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Phoenix: A modern X server written from scratch in Zig

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Re: Phoenix: A modern X server written from scratch in Zig

#81
post #13

This is a great project! I like and use Wayland but the portal protocols and extension mechanism does leave a lot to be desired. Wayland is still quite a way behind Windows and macOS in terms of what productivity users need An X11 rewrite with some security baked in is an awesome approach. Will be watching!

> Wayland is still quite a way behind Windows and macOS in terms of what productivity users need

What's missing?

Re: Phoenix: A modern X server written from scratch in Zig

#82
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought this too and originally thought that’s what Wayland was going to do but it went off and did its own thing. I’m all for an X12.

An X12 was briefly considered by the community before adopting Wayland: https://www.x.org/wiki/Development/X12/ If you take the time to read through that (very partial) list of cruft and footguns in X11 it probably makes it a little easier to understand why a clean-slate approach was able to attract momentum and why many hands-on involved developers were relatively tired of X11. Critics would of course respond that b…

I’ve been here since the beginning.

I remember Usenet.

X11 was built for multi-user terminals a kin to today’s Microsoft VDI garbage.

There’s some good. A lot of bad. And some WTF in there.

Re: Phoenix: A modern X server written from scratch in Zig

#83
post #51
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An X12 was briefly considered by the community before adopting Wayland: https://www.x.org/wiki/Development/X12/ If you take the time to read through that (very partial) list of cruft and footguns in X11 it probably makes it a little easier to understand why a clean-slate approach was able to attract momentum and why many hands-on involved developers were relatively tired of X11. Critics would of course respond that b…

Python 3 was actively antagonistic to Python 2 code for no reason other than to lecture us about how we were doing things wrong, writing code to support 2 and 3 to help transition was dumb etc etc. For example, in python 2 you could explicitly mark unicode text with u"...". That was actively BLOCKED with python 3.0 which supposedly was about unicode support! The irony was insane, they could of just no-oped the u"". I…

There’s a reason they’re called Pythonistas

It’s always drama and they’re the center of it.

(I’m joking of course, Merry Christmas)

Re: Phoenix: A modern X server written from scratch in Zig

#84
post #76

This is the kind of initiative I’d prefer to see from X preservationists. Great job, I hope it succeeds. I prefer Wayland, but there’s still a place in the world for X; it just needs new dev teams to shoulder the burden.

I disagree. The choices in the Linux ecosystem lead to unnecessary fragmentation and development/packaging nightmares. I say let X11 die, bury it, and never let it rise again. Then we can all focus on making just one display server as good as possible.

This is the worst argument ever. The choices in the Linux community is what's made it the best OS in the world today.

Re: Phoenix: A modern X server written from scratch in Zig

#85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good news. The devs of x11 agree and made a replacement called... Way... Oops

"The devs of x11" is a wide category, considering how many X11 devs weren't even born when X11 was first written. Plenty of X11 devs objected to Wayland and tried to patch X11, but when half the devs decide they want to write a replacement and put the original into maintenance-mode, there's not much you can do.

> there's not much you can do.

You could fork it. X11 hasn't shipped a major release since 2005, the likelihood of a complete overhaul making it upstream was slim to none even in 2009. X11 developers were better-off focusing on stability, and the Wayland devs moved on. There was no conspiracy to kill either project.

Re: Phoenix: A modern X server written from scratch in Zig

#86
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on whether their reasons for "absolutely having to have X11" hinge on actual compatibility with e.g. old binaries or wanting full remoting without streaming pixels. This project would satisfy people who really actually want Wayland, but were upset by transitional pains or interactions they had around it and want to stick with X11 just-cause while getting some similar benefits. This arguably does describe s…

Wayland made writing WMs needlessly hard, and the benefits of Wayland were frankly not real - most of the reasons given in 2011 were patched in to X11 later. All the Wayland rewrite got us was a situation where Wayland is both bleeding-edge and obsolete simultaneously. Say what you like about X11, but by the time people unironically pushed for mass Wayland adoption, X11 was stable and boringly so. The future of WMs i…

IMO, if you have to rewrite a display server implementation then you're already proving all the protocol advocates right.

Re: Phoenix: A modern X server written from scratch in Zig

#87
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on whether their reasons for "absolutely having to have X11" hinge on actual compatibility with e.g. old binaries or wanting full remoting without streaming pixels. This project would satisfy people who really actually want Wayland, but were upset by transitional pains or interactions they had around it and want to stick with X11 just-cause while getting some similar benefits. This arguably does describe s…

Wayland made writing WMs needlessly hard, and the benefits of Wayland were frankly not real - most of the reasons given in 2011 were patched in to X11 later. All the Wayland rewrite got us was a situation where Wayland is both bleeding-edge and obsolete simultaneously. Say what you like about X11, but by the time people unironically pushed for mass Wayland adoption, X11 was stable and boringly so. The future of WMs i…

> "most of the reasons given in 2011 were patched in to X11 later"

This definitely doesn't match my memory, and I was there :) Most of the good reasons remain unavailable in X11 to this day.

There definitely were some attempts to advance X11 that post-date Wayland, most notably the proposals by Keith Packard, but they never got much traction.

Re: Phoenix: A modern X server written from scratch in Zig

#89
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For people who absolutely have to have X11 this looks like a better plan than XLibre.

My rpi dashboards are gonna love it

Anything special about Raspberry Pi's that require X11? Raspberry Pi OS defaults to Wayland nowadays, and there's specific kiosk Wayland compositors like Cage (https://github.com/cage-kiosk/cage).

Tho admittedly kiosk-wm (https://github.com/JOT85/kiosk-wm) is much more succinct.

Re: Phoenix: A modern X server written from scratch in Zig

#90
I have no idea how well this one works, but I am all up for more projects that can compete against the singularization that corporations currently try (see paid developers for wayland, GNOME and now also KDE). I wonder how much money would be needed to make the xorg server adapt to the modern era; I don't even know the featureset that is missing for this either. But I also know that wayland, after 20 years (!!!), will never cover those requests users had over tohse 20 years, simply because it tries to cater to a narrow specification wanted by corporations rather than the people - so much is now clear (wayland protocol was released in 2008, so it is soon 20 years actually; in a few days we have 2026, so it will be 18 years).
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