8 ms·

Lubuntu Development Newsletter #9

56 points by kbumsik 8y ago

jacob019 8y ago
Will x11vnc still work with Mir? If not then how will I remote in?
- emersion 8y ago
  No, it won't work. There are some possible replacements (e.g. [1]) but it's still a work-in-progress. [1]: https://github.com/swaywm/wlr-protocols https://github.com/swaywm/wlr-protocols
mixmastamyk 8y ago
Interesting for a dist focused on resource constraints to be using the new/shiny instead of old and small. Perhaps W is more efficient? > Q: Why are you switching to Wayland? A: The X implementation is old and won’t be updated to address the way desktop Linux is used today. Window managers are an afterthought, and many things aren’t implemented correctly. Wayland is a modern take on the Linux display system. Would have liked if this was expanded on a bit. Using X on 18.04 now and while not perfect (in the security area) nothing else about it is currently holding me back.
- dunpeal 8y ago
  Is it a fact that X is "smaller" than Wayland, and more resource efficient? X was designed with far more ambitious goals than Wayland, so it's not a foregone conclusion that it's "smaller" (implying cheaper) just because it's older.
  - emersion 8y ago
    >Is it a fact that X is "smaller" than Wayland, and more resource efficient? This statement doesn't really make sense. Wayland is just a protocol, and you can build bloated compositors on top of it -- just like you can build really tiny compositors [1]. xorg-xserver on the other hand will always have the same level of "bloat". >X was designed with far more ambitious goals than Wayland This is hard to say. Wayland has been designed to be flexible enough to allow for a clean base that can be used in mobile UIs, IVIs (e.g. plane UIs), VR and so on (without hacks). [1]: https://gist.github.com/SirCmpwn/ae4d1cdcca97ffeb2c35f0878d75dc17 https://gist.github.com/SirCmpwn/ae4d1cdcca97ffeb2c35f0878d7...
    - dunpeal 8y ago
      > Wayland is just a protocol If we're splitting hairs here: X (i.e. the X11 Window System) is also "just a protocol".
      - emersion 8y ago
        Sure, but then it's quite difficult to say that one is "more resource efficient" than the other. Only implementations can be compared. And in fact, when you e.g. open Gedit, hundreds of messages are exchanged on X11 (getting/registering atoms, changing window properties, etc). Wayland is much more efficient in that regard.
        dunpeal 8y ago
        > Wayland is much more efficient in that regard. Which is what I implied in my original comment... Of course, the resources are ultimately consumed by implementations, not protocols. But it helps when the protocols are efficient.
  - mixmastamyk 8y ago
    In the sense that I first used X on Linux on a 486 in the early/mid 90's. It was snappy then and snappy now. Also I like being able to minimize crashed windows, something other major OSs haven't done.
    - dcbadacd 8y ago
      But screen tearing is a plague on so much different hardware and multi-monitor, high-dpi, FreeSync, HDR, high-gamut (pick any combination of these things) really do not want to work perfectly with X. This is not to say Wayland is good, X Forwarding is an awesome feature and X runs probably can now run on a literally toaster.
      - mixmastamyk 8y ago
        I'm using it with two 4k monitors now, no problem, and no screen tearing. Hi-color might be somewhat compelling, though I write text files for a living. Does X not support it?
        dcbadacd 8y ago
        > Does X not support it? It technically should, but there's no official page that says it does (and in which combinations) and then there's the question if the DE and other software Linux does. It all in total has a probability of breaking, combine a few rare features and it's pretty much certain something will break. It would be really awesome if say phoronix tested all of those features out in every combination :D
    - acdha 8y ago
      > Also I like being able to minimize crashed windows, something other major OSs haven't done. What major OSes besides Windows and Mac OS did you have in mind?
      - mixmastamyk 8y ago
        Those are the two I'm thinking of. May have changed however, haven't used either extensively in several years.
- kenmicklas 8y ago
  X is much larger than Wayland in the same way that OpenGL is much larger than Vulkan. The older protocols tried to encode way too much framework-like application implementation details which turned out to be a mistake. And in both cases, the framework layers (GUI toolkits, game engines) ended up reimplementing most of that logic but better, leading to lots of unused cruft and problematic architecture in the lower layer.
  - bitwize 8y ago
    > The older protocols tried to encode way too much framework-like application implementation details which turned out to be a mistake. What "framework-like application implementation details"? I came to X development from Windows development, and the first thing I noticed was the lack of stuff bare X provides. X doesn't even have timers, let alone a standard notion of how to display a button or text box. It's very bare bones and minimal, and you can learn most of it in a weekend. (I know, because I did.) Game engines need OpenGL to work, so no surprise they reimplemented much of the rendering layer. GTK is maintained by fucking GNOME developers who run screaming at the sight of old code they have to maintain, so reimplementing fucking everything is par for the course for that crowd. If Wayland ever settles down and becomes usable, within a few years the GNOME team will be lamenting how old and crufty it all is and making plans to replace it with an even newer graphics stack. EDIT: X actually does have something like timers, in the XSync extension.
    - mixmastamyk 8y ago
      Believe grandparent is talking about Xlib, etc. True not used much any more, but they don't hurt anything sitting on disk. And as mentioned elsewhere targeted at 80's and 90's hardware.
      - bitwize 8y ago
        > Believe grandparent is talking about Xlib, etc. They mentioned "the old protocols". Xlib is not a protocol. And it's not a framework either. > And as mentioned elsewhere targeted at 80's and 90's hardware. Yeah? And? The DEs that are targeted at 2010s hardware have compositing-latency issues, slow animations, and seem to have trouble making it clear what can be clicked on. I know because any time an article about the Windows 9x UI comes up, Hackernews goes on a nostalgia-tinged, but justified, rant about how great that UI was and how easy it was to read what can be interacted with and how. Maybe the 80s and 90s got a lot right in terms of UI, and constant UI churn just isn't necessary. Besides which, if you can build a UI that could be run on a 90s PC, it takes up far fewer resources than do the UIs of today, and that's compute that you could devote to better programs. And Xorg accelerates the old X and newer Xrender primitives with the GPU anyway, through GLAMOR, so it's not like you're not taking advantage of it.
- jplayer01 8y ago
  First time I've seen 'small' being used to describe X.
  - bitwize 8y ago
    X was running on 286-class machines (that were intended as purpose-built X terminals) back in the day. The KDrive server can be compiled to fit in a few hundred KiB.
    - babypuncher 8y ago
      X today is a different beast than it was 20 years ago
      - bitwize 8y ago
        And the KDrive server can still be compiled to fit in a few hundred KiB. And it's a full-featured X server. X is small, especially when you start comparing it to the sort of runtime modern devs are fond of (looking at you, Electron).
        emersion 8y ago
        Nothing stops you from building a very small Wayland compositor.
- cs315 8y ago
  >Interesting for a dist focused on resource constraints to be using the new/shiny instead of old and small. Lubuntu has shifted focus recently https://lubuntu.me/taking-a-new-direction/ https://lubuntu.me/taking-a-new-direction/
  - mixmastamyk 8y ago
    Ahh, I see. Computers have been good enough for a decade or more and therefore not much reason to support ancient machines. A ten-year old computer is probably close to free.
- starsinspace 8y ago
  Well, I'm using X on Xubuntu 18.04, and I'm still constantly annoyed about seeing tearing artefacts when playing video. This is something that should have been solved >15 years ago, but somehow, it still isn't.
  - mixmastamyk 8y ago
    I do have an occasional stutter with HD+ video running fullscreen with VLC, but otherwise hadn't noticed. Hopefully W improves on that.
- cultus 8y ago
  Don't assume that new=complex. Wayland is smaller and follows the Unix philosophy much better than X. X has gotten insanely complex with all the workarounds necessary for a modern desktop. It tries to do far too much, and not well, so all the other parts replicate much of X's functionality. Wayland was actually started by X devs who felt it needed a reboot.
  - captainmuon 8y ago
    Wayland and X11 are complex in different ways. Wayland is a simpler spec without years of cruft, but it is much more complex to write a Wayland compositor than a X11 Window Manager. There are libraries like wlroots, but they are opinionated. And it will still take years for Wayland to match X11 feature wise (screenshots, eyedropper tools, a remoting option, restarting the window manager or compositor independently of the desktop, and so on). I fear that the switch to Wayland will slow down experimentation in the field of window management, because it makes it hard to quickly do something different. Which would be ironic given the goals of it.
asplake 8y ago
Maybe I’ve been hiding under a rock or something but I don’t think I’ve heard of Lubuntu before. I took a quick look at the home page but still: when this and not some other distribution?
- srcmap 8y ago
  Same here - This is first time I heard of Lubuntu. Maybe Lubuntu folks can put up one page on comparing the disk space requirements for standard default setup between Ubuntu/KDE/Xbuntu/Lubuntu - for typical VM. Or any other advantages for using Lubuntu.
