4 ms·

X is good enough for majority of the users, even if the architecture is not perfect.

floatboth 8y ago
Screen tearing, bad performance, bad touchscreen support (not independent of mouse cursor), and especially important these days: no real HiDPI support (practically impossible to support different scales for different monitors). It's not good enough.
- chmln 8y ago
  These claims are blown out of proportion and/or simply untrue. Screen tearing: both Intel and AMD have hardware-backed "TearFree" buffering to prevent tearing. Bad performance: citation required - in my experience, Xorg is way faster. Touchscreen support - in most cases just works out of the box thanks to libinput. No HiDPI support for different scales per monitor - simply wrong - this is trivial with xrandr.
  - blibble 8y ago
    I still find tearing to be problematic I have a machine with a supported Radeon card (open-source driver), another machine with a supported nvidia card (binary blob driver), and another two machines using different intel onboard graphics chips (open-source driver) the radeon and the intel (both drivers which work with it) have issues putting out a stable jitterless 60fps without tearing (with tearfree on, and various combinations of with/without compositing/glx/...)
    - chmln 8y ago
      How did you test the fps? I'm using the intel driver as well, and it's definitely not perfect. But it's pretty close, at least for me - I get hardware-accelerated video decoding with VAAPI, no tearing, and excellent input latency (~3ms).
      - blibble 8y ago
        I've got a couple of videos I use that make the tearing/jitter obvious, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RvIbVmCOxg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RvIbVmCOxg (you can get a .mp4 too which eliminates the browser as a possible cause) sadly I can see the jitter/tearing, vs. on Windows where it's perfect (with 4k or higher frame rates it's far more obvious)
    - kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
      That's your video driver's fault. Not X's.
  - curt15 8y ago
    If you click and drag a window around in xorg, does the window stick perfectly to the cursor or is there still noticeable lag?
    - chmln 8y ago
      I use a tiling wm (i3), so I can't exactly drag windows around, but I can drag-and-resize them. In my case, there is no lag. However, there is a tiny amount of stuttering since I don't use a compositor, but I can live with that.
      - yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago
        > I use a tiling wm (i3), so I can't exactly drag windows around, but I can drag-and-resize them Sure you can. Just pop the widow into floating mode; I think the default is meta-space.
- andreyv 8y ago
  There is no tearing with proper drivers and window managers. This was a problem in the past, but now is largely overstated.
  - rwmj 8y ago
    I never even knew what the problem was supposed to be. A window isn't rendered absolutely perfectly when I drag it around? How is that even an issue that anyone cares about?! Do you spend all day moving windows around? Compared to major flaws in Wayland like not being able to use a program at all on a remote desktop, it's trivialities.
mrb 8y ago
The fact X11, as the "standard" windowing environment for Unix operating systems, was ditched by literally all major Unix operating systems created in the last 20 years like Mac OS X, Android, iOS, etc, tells us that X11 is not good enough. For example here is an Apple developer explaining why X11 wasn't chosen for Mac OS X: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/168980/if-os-x-doesnt-use-the-x-server-then-what-does-it-use https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/168980/if-os-x-doe... (By "Unix operating system" I mean an OS based on a Unix/Linux kernel.)
- cmrdporcupine 8y ago
  Not to defend X, because it's awful, but Apple never made that choice. They inherited that choice from NeXT. And at the time that the engineers at NeXT made that choice (mid-late 80s) standardization of X11 was by no means assured.
- simion314 8y ago
  What I said is that it works for majority of desktop users, the mentioned issues of tearing or security are non issue for this group of users. I know Wayland is supposed to be better because it is modern and has a better design but personally I won't swap something that works for something that is still not supporting all MY use cases (Wine) just because of theoretical benefits (for me for others there may be benefits like mixed DPI setups). Conclusion I am not defending X11 architecture, but for a majority the features it has are good enough despite of the architecture and limitations.

Screen tearing, bad performance, bad touchscreen support (not independent of mouse cursor), and especially important these days: no real HiDPI support (practically impossible to support different scales for different monitors). It's not good enough.

chmln 8y ago
These claims are blown out of proportion and/or simply untrue. Screen tearing: both Intel and AMD have hardware-backed "TearFree" buffering to prevent tearing. Bad performance: citation required - in my experience, Xorg is way faster. Touchscreen support - in most cases just works out of the box thanks to libinput. No HiDPI support for different scales per monitor - simply wrong - this is trivial with xrandr.
- blibble 8y ago
  I still find tearing to be problematic I have a machine with a supported Radeon card (open-source driver), another machine with a supported nvidia card (binary blob driver), and another two machines using different intel onboard graphics chips (open-source driver) the radeon and the intel (both drivers which work with it) have issues putting out a stable jitterless 60fps without tearing (with tearfree on, and various combinations of with/without compositing/glx/...)
  - chmln 8y ago
    How did you test the fps? I'm using the intel driver as well, and it's definitely not perfect. But it's pretty close, at least for me - I get hardware-accelerated video decoding with VAAPI, no tearing, and excellent input latency (~3ms).
    - blibble 8y ago
      I've got a couple of videos I use that make the tearing/jitter obvious, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RvIbVmCOxg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RvIbVmCOxg (you can get a .mp4 too which eliminates the browser as a possible cause) sadly I can see the jitter/tearing, vs. on Windows where it's perfect (with 4k or higher frame rates it's far more obvious)
  - kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
    That's your video driver's fault. Not X's.
- curt15 8y ago
  If you click and drag a window around in xorg, does the window stick perfectly to the cursor or is there still noticeable lag?
  - chmln 8y ago
    I use a tiling wm (i3), so I can't exactly drag windows around, but I can drag-and-resize them. In my case, there is no lag. However, there is a tiny amount of stuttering since I don't use a compositor, but I can live with that.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago
      > I use a tiling wm (i3), so I can't exactly drag windows around, but I can drag-and-resize them Sure you can. Just pop the widow into floating mode; I think the default is meta-space.
andreyv 8y ago
There is no tearing with proper drivers and window managers. This was a problem in the past, but now is largely overstated.
- rwmj 8y ago
  I never even knew what the problem was supposed to be. A window isn't rendered absolutely perfectly when I drag it around? How is that even an issue that anyone cares about?! Do you spend all day moving windows around? Compared to major flaws in Wayland like not being able to use a program at all on a remote desktop, it's trivialities.

mrb 8y ago

The fact X11, as the "standard" windowing environment for Unix operating systems, was ditched by literally all major Unix operating systems created in the last 20 years like Mac OS X, Android, iOS, etc, tells us that X11 is not good enough. For example here is an Apple developer explaining why X11 wasn't chosen for Mac OS X: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/168980/if-os-x-doesnt-use-the-x-server-then-what-does-it-use https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/168980/if-os-x-doe... (By "Unix operating system" I mean an OS based on a Unix/Linux kernel.)

cmrdporcupine 8y ago
Not to defend X, because it's awful, but Apple never made that choice. They inherited that choice from NeXT. And at the time that the engineers at NeXT made that choice (mid-late 80s) standardization of X11 was by no means assured.
simion314 8y ago
What I said is that it works for majority of desktop users, the mentioned issues of tearing or security are non issue for this group of users. I know Wayland is supposed to be better because it is modern and has a better design but personally I won't swap something that works for something that is still not supporting all MY use cases (Wine) just because of theoretical benefits (for me for others there may be benefits like mixed DPI setups). Conclusion I am not defending X11 architecture, but for a majority the features it has are good enough despite of the architecture and limitations.