4 ms·

This is big news, no?

Jasper_ 7y ago
It's more an admission of the current state of things. Adam Jackson, the previous release manager, stepped down, decided to switch gears to doing other graphics-related stuff, and nobody has volunteered to make a new X server release. xorg-devel has always been a relatively slow mailing list, and very little new R&D has been done on the X server for the past 5 years or so. Latest I can think of is the DRM lease work, which is still ongoing.
- klodolph 7y ago
  Just to add some context: DRM = direct rendering manager, not digital rights management.
- ddalex 7y ago
  If it's working, why break it by adding new stuff? I'm very fond of old software that has been battle tested, rather than jumping on the bandwagon of the newest thing which is invariably rough around the edges. Just look at the terminal latency of Wayland default compositor vs X, or 3D performance with NVIDIA, or weird configuration - it doesn't work as good as the old thing
  - floatboth 7y ago
    Because if "working" was the only thing people ever wanted, we would be using Windows 95 or something. People want "not crap", and everything related to X11/Xorg is a gigantic pile of crap. > terminal latency of Wayland default compositor vs X I'm not sure what you mean by "default compositor" — Weston? — and what's "X" — Xorg without any compositor, with the Windows 95-esque situation of everything drawing into one buffer? Yeah, you can decrease latency by a tiny bit by not compositing at all, but the result is totally unacceptable visually. People generally don't want to look at Windows 95 anymore.
    - sprash 7y ago
      Your priorities are wrong. Latency is the most important metric for doing actual work. This means that the windowing system should allow clients to blurt out pixels whenever they want no matter where the current scanline is positioned. Apparently there are patches on the way [1] that try to mitigate the severe design flaws of wayland in that regard. If wayland will ever reach X11-like performance remains to be seen. Right now this is not the case. [1]: https://cgit.freedesktop.org/wayland/weston/commit/?id=df2095fa35fe84e4ebc30754dd9f25e50bd1aa47 https://cgit.freedesktop.org/wayland/weston/commit/?id=df209...
      - Jasper_ 7y ago
        Partial update is not an improvement for latency in the way you're thinking about it. It's mostly an optimization for tillers so they don't have to rerender some parts. You seem to broadly misunderstand several parts of the modern display architecture -- the goal you insist any sane window system should provide hasn't been provided by any, including the X Window System.
        deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
    - Crinus 7y ago
      > but the result is totally unacceptable visually It is perfectly acceptable to me. And this is the issue with Wayland vs X11 when it comes to compositing: Wayland forces it down your throat, either you like it or not, whereas X11 enables it but doesn't mandate it so if you dislike it you just don't use it. (though this isn't the only problem Wayland has... and FWIW Windows 95 is in many fronts superior to any desktop you can find on Linux)
      - bitwize 7y ago