- ekianjo 8y ago
  it used to be aimed at 10 years old hardware. Now its less clear, they just changed their positionning a few months ago
  - abricot 8y ago
    Not very smart of them. In mu LUG we usually suggest Lubuntu for those PCs that are a bit older. Now I don't see what the point is. Most would rather run MATE than LXDE if there's no difference.
    - ekianjo 8y ago
      Yeah, when a project loses a clear message, it's more likely to die a slow death than anything else. However, they did point out why they made that change: even recent distros could actually run very decently on older hardware, which made them lose their former "edge" on that matter. Personally, I think LXDE/Lubuntu is obsolete. Xfce/Mate can be very good replacements with low footprint these days.
      - sha666sum 8y ago
        > Personally, I think LXDE/Lubuntu is obsolete. I suppose this is precisely why the project is changing direction. LXDE/LXQT are pretty cool desktop environments and I'd hate to see their development come to a halt even if I'm personally not a user.
Filligree 8y ago
So... does XWayland work for Nvidia yet?
- m0llusk 8y ago
  From the linked text: Q: What about people with NVIDIA graphics cards? A: More details to solve, but the plan is to get this working with those graphics cards by that time.
- emersion 8y ago
  I've seen some Xwayland patches to make the proprietary NVIDIA driver work in compositors that support it. Mandatory link to NVIDIA rant: https://drewdevault.com/2017/10/26/Fuck-you-nvidia.html https://drewdevault.com/2017/10/26/Fuck-you-nvidia.html
exikyut 8y ago
I wonder when Debian, SuSE, et al will do this too. XWayland will probably still sit around for a very long time even beyond that point though. Time will tell how hilariously it gets integrated. I'm especially glad the video driver situation means X will hang around for a long time. I'm currently learning the X wire protocol and what I find the nicest about it is its eminent hackability. Wayland, on the other hand, is just a compositor. Seems comparatively boring, from the perspective I have (as an outsider who has dubiously picked through some poorly written documentation that doesn't inspire much confidence). Compositing chews more (system!) RAM, too; an X client doesn't need to allocate any memory of its own, only the X server holds the actual image of the window in memory (GPU memory obviously, and if you're using compositing, main memory as well). Yes, X has a thousand bugs. Yes, it would fall down a hundred times a second if it were actually possible to feed it into afl. Yes, I had it deadlock on my laptop (when running a program through xtruss and xterm tried to print too fast). Yes, I'm still yet to enable XF86Ungrab (introduced in 2010: https://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/commit/?id=7d2543a3cb3089241982ce4f8984fd723d5312a1 https://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/commit/?id=7d2543a...) so I can fix broken grabs (at least the most recent one that happened this morning - when NFS momentarily timed-out right bang in the middle of me clicking in a menu bar and the menu [window] actually opening). Yes, XKB needed an XKB2, and then XI, and then XI2, because nobody thought we would need more than 256 individual input buttons (mice sometimes eat 30 keys from X's perspective...). DRI needed a DRI2 and then DRI3. Yes, Xinerama is actually named PanoramiX and not even used anymore thanks to RandR 1.2 ("RandR 1.2 enabled, ignore the following RandR disabled message." ... "RandR disabled"). And that's not even mentioning XFIXES and XC-MISC... About 4-5 days after starting on poking the X protocol specification for the first time, I crashed into https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=107568 https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=107568, which was highly amusing. I think that's been in there for 27 years. Not sure whether to call it a leaky abstraction or a case of "someone forgot their mechanism-over-policy hat that day", or both. But anyway. Not a critical bug, but a good illustration of poorly thought through design and implementation. I'm sad to see X die. Not from the it's-so-terrible standpoint; from that view, sure, yeah. But nostalgically speaking, it's older than I am :) and I guess it's sad to see things move on after having existed the way they are for so long (it's {h,cl}ung on for 30 years). I know, I know, it'll exist as a legacy component for the next 20 years. But that isn't the same as "nobody uses Perl but it's always installed anyway because some random init-time thing might call it." You can't just "call X". Having X floating around in the form of Xwayland is very similar to XQuartz; as a legacy component, I can see a status quo developing where the integration is subpar, but the situation isn't annoying enough for the people with the "social