Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

phoronix.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

641–650 of 714 posts

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#641

Post by ammen99 »

solarkraft wrote: post #299
vageli wrote: post #167

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. Which compositor do you use?

I use Wayfire [0], a customizable compositor based on wlroots, the same base as sway. It's quite involved and not absolutely perfect yet, but it has some features I haven't yet seen on other DEs like being able to swipe horizontally on your touchpad to smoothly switch workspaces (following your fingers) and the satisfaction of having it properly configured is pretty high. There have been 3 issues I've had regarding i…

Wayfire's developer here, have you looked into output configuration on our wiki?

Also, is there a chance your 4K screen has negative coordinates? It is well known that Xwayland does not react if an output has negative coordinates (or at least partly negative coordinates).

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#642

Post by sergeykish »

wegs wrote: post #634
anthk wrote: post #605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 co…

You've described need for UUID but then discard it for disks, why?

    $ ls /dev/disk/by-uuid/
    266c945c-1c6d-40e7-b770-73864a5541fa

    $ cat /etc/fstab 
    UUID=266c945c-1c6d-40e7-b770-73864a5541fa       /

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#643

Post by acoard »

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…

> 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.

For the sake of civility and discourse I just want to point out the quote you're responding to does not talk about hating power users. The OP clearly just says that the "decision [is] power-user hostile." That's an important difference, as one is talking about substance (i.e. the decisions) and the other is veering into personal attacks. It's easy to conflate the two and I've certainly done it, but I just wanted to point it out to try and de-escalate the conversation a bit.

I also think it's reasonable to say that many security decisions in many contexts are "user hostile." Hostile design is an actual thing, where security and order are prioritized above convenience and functionality, and not simply an attack on "bad design"[0]. This is not to say all user hostile decisions are bad, but it's a trade-off. Asking for your password before every single interaction is user hostile (the user will never get in the flow[1]), but could be the right decision in certain contexts.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostile_architecture

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#644

Post by danaris »

Const-me wrote: post #406
Flex247A wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What could be the reason behind this? Asking as a noob.

Technically what Wayland is doing, using 3D GPU for everything, is the best way forward. Windows is using it since Vista. When done right, gradients mentioned in other comments are free, GPUs have hardware to interpolate values (such as colors) across vertices of triangle, for free. Many other effects are either free or very cheap. Engineering-wise it's really hard. Microsoft reworked GPU driver model introducing WDD…

> Technically what Wayland is doing, using 3D GPU for everything, is the best way forward.

It's great for the common desktop case.

It's not as great for some other cases in which Linux is the preferred platform (headless servers, repurposed old hardware, etc).

The problem isn't, of course, that there exists a solution for this on Linux. It's that that solution is being pushed as the only one that should be maintained—and thus, exist—going forward.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#645

Post by [deleted] »

noobermin wrote: post #411
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…

I've added this comment to my favorites; a very succinct description of the problems with Wayland. At this point I wonder if starting from scratch was the right call vs. spending the 12 intervening years trying to (yes) dig into X11 and fix existing issues.

[deleted]

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#646

Post by akvadrako »

pjmlp wrote: post #567
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…

> Unix was really well-designed, Not really, it is just a pile of hacks on top of hacks, starting by everything is a file until one needs to use sockets.

Unix is what you get by usually applying the "worse is better" philosophy.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#647

Post by School-Cotton »

wegs wrote: post #636
School-Cotton wrote: post #604

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

1) There isn’t a standalone binary, but you might be able to get the web client working in Chromium. I’m not sure.

2) I don’t know.

3) AFAIK it should work.

Using the BSDs as a workstation, rather than a server, is a bit niche. Like Linux, but even more so. So unfortunately it’s still a labor of love and a lot of modern stuff won’t be supported.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#648

Post by derefr »

danaris wrote: post #635
derefr wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 securit…

I think that (the compositor doing the screenshotting) is already the way it works. But "screenshots" (i.e. fed to the user as files / on the pasteboard) are the exception, not the rule, of the use of this API.

The normal, non-edge-case use of the relevant screen-capturing API is for screen-sharing ala Zoom, or for remote desktop using RDP et al. These are use-cases where one app wants to see what's going on in other apps — exactly the thing you wouldn't want a malicious app to be able to do, but also exactly the thing that you do want these apps to be able to do.

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#649

Post by AzzieElbab »

sergeykish wrote: post #558
neurostimulant wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

Doesn’t wayland run x11 server as well?

Re: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

#650

Post by [deleted] »

renewiltord wrote: post #639
RedShift1 wrote: post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pe…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN