The X.Org Server Is Abandonware? • Hacker News Board

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#631

Post by Spivak » Mon, Oct 26, 2020, 3:21 PM UTC

phkahler wrote: post #518

WesolyKubeczek wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Well until you need mixed scaling and then it completely falls down.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#632

Post by ddingus » Mon, Oct 26, 2020, 3:21 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #568

ddingus wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Need to accept" vs "get stuff done" = "use Windows or OSX" Fact is the people who developed X thought through multi user graphical computing. That process has not really happened since. It needs to, or we just won't see desktop Linux compete.

2% after 30 years in the making, and hatred for the GNOME and KDE communities, always pushing for PDP-11 experience with multiple xterms like I was doing in 1994 on IBM X Window terminals on the university campus with DG/UX, I already gave up around Windows 7 release.

I used X on SGI and have yet to have as robust an experience on any of the OSes.

When the thinking it through gets done, the result is powerful.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#633

Post by Spivak » Mon, Oct 26, 2020, 3:30 PM UTC

severino wrote: post #174

solarkraft wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wayland is a protocol. It has nothing to do with multi screen support. You're talking about the compositor you used. The one I use handles multi-screen setups quite well.

I never got to fully understand Wayland's model, but if this means that something that previously was handled by the display server for everybody, and now every single desktop environment (or at least something like wlroots) has to solve it over and over again... how isn't this a step back?

Wayland is like X11. Xorg implements the X11 protocol. There are other X11 server implementations — XWin32 is one example on Windows.

Nothing has changed with Wayland except we have a new thing and lots of groups writing compositors. And this is great — Mutter, Kwin, wlroots, Mir — and they will all speak a common protocol for putting stuff on the screen and handing input events. And projects with similar use-cases “desktops” are standardizing on common dbus interfaces for non-display stuff.

This is genuinely so much better than the Xorg monoculture. Wayland’s design has made it possible for lots of different groups to implement display servers and have interoperability because what we had before was “X11 actually means do what Xorg does.”

There’s lots of in-fighting about the scope of Wayland and people that want to make a protocol for putting pixels on the screen also handle “desktop stuff” like audio, screenshots, screen recording, keybindings, input automation, authentication. I think this is misguided because it would effectively turn Wayland into a generic message bus between “apps with windows” and the display server when we already have a generic message bus for every application — dbus.

Right now we have things like:

org.gnome.Shell.Screenshot | org.kde.kwin.Screenshot

org.gnome.Shell.Screencast | org.kde.kwin.Screencast

which after shaking out will be promoted to org.freedesktop.* after standardization. Despite the fact that notifications have been "DE specific" in the same way for years and years nobody seems to complain about org.freedesktop.Notifications.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#634

Post by wegs » Mon, Oct 26, 2020, 3:41 PM UTC

anthk wrote: post #605

wegs wrote: post #587

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. T…

> think the only piece nineties Linux didn't anticipate was the level of hot-swapping hardware They did, modular kernels date back as 2.2 at least. And USB was born in that era.

If this was anticipated by the architecture:

* My USB webcams wouldn't show up in a different order each time I reboot. This works fine under Windows and Mac.

* My monitor configuration wouldn't be hardcoded in my xorg config file, or swapped around manually with xrandr. I'd have a way to code up config options for whatever is plugged in, and if something unanticipated happens, it'd do something reasonable until I coded that config in too.

* I wouldn't need to reconfigure my drawing tablet to connect to the right monitor each time I plug it in.

* The system wouldn't get into an unrecoverable, unstable state with e.g. an unreliable USB cable.

.. and so on. It's designed for a fixed set of hardware, with layers on top of that to support hotswapping. I don't have "USB 4k Logitech Webcam" on the native level. I have /dev/video3. I then have layers to map names back.

Same thing with HDDs too, actually. I refer to them as /dev/sdc4, rather than by a GUID or name or similar. Layers with onions.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#635

Post by danaris » Mon, Oct 26, 2020, 3:42 PM UTC

derefr wrote: post #393

swiley wrote: post #67

Sure X.org is abandonware but there are serious problems Wayland still hasn't solved that X has. 1) Wayland is really slow. I don't know if it's the compositing or what but it's unusable on lighter hardware that X ran fine on. 2) Widget toolkits handling window decoration is awful. Before the large number of toolkits just meant some controls were a little different but now basic behavior changes based on how programm…

> And if there's a security problem with something isn't hacking around with it because people need it a really strong indication that the idea is broken and probably making the situation worse? If there’s a security problem and people are hacking around it, that’s an indication that the either those people have bad needs, or that the security model is flawed — but it’s not an indication that it’s wrong to attempt to…

I guess my question is: Why shouldn't "take a screenshot, either of a window, the whole screen, or a portion of the screen" be something that Wayland itself be expected to handle?

I mean, if you're worried about security of apps from other apps, don't make it something in the apps' domain. Only allow Wayland to take the screenshots, but support that, make it easy, and you won't need to worry about either the security model or users complaining.