commit bits" to be insufficiently annoyed to fix it. Hopefully the integration is well-designed and keeps up with the times, at least on 2D screens with keyboards and mice. I wonder where Wayland will be in 15 years. Same for X. It'll be interesting. As an OS evaluator, I just wish Linux would stay still. Design things properly the first time (and actually put the time and effort in)! Hopefully Wayland doesn't have to change anything major for at least 20 years. (Why do I cynically expect it to have a tangle of circular dependencies on systemd and dbus within 10. :/) As a power user/sysadmin, I am _not_ looking forward to having to fuss around with Wayland and get it working. (I mean working _properly_.) As an end user, I hope I don't actually have to put my sysadmin hat on at all. As an inveterate tinkerer who likes hacking things in the true sense (finding interesting ways to reuse things :D), I'm sad because X is fun to figure out. (Try it.) From the perspective of a UX designer who likes building efficient integrated software, I have to sadly reiterate a comment I made 2 years ago (before I accidentally locked 'i336_): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13334053 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13334053 > I'm really sad X11 is legacy software myself, as an aside. It's a disaster, sure, but now we have one more layer of "uhhhh..." for all the UX-types to get scared away by: it used to be "(WinAPI) vs ((Qt)/(GTK+)/(Xlib/XCB))", which was embarrassing enough; now it's "(WinAPI) vs (X11((Qt)/(GTK+)/(Xlib/XCB))/Wayland((Qt)/(GTK+)/(???)))" which is just plain annoying for low-level graphics hacker wannabes - I can make a WinAPI app in C that opens a window in a few KB, where as to do that in Linux now I HAVE to support XCB and also write my own tiny UI for Wayland. I guess this is the major point of my tired rant: I wish I could wet-fish all of Linux and yell something along the lines of "stop increasing the surface area developers must target!!!! Backward compatibility is not developer responsibility!!", but I can't, because Linux is a bazaar, and everyone is too busy trying to compete for the most amount of responsibility they can elegantly juggle.
70122-_6 8y ago
If I am not mistaken - I'd say the standard specs for Lubuntu on a Mini PC are exactly the same a those that were discussed for -UbuntutV (yes there's a subreddit). But the guy in charge never wanted to do Lubuntu-mini, although but Ubuntu Netbook remix finished eight years ago. https://www.canonical.com/projects/ubuntu/unr https://www.canonical.com/projects/ubuntu/unr ' Its a revo-70 by the way.
jchw 8y ago
My only real issue with Wayland is that I don't think anyone has given real thought to heterogenous graphics card configurations, GPU hot plugging, Optimus, etc. X11 is not much better, but people have at least built hacks for it at this point. It does seem like heterogenous DPI with multimonitor will be possible to a degree so that's nice.
- emersion 8y ago
  Heterogenous graphics card configurations can be supported on Wayland (e.g. Sway 1.0 supports them). GPU hot plugging could be supported by compositors as long as you don't need the compositor to change the GPU it's rendering on (it's just not clear how this looks like API-wise -- and it's very difficult to obtain hardware setups that support those). Clients could then be restarted to use a different GPU. Wayland is not not limiting factor here.
zzzcpan 8y ago
Weird move. X is a big reason I and probably others use Lubuntu. It's not bloated but still compatible with everything and therefore easily configurable and personalizable. For example, I have xbindkeys for keyboard shortcuts with a bunch of scripts that use xprop, wmctrl, xdotool, etc. Wayland breaks those. And if mandatory, it will definitely force me out of lubuntu. Gnome flavor dictatorships don't work for lubuntu.
- hsitz 8y ago
  The notes say it will "default" to Wayland, which I assume means you will have your choice.
- emersion 8y ago
  >It's not bloated X11 has a big number of issues. Security, very complicated mechanisms (like how clipboard is handled), HiDPI are some of these issues. X11 _is_ bloated (for instance it has an drawing API). It's not like Wayland makes things that were possible on X11 impossible, it's just that replacements for everything don't exist yet. For instance there's no standardized way to make panels/docks/notification daemons. Same goes for screenshooters and screen recording. We -- the wlroots developers -- have been campaigning to push new protocols to bridge the gap. For instance the layer shell mentioned in the article is a protocol we try to standardize [1]. [1]: https://github.com/swaywm/wlr-protocols/blob/master/unstable/wlr-layer-shell-unstable-v1.xml https://github.com/swaywm/wlr-protocols/blob/master/unstable...
  - zzzcpan 8y ago
    I meant Lubuntu as not bloated. I'm fine with X11 bloat compared to Wayland, given that I can't even use Wayland with most things I do everyday.

