have zero issues.

But on an AMD/Nvidia desktop it's unusable because it's buggy as all hell. It's endless glitches in dozens of applications. At first it appears fine and then you get subtle stuff like like letters not appearing in vscode when you type, OBS won't record etc.

Re: Gnome developer proposes removing the X11 session

#65

Post by redox99 »

uxp8u61q wrote: post #49

As someone who used to be a diehard Linux user and supporter, and then switched back to windows after about a decade, this thread is a good reminder of why I switched back. I've been hearing about the year of the Linux desktop for... Years... And yet here are people who suggest I should put up with an incomplete, partially broken display server, because they don't want to deal with maintenance of the old one. And in…

> You know what? The equivalent of X11 in windows may be full of cruft, technical debt, poorly thought out / "unelegant" design decisions... But it fucking works. I'm sorry, but I have other things to do than dealing with the constant churn of Linux desktop software.

It's funny because it's the opposite.

On Windows, you can install and update the graphics drivers without restarting, and it can ever seamlessly recover from a GPU crash.

On Linux, you need to update the whole kernel, and if the GPU or the driver crashes, you'll kernel panic.

On the compositor side, on Windows you can easily have multimonitor setups with different fractional DPIs, different refresh rates (including variable refresh rate), mix of HDR and SDR, applications without vsync and so on. On linux, even single monitor HDR is unsupported.

Re: Gnome developer proposes removing the X11 session

#66

Post by jeroenhd »

bandrami wrote: post #53
jeroenhd wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When did they do that? All I can find is the Python foundation protecting their trademark. Someone launched "Python 2.8" without any affiliation to the Python Foundation, that's a silly move. Surely everyone in open source learned from the Iceweasel debacle. Something called Tauthon is still being patched every few months for people who can't let go of Python 2.7, though I don't see many contributors to that fork.

> without any affiliation to the Python Foundation Sorry, no dice. The Python team said for years as the 2 to 3 rollout grew increasingly catastrophic "If you wan't to keep Python 2 all you have to do is maintain it" and then threatened to sue the guy who called their bluff. It was a real low point in free software.

This guy wasn't maintaining Python, he as creating a new version incompatible with either Python 2.7 or Python 3.

Red Hat and other large companies have maintained Python for years after 2.7 died (EOL date was January 1st, 2020). IBM/Red Hat offer Python 2.7 including security fixes and bug fixes until 2024 (https://access.redhat.com/solutions/4455511).

Had he just provided patches to Python 2.7, nobody would've batted an eye. Instead, they created an alternative language that was completely different (https://web.archive.org/web/20161210161837/https://www.nafta...).

Founders and core devs indicated that the name was the only problem (https://github.com/naftaliharris/tauthon/issues/47#issuecomm...) and that even things like the header file names could continue to be named Python because of API compatibility.

You can fork any open source project you like, but you still need to stick follow trademark law. You can't just release Linux 2.7 because you disagree with breaking changes in 3.0 either, but you're free to take the Linux code and release Twonux if you really care.

Re: Gnome developer proposes removing the X11 session

#67

Post by FloatArtifact »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #9
v3ss0n wrote: post #5

Wayland is no way ready - O proper screen recording support - broken screen sharing - No proper global keyboard shortcut - No push to talk support - Their developers are seriously crazy on their design decisions. - Several problems with multiple screens A proper refactor of X11 should have been the way to go and there should had been X12 with modern technologies

> proper screen recording support > broken screen sharing Both work perfectly here with pipewire installed. I can do screen recording, and share my screen in video meetings in Firefox. > No proper global keyboard shortcut System-wide keyboard shortcuts already work, through the desktop. The ability for an arbitrary application to request a global keybinding is in progress and expected to become available soon. > No p…

What about accessibility that needs to emulate mouse and keyboard based on window titles/executable?

Re: Gnome developer proposes removing the X11 session

#68

Post by Gualdrapo »

Fluorescence wrote: post #64
r0l1 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am using wayland since 5 years and never looked back to X11. I think it is the right way and time to remove the old insecure X11 backend. GNOME should not be bloated with legacy stuff.

Your experience is not universal. On an intel cpu/gpu laptop, I have zero issues. But on an AMD/Nvidia desktop it's unusable because it's buggy as all hell. It's endless glitches in dozens of applications. At first it appears fine and then you get subtle stuff like like letters not appearing in vscode when you type, OBS won't record etc.

Then I don't understand why people blame about Wayland about this on its entirety.

Re: Gnome developer proposes removing the X11 session

#69

Post by janosdebugs »

jjav wrote: post #63
janosdebugs wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

X forwarding over SSH always struck me as a bit of an edge case. I used it maybe 5 times in the last 20 years. Most people probably never knew this was a thing.

I use it every day all day ever since it was introduced in ssh (can't remember when). Before that used to just forward in plaintext over the network (different times).

When I explain this to people, they are usually very surprised.

Re: Gnome developer proposes removing the X11 session

#70

Post by sprash »

olgeni wrote: post #59

Reminds me of systemd: we "modern" developers despise anything that reminds us of "traditional" Unix, thus we need to rewrite it in such a way that is not only new, but actively punishes unwelcome users. Then we will complain about "embrace and extend" while people try to replace their xdotool scripts and their perfectly working X11 setups. Too bad for them: we don't care about custom applications, we still aim to ju…

X11 has nothing to do with "traditional" Unix. Even back in the 80s the UNIX philosophy didn't work with a graphics stack and X11 itself is very un-Unix-like. This is even more true for the modern graphics stack. That being said, X11 is one of the few APIs that had a really long run and that everybody in the community agrees upon. This is extremely rare. 38 years of backwards compatibility and still being able to deliver performance on the most modern graphics stacks is a tremendously huge value that shouldn't be thrown away just because some IBM/Redhat or Collabora employee says so.
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