I mean, this is the way other OSes do it...to the best of my knowledge (which is certainly not comprehensive) neither Windows nor macOS allow arbitrary apps to screenshot arbitrary portions of the screen; that's handled by the OS itself.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#636

Post by wegs » Mon, Oct 26, 2020, 3:44 PM UTC

School-Cotton wrote: post #604

wegs wrote: post #599

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Computers aren't things I enjoy. They're things I stomach. I think I'd use OpenBSD if I were confident that after setting it up, it worked reliably, without changes, for the next few decades, with transparent system upgrades. Part of that is working Bluetooth, power management, webcams, video conferencing, OBS, and similar. Historically, OpenBSD was behind Linux on working reliably. Debian used to do this before: 1)…

Fair enough. Webcams and power management work fine on OpenBSD (assuming there exist drivers for your hardware), but Bluetooth isn’t supported at all. What I like about it is the simplicity of everything. If you want to change your mouse sensitivity, you add a line to a particular file in /etc. If you want to autojoin a particular WiFi network, you add the SSID and password to a particular file in /etc. If you want t…

On that list, I can live without Bluetooth.

Do you know if:

1) Zoom works? Linux has a blob which does.

2) OBS works? This is critical.

3) How is video support with ATI/Nvidia? Will my multimonitor setup break?

The other thing which scares me is the manual upgrade process. On my systems, I've done apt-get update/dist-upgrade for a quarter century now, with never an issue.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#637

Post by sergeykish » Mon, Oct 26, 2020, 3:56 PM UTC

neurostimulant wrote: post #627

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…

Just like you said, for majority of people, migration from python 2 to 3 is mostly painless. Some code don't even have to be rewritten and might work on python 3 without any modification. However, some applications requires major migration because their core functionality depends on some feature in python 2 that now changed python 3, and they won't do major refactoring effort until the benefit of migrating to python…

I've built Python 3.2 just to show the problem introduced by language designer

    $ python3.2
    Python 3.2.6 (default, Oct 26 2020, 15:29:09) 
    [GCC 10.2.0] on linux2
    Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
    >>> u"foo"
      File "", line 1
        u"foo"
             ^
    SyntaxError: invalid syntax

This is hostile behavior. It took four years to solve (python 3.3), still supported:

    $ python3
    Python 3.8.6 (default, Sep 30 2020, 04:00:38) 
    [GCC 10.2.0] on linux
    Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
    >>> u"foo"
    'foo'

Python got better in supporting old versions over the years. Take a look at Django, it got Python 3 support in February 26, 2013 [1].

> Django 1.5 introduces support for Python 3 - specifically, Python 3.2 and above.

Notice version gap — no support for 3.0, 3.1. It was quite common.

> python 3 migration where most of the community agree that the move is justifiable

If people believed breaking change was justified they would move to 3.0, it did not happen.

I've seen both Python and Ruby community, Ruby made two breaking changes (1.9 and 2.0) while Python got its PEP 414. There was a huge split among developers.

---

Essentially you are describing how switch happened while I'm describing which lessons should have been learned. It is sad if Python community learned nothing.

> the community opinion seem to be split which certainly harm wayland migration progress.

Developers done great job, you can't run 2.7 code in 3.*, you can run X11 applications in XWayland. Is there a split in developers community? All I see is FUD among users.

[1] https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/3.1/releases/1.5/#python-3...

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#638

Post by sergeykish » Mon, Oct 26, 2020, 4:03 PM UTC

phone8675309 wrote: post #630

cipherboy wrote: post #612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I strongly disagree. Since switching to Fedora almost 4 years ago, I've only booted to X.org once, three years ago. I haven't needed it since. I do browser-based screensharing (of both individual windows and the whole screen), I have a mixed DPI monitor setup, I've played games on Steam, &c. I need no workarounds. GNOME just works. About the only things I don't use are nvidia's crappy drivers.

nVidia is the overwhelming leader in GPUs that people care about, so if you don't mind excluding the majority then it sounds like a great direction. Hope it works out for you.

There is nothing Wayland can do about "nvidia's crappy drivers".

GamingOnLinux stats — AMD GPU 40% and raising.

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/index.php?module=statistics&vi...

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#639

Post by renewiltord » Mon, Oct 26, 2020, 4:08 PM UTC

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.

Sure, but that's not how hobbies work. You can't take someone's volunteer work and turn that into work on a thing that is not the thing they volunteered their work on and expect to get the same productivity.

It's like saying "Imagine if all the time you, a software engineer, spent on taking care of your child was spent on making a graphical server". Sure, but I don't want to make a graphical server, I want to turn people into dinosaurs.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#640

Post by cipherboy » Mon, Oct 26, 2020, 4:11 PM UTC

phone8675309 wrote: post #630

cipherboy wrote: post #612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I strongly disagree. Since switching to Fedora almost 4 years ago, I've only booted to X.org once, three years ago. I haven't needed it since. I do browser-based screensharing (of both individual windows and the whole screen), I have a mixed DPI monitor setup, I've played games on Steam, &c. I need no workarounds. GNOME just works. About the only things I don't use are nvidia's crappy drivers.

nVidia is the overwhelming leader in GPUs that people care about, so if you don't mind excluding the majority then it sounds like a great direction. Hope it works out for you.

You've got two primary use cases for nVidia's GPUs:

1. Gaming. Just about nobody games on Linux with nVidia. Most people I know who game (from Linux) with nVidia GPUs use PCI passthrough to a guest VM running Windows. Very few use nVidia GPUs on their host system. My primary setup is a 2950x/128GB DDR4/Vega 56/2080 Super -- the latter goes to kvm exclusively.

2. "Research" such as machine learning. You don't need Wayland or X11 for this, and the proprietary drivers work the best. To be honest, this is a space where Ubuntu Server performs best. I keep one of these around in a VM (see above) for this purpose. (Mining also goes in this category)

Everything else can probably be done with an Intel or AMD GPU tbh.