56 points by kbumsik 8y ago

jacob019 8y ago

Will x11vnc still work with Mir? If not then how will I remote in?

emersion 8y ago
No, it won't work. There are some possible replacements (e.g. [1]) but it's still a work-in-progress. [1]: https://github.com/swaywm/wlr-protocols https://github.com/swaywm/wlr-protocols

mixmastamyk 8y ago

Interesting for a dist focused on resource constraints to be using the new/shiny instead of old and small. Perhaps W is more efficient? > Q: Why are you switching to Wayland? A: The X implementation is old and won’t be updated to address the way desktop Linux is used today. Window managers are an afterthought, and many things aren’t implemented correctly. Wayland is a modern take on the Linux display system. Would have liked if this was expanded on a bit. Using X on 18.04 now and while not perfect (in the security area) nothing else about it is currently holding me back.

dunpeal 8y ago
Is it a fact that X is "smaller" than Wayland, and more resource efficient? X was designed with far more ambitious goals than Wayland, so it's not a foregone conclusion that it's "smaller" (implying cheaper) just because it's older.
- emersion 8y ago
  >Is it a fact that X is "smaller" than Wayland, and more resource efficient? This statement doesn't really make sense. Wayland is just a protocol, and you can build bloated compositors on top of it -- just like you can build really tiny compositors [1]. xorg-xserver on the other hand will always have the same level of "bloat". >X was designed with far more ambitious goals than Wayland This is hard to say. Wayland has been designed to be flexible enough to allow for a clean base that can be used in mobile UIs, IVIs (e.g. plane UIs), VR and so on (without hacks). [1]: https://gist.github.com/SirCmpwn/ae4d1cdcca97ffeb2c35f0878d75dc17 https://gist.github.com/SirCmpwn/ae4d1cdcca97ffeb2c35f0878d7...
  - dunpeal 8y ago
    > Wayland is just a protocol If we're splitting hairs here: X (i.e. the X11 Window System) is also "just a protocol".
    - emersion 8y ago
      Sure, but then it's quite difficult to say that one is "more resource efficient" than the other. Only implementations can be compared. And in fact, when you e.g. open Gedit, hundreds of messages are exchanged on X11 (getting/registering atoms, changing window properties, etc). Wayland is much more efficient in that regard.
      - dunpeal 8y ago
        > Wayland is much more efficient in that regard. Which is what I implied in my original comment... Of course, the resources are ultimately consumed by implementations, not protocols. But it helps when the protocols are efficient.
- mixmastamyk 8y ago
  In the sense that I first used X on Linux on a 486 in the early/mid 90's. It was snappy then and snappy now. Also I like being able to minimize crashed windows, something other major OSs haven't done.
  - dcbadacd 8y ago
    But screen tearing is a plague on so much different hardware and multi-monitor, high-dpi, FreeSync, HDR, high-gamut (pick any combination of these things) really do not want to work perfectly with X. This is not to say Wayland is good, X Forwarding is an awesome feature and X runs probably can now run on a literally toaster.
    - mixmastamyk 8y ago
      I'm using it with two 4k monitors now, no problem, and no screen tearing. Hi-color might be somewhat compelling, though I write text files for a living. Does X not support it?
      - dcbadacd 8y ago
        > Does X not support it? It technically should, but there's no official page that says it does (and in which combinations) and then there's the question if the DE and other software Linux does. It all in total has a probability of breaking, combine a few rare features and it's pretty much certain something will break. It would be really awesome if say phoronix tested all of those features out in every combination :D
  - acdha 8y ago
    > Also I like being able to minimize crashed windows, something other major OSs haven't done. What major OSes besides Windows and Mac OS did you have in mind?
    - mixmastamyk 8y ago
      Those are the two I'm thinking of. May have changed however, haven't used either extensively in several years.
kenmicklas 8y ago
X is much larger than Wayland in the same way that OpenGL is much larger than Vulkan. The older protocols tried to encode way too much framework-like application implementation details which turned out to be a mistake. And in both cases, the framework layers (GUI toolkits, game engines) ended up reimplementing most of that logic but better, leading to lots of unused cruft and problematic architecture in the lower layer.
- bitwize 8y ago
  > The older protocols tried to encode way too much framework-like application implementation details which turned out to be a mistake. What "framework-like application implementation details"? I came to X development from Windows development, and the first thing I noticed was the lack of stuff bare X provides. X doesn't even have timers, let alone a standard notion of how to display a button or text box. It's very bare bones and minimal, and you can learn most of it in a weekend. (I know, because I did.) Game engines need OpenGL to work, so no surprise they reimplemented much of the rendering layer. GTK is maintained by fucking GNOME developers who run screaming at the sight of old code they have to maintain, so reimplementing fucking everything is par for the course for that crowd. If Wayland ever settles down and becomes usable, within a few years the GNOME team will be lamenting how old and crufty it all is and making plans to replace it with an even newer graphics stack. EDIT: X actually does have something like timers, in the XSync extension.
  - mixmastamyk 8y ago
    Believe grandparent is talking about Xlib, etc. True not used much any more, but they don't hurt anything sitting on disk. And as mentioned elsewhere targeted at 80's and 90's hardware.
    - bitwize 8y ago
      > Believe grandparent is talking about Xlib, etc. They mentioned "the old protocols". Xlib is not a protocol. And it's not a framework either. > And as mentioned elsewhere targeted at 80's and 90's hardware. Yeah? And? The DEs that are targeted at 2010s hardware have compositing-latency issues, slow animations, and seem to have trouble making it clear what can be clicked on. I know because any time an article about the Windows 9x UI comes up, Hackernews goes on a nostalgia-tinged, but justified, rant about how great that UI was and how easy it was to read what can be interacted with and how. Maybe the 80s and 90s got a lot right in terms of UI, and constant UI churn just isn't necessary. Besides which, if you can build a UI that could be run on a 90s PC, it takes up far fewer resources than do the UIs of today, and that's compute that you could devote to better programs. And Xorg accelerates the old X and newer Xrender primitives with the GPU anyway, through GLAMOR, so it's not like you're not taking advantage of it.
jplayer01 8y ago
First time I've seen 'small' being used to describe X.
- bitwize 8y ago
  X was running on 286-class machines (that were intended as purpose-built X terminals) back in the day. The KDrive server can be compiled to fit in a few hundred KiB.
  - babypuncher 8y ago
    X today is a different beast than it was 20 years ago
    - bitwize 8y ago
      And the KDrive server can still be compiled to fit in a few hundred KiB. And it's a full-featured X server. X is small, especially when you start comparing it to the sort of runtime modern devs are fond of (looking at you, Electron).
      - emersion 8y ago
        Nothing stops you from building a very small Wayland compositor.
cs315 8y ago
>Interesting for a dist focused on resource constraints to be using the new/shiny instead of old and small. Lubuntu has shifted focus recently https://lubuntu.me/taking-a-new-direction/ https://lubuntu.me/taking-a-new-direction/
- mixmastamyk 8y ago
  Ahh, I see. Computers have been good enough for a decade or more and therefore not much reason to support ancient machines. A ten-year old computer is probably close to free.
starsinspace 8y ago
Well, I'm using X on Xubuntu 18.04, and I'm still constantly annoyed about seeing tearing artefacts when playing video. This is something that should have been solved >15 years ago, but somehow, it still isn't.
- mixmastamyk 8y ago
  I do have an occasional stutter with HD+ video running fullscreen with VLC, but otherwise hadn't noticed. Hopefully W improves on that.
cultus 8y ago
Don't assume that new=complex. Wayland is smaller and follows the Unix philosophy much better than X. X has gotten insanely complex with all the workarounds necessary for a modern desktop. It tries to do far too much, and not well, so all the other parts replicate much of X's functionality. Wayland was actually started by X devs who felt it needed a reboot.
- captainmuon 8y ago
  Wayland and X11 are complex in different ways. Wayland is a simpler spec without years of cruft, but it is much more complex to write a Wayland compositor than a X11 Window Manager. There are libraries like wlroots, but they are opinionated. And it will still take years for Wayland to match X11 feature wise (screenshots, eyedropper tools, a remoting option, restarting the window manager or compositor independently of the desktop, and so on). I fear that the switch to Wayland will slow down experimentation in the field of window management, because it makes it hard to quickly do something different. Which would be ironic given the goals of it.

asplake 8y ago

Maybe I’ve been hiding under a rock or something but I don’t think I’ve heard of Lubuntu before. I took a quick look at the home page but still: when this and not some other distribution?