        > It is perfectly acceptable to me. Most users want a UI from $CURRENT_YEAR, not one that makes them think of Spice Girls songs and AOL Instant Messenger. > Wayland forces it down your throat, either you like it or not, whereas X11 enables it but doesn't mandate it so if you dislike it you just don't use it. X11 is architecturally ill suited to a compositing environment. Inasmuch as compositing solutions exist, they are janky hacks that introduce more processes, more context switches on the hot path, and more latency than Wayland, which was based on $CURRENT_DECADE graphical principles from the ground up. Sometimes you can't square the circle and engineer a general solution. Sometimes you have to engineer for the common case only. For desktop usage, the common case is "user who is used to Windows or macOS and does not want to regress backward in terms of UI". For such users, a noncomposited Windows 9x-like desktop is unacceptable. A broken, laggy, hard-to-maintain pile of hacks is also unacceptable. Wayland solves both those problems, which is why virtually ALL of the hackers working on the Linux graphics stack have jumped ship from X to Wayland. Like it or not, you will eventually be using Wayland too.
- bluGill 7y ago
  x.org has always been that way. Slow, hard to get started developing, and not really "sexy". it is critical infrastructure, but nobody wants to maintain it. Wayland was at least started by people frustrated with the real problems in X. (unlike most other replace X projects I've seen over the last 20 years where were someone who had no idea what is really wrong proposing a solution that didn't solve the real problems.
  - dralley 7y ago
    >Wayland was at least started by people frustrated with the real problems in X Many of whom, it's worth pointing out, are themselves the core Xorg developers who don't want to be stuck maintaining Xorg forever.
- flomo 7y ago
  I think its been a long, long time coming. X11 was effectively left in "hard maintenance mode" in the early 1990s when the Unix vendors abandoned the workstation market. Since then every new system based on *nix has used some other display manager, while Linux desktops used X11 mainly for legacy reasons. At some point 10-15 years ago, Linux vendors (Redhat) revived X.org. But something better has wanted for a long time. "X11 is the Iran-Contra of graphical user interfaces" as the old unix hater book said decades ago.
kgwxd 7y ago
It feels like it to me, but my understanding of how things work in this area is pretty limited. I've been using Xubuntu for a long time now, does it currently depend heavily on X.org? I'm having a hard time figuring that out searching the past 20 minutes.
- miloignis 7y ago
  I believe so - Xubuntu is based on XFCE, which is an X based environment. I've seen some mutterings that they may eventually write a Wayland backend, but I don't think that it's in the near future
- hjek 7y ago
  Once XFCE is ported to GTK3, it should be Wayland-compatible, but for now Xubuntu still depends on X.
- gnode 7y ago
  Yes, but an effort to port XFCE to GTK 3 is underway. My understanding is that this will bring Wayland support.
  - gnomewascool 7y ago
    Porting XFCE applications (Thunar etc.) to GTK3 indeed gives automatic (or near-automatic) Wayland support. This means that XFCE applications will run natively (without XWayland) in Wayland compositors (such as sway, GNOME or KDE). However, xfwm (the window manager) will also need to be ported to Wayland — i.e. become a Wayland compositor — which will probably be a more complicated undertaking, as "xfwm-wayland will need to fulfil the role of both X and the window manager. (Yes, using libraries like wlroots or libmir, will make this not completely impossible, but it will still be non-trivial.) Plausibly, XFCE might join forces and use the same Wayland compositor as, say, LXQt or Mate.
  - maggotbrain 7y ago
    The Xfce port to GTK 3 is almost complete. Xfce 4.14 should be released sometime in August this year if all goes well. https://wiki.xfce.org/releng/4.14/roadmap#roadmapplanned_features https://wiki.xfce.org/releng/4.14/roadmap#roadmapplanned_fea...