srcmap 8y ago
Same here - This is first time I heard of Lubuntu. Maybe Lubuntu folks can put up one page on comparing the disk space requirements for standard default setup between Ubuntu/KDE/Xbuntu/Lubuntu - for typical VM. Or any other advantages for using Lubuntu.
ekianjo 8y ago
it used to be aimed at 10 years old hardware. Now its less clear, they just changed their positionning a few months ago
- abricot 8y ago
  Not very smart of them. In mu LUG we usually suggest Lubuntu for those PCs that are a bit older. Now I don't see what the point is. Most would rather run MATE than LXDE if there's no difference.
  - ekianjo 8y ago
    Yeah, when a project loses a clear message, it's more likely to die a slow death than anything else. However, they did point out why they made that change: even recent distros could actually run very decently on older hardware, which made them lose their former "edge" on that matter. Personally, I think LXDE/Lubuntu is obsolete. Xfce/Mate can be very good replacements with low footprint these days.
    - sha666sum 8y ago
      > Personally, I think LXDE/Lubuntu is obsolete. I suppose this is precisely why the project is changing direction. LXDE/LXQT are pretty cool desktop environments and I'd hate to see their development come to a halt even if I'm personally not a user.

Filligree 8y ago

So... does XWayland work for Nvidia yet?

m0llusk 8y ago
From the linked text: Q: What about people with NVIDIA graphics cards? A: More details to solve, but the plan is to get this working with those graphics cards by that time.
emersion 8y ago
I've seen some Xwayland patches to make the proprietary NVIDIA driver work in compositors that support it. Mandatory link to NVIDIA rant: https://drewdevault.com/2017/10/26/Fuck-you-nvidia.html https://drewdevault.com/2017/10/26/Fuck-you-nvidia.html

exikyut 8y ago

I wonder when Debian, SuSE, et al will do this too. XWayland will probably still sit around for a very long time even beyond that point though. Time will tell how hilariously it gets integrated. I'm especially glad the video driver situation means X will hang around for a long time. I'm currently learning the X wire protocol and what I find the nicest about it is its eminent hackability. Wayland, on the other hand, is just a compositor. Seems comparatively boring, from the perspective I have (as an outsider who has dubiously picked through some poorly written documentation that doesn't inspire much confidence). Compositing chews more (system!) RAM, too; an X client doesn't need to allocate any memory of its own, only the X server holds the actual image of the window in memory (GPU memory obviously, and if you're using compositing, main memory as well). Yes, X has a thousand bugs. Yes, it would fall down a hundred times a second if it were actually possible to feed it into afl. Yes, I had it deadlock on my laptop (when running a program through xtruss and xterm tried to print too fast). Yes, I'm still yet to enable XF86Ungrab (introduced in 2010: https://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/commit/?id=7d2543a3cb3089241982ce4f8984fd723d5312a1 https://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/commit/?id=7d2543a...) so I can fix broken grabs (at least the most recent one that happened this morning - when NFS momentarily timed-out right bang in the middle of me clicking in a menu bar and the menu [window] actually opening). Yes, XKB needed an XKB2, and then XI, and then XI2, because nobody thought we would need more than 256 individual input buttons (mice sometimes eat 30 keys from X's perspective...). DRI needed a DRI2 and then DRI3. Yes, Xinerama is actually named PanoramiX and not even used anymore thanks to RandR 1.2 ("RandR 1.2 enabled, ignore the following RandR disabled message." ... "RandR disabled"). And that's not even mentioning XFIXES and XC-MISC... About 4-5 days after starting on poking the X protocol specification for the first time, I crashed into https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=107568 https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=107568, which was highly amusing. I think that's been in there for 27 years. Not sure whether to call it a leaky abstraction or a case of "someone forgot their mechanism-over-policy hat that day", or both. But anyway. Not a critical bug, but a good illustration of poorly thought through design and implementation. I'm sad to see X die. Not from the it's-so-terrible standpoint; from that view, sure, yeah. But nostalgically speaking, it's older than I am :) and I guess it's sad to see things move on after having existed the way they are for so long (it's {h,cl}ung on for 30 years). I know, I know, it'll exist as a legacy component for the next 20 years. But that isn't the same as "nobody uses Perl but it's always installed anyway because some random init-time thing might call it." You can't just "call X". Having X floating around in the form of Xwayland is very similar to XQuartz; as a legacy component, I can see a status quo developing where the integration is subpar, but the situation isn't annoying enough for the people with the "social commit bits" to be insufficiently annoyed to fix it. Hopefully the integration is well-designed and keeps up with the times, at least on 2D screens with keyboards and mice. I wonder where Wayland will be in 15 years. Same for X. It'll be interesting. As an OS evaluator, I just wish Linux would stay still. Design things properly the first time (and actually put the time and effort in)! Hopefully Wayland doesn't have to change anything major for at least 20 years. (Why do I cynically expect it to have a tangle of circular dependencies on systemd and dbus within 10. :/) As a power user/sysadmin, I am _not_ looking forward to having to fuss around with Wayland and get it working. (I mean working _properly_.) As an end user, I hope I don't actually have to put my sysadmin hat on at all. As an inveterate tinkerer who likes hacking things in the true sense (finding interesting ways to reuse things :D), I'm sad because X is fun to figure out. (Try it.) From the perspective of a UX designer who likes building efficient integrated software, I have to sadly reiterate a comment I made 2 years ago (before I accidentally locked 'i336_): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13334053 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13334053 > I'm really sad X11 is legacy software myself, as an aside. It's a disaster, sure, but now we have one more layer of "uhhhh..." for all the UX-types to get scared away by: it used to be "(WinAPI) vs ((Qt)/(GTK+)/(Xlib/XCB))", which was embarrassing enough; now it's "(WinAPI) vs (X11((Qt)/(GTK+)/(Xlib/XCB))/Wayland((Qt)/(GTK+)/(???)))" which is just plain annoying for low-level graphics hacker wannabes - I can make a WinAPI app in C that opens a window in a few KB, where as to do that in Linux now I HAVE to support XCB and also write my own tiny UI for Wayland. I guess this is the major point of my tired rant: I wish I could wet-fish all of Linux and yell something along the lines of "stop increasing the surface area developers must target!!!! Backward compatibility is not developer responsibility!!", but I can't, because Linux is a bazaar, and everyone is too busy trying to compete for the most amount of responsibility they can elegantly juggle.

70122-_6 8y ago

If I am not mistaken - I'd say the standard specs for Lubuntu on a Mini PC are exactly the same a those that were discussed for -UbuntutV (yes there's a subreddit). But the guy in charge never wanted to do Lubuntu-mini, although but Ubuntu Netbook remix finished eight years ago. https://www.canonical.com/projects/ubuntu/unr https://www.canonical.com/projects/ubuntu/unr ' Its a revo-70 by the way.

jchw 8y ago

My only real issue with Wayland is that I don't think anyone has given real thought to heterogenous graphics card configurations, GPU hot plugging, Optimus, etc. X11 is not much better, but people have at least built hacks for it at this point. It does seem like heterogenous DPI with multimonitor will be possible to a degree so that's nice.

emersion 8y ago
Heterogenous graphics card configurations can be supported on Wayland (e.g. Sway 1.0 supports them). GPU hot plugging could be supported by compositors as long as you don't need the compositor to change the GPU it's rendering on (it's just not clear how this looks like API-wise -- and it's very difficult to obtain hardware setups that support those). Clients could then be restarted to use a different GPU. Wayland is not not limiting factor here.

zzzcpan 8y ago

Weird move. X is a big reason I and probably others use Lubuntu. It's not bloated but still compatible with everything and therefore easily configurable and personalizable. For example, I have xbindkeys for keyboard shortcuts with a bunch of scripts that use xprop, wmctrl, xdotool, etc. Wayland breaks those. And if mandatory, it will definitely force me out of lubuntu. Gnome flavor dictatorships don't work for lubuntu.

hsitz 8y ago
The notes say it will "default" to Wayland, which I assume means you will have your choice.
emersion 8y ago
>It's not bloated X11 has a big number of issues. Security, very complicated mechanisms (like how clipboard is handled), HiDPI are some of these issues. X11 _is_ bloated (for instance it has an drawing API). It's not like Wayland makes things that were possible on X11 impossible, it's just that replacements for everything don't exist yet. For instance there's no standardized way to make panels/docks/notification daemons. Same goes for screenshooters and screen recording. We -- the wlroots developers -- have been campaigning to push new protocols to bridge the gap. For instance the layer shell mentioned in the article is a protocol we try to standardize [1]. [1]: https://github.com/swaywm/wlr-protocols/blob/master/unstable/wlr-layer-shell-unstable-v1.xml https://github.com/swaywm/wlr-protocols/blob/master/unstable...
- zzzcpan 8y ago
  I meant Lubuntu as not bloated. I'm fine with X11 bloat compared to Wayland, given that I can't even use Wayland with most things I do everyday.