It's more an admission of the current state of things. Adam Jackson, the previous release manager, stepped down, decided to switch gears to doing other graphics-related stuff, and nobody has volunteered to make a new X server release. xorg-devel has always been a relatively slow mailing list, and very little new R&D has been done on the X server for the past 5 years or so. Latest I can think of is the DRM lease work, which is still ongoing.

klodolph 7y ago
Just to add some context: DRM = direct rendering manager, not digital rights management.
ddalex 7y ago
If it's working, why break it by adding new stuff? I'm very fond of old software that has been battle tested, rather than jumping on the bandwagon of the newest thing which is invariably rough around the edges. Just look at the terminal latency of Wayland default compositor vs X, or 3D performance with NVIDIA, or weird configuration - it doesn't work as good as the old thing
- floatboth 7y ago
  Because if "working" was the only thing people ever wanted, we would be using Windows 95 or something. People want "not crap", and everything related to X11/Xorg is a gigantic pile of crap. > terminal latency of Wayland default compositor vs X I'm not sure what you mean by "default compositor" — Weston? — and what's "X" — Xorg without any compositor, with the Windows 95-esque situation of everything drawing into one buffer? Yeah, you can decrease latency by a tiny bit by not compositing at all, but the result is totally unacceptable visually. People generally don't want to look at Windows 95 anymore.
  - sprash 7y ago
    Your priorities are wrong. Latency is the most important metric for doing actual work. This means that the windowing system should allow clients to blurt out pixels whenever they want no matter where the current scanline is positioned. Apparently there are patches on the way [1] that try to mitigate the severe design flaws of wayland in that regard. If wayland will ever reach X11-like performance remains to be seen. Right now this is not the case. [1]: https://cgit.freedesktop.org/wayland/weston/commit/?id=df2095fa35fe84e4ebc30754dd9f25e50bd1aa47 https://cgit.freedesktop.org/wayland/weston/commit/?id=df209...
    - Jasper_ 7y ago
      Partial update is not an improvement for latency in the way you're thinking about it. It's mostly an optimization for tillers so they don't have to rerender some parts. You seem to broadly misunderstand several parts of the modern display architecture -- the goal you insist any sane window system should provide hasn't been provided by any, including the X Window System.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
  - Crinus 7y ago
    > but the result is totally unacceptable visually It is perfectly acceptable to me. And this is the issue with Wayland vs X11 when it comes to compositing: Wayland forces it down your throat, either you like it or not, whereas X11 enables it but doesn't mandate it so if you dislike it you just don't use it. (though this isn't the only problem Wayland has... and FWIW Windows 95 is in many fronts superior to any desktop you can find on Linux)
    - bitwize 7y ago
      > It is perfectly acceptable to me. Most users want a UI from $CURRENT_YEAR, not one that makes them think of Spice Girls songs and AOL Instant Messenger. > Wayland forces it down your throat, either you like it or not, whereas X11 enables it but doesn't mandate it so if you dislike it you just don't use it. X11 is architecturally ill suited to a compositing environment. Inasmuch as compositing solutions exist, they are janky hacks that introduce more processes, more context switches on the hot path, and more latency than Wayland, which was based on $CURRENT_DECADE graphical principles from the ground up. Sometimes you can't square the circle and engineer a general solution. Sometimes you have to engineer for the common case only. For desktop usage, the common case is "user who is used to Windows or macOS and does not want to regress backward in terms of UI". For such users, a noncomposited Windows 9x-like desktop is unacceptable. A broken, laggy, hard-to-maintain pile of hacks is also unacceptable. Wayland solves both those problems, which is why virtually ALL of the hackers working on the Linux graphics stack have jumped ship from X to Wayland. Like it or not, you will eventually be using Wayland too.
bluGill 7y ago
x.org has always been that way. Slow, hard to get started developing, and not really "sexy". it is critical infrastructure, but nobody wants to maintain it. Wayland was at least started by people frustrated with the real problems in X. (unlike most other replace X projects I've seen over the last 20 years where were someone who had no idea what is really wrong proposing a solution that didn't solve the real problems.
- dralley 7y ago
  >Wayland was at least started by people frustrated with the real problems in X Many of whom, it's worth pointing out, are themselves the core Xorg developers who don't want to be stuck maintaining Xorg forever.
flomo 7y ago
I think its been a long, long time coming. X11 was effectively left in "hard maintenance mode" in the early 1990s when the Unix vendors abandoned the workstation market. Since then every new system based on *nix has used some other display manager, while Linux desktops used X11 mainly for legacy reasons. At some point 10-15 years ago, Linux vendors (Redhat) revived X.org. But something better has wanted for a long time. "X11 is the Iran-Contra of graphical user interfaces" as the old unix hater book said decades ago.

kgwxd 7y ago

It feels like it to me, but my understanding of how things work in this area is pretty limited. I've been using Xubuntu for a long time now, does it currently depend heavily on X.org? I'm having a hard time figuring that out searching the past 20 minutes.

miloignis 7y ago
I believe so - Xubuntu is based on XFCE, which is an X based environment. I've seen some mutterings that they may eventually write a Wayland backend, but I don't think that it's in the near future
hjek 7y ago
Once XFCE is ported to GTK3, it should be Wayland-compatible, but for now Xubuntu still depends on X.
gnode 7y ago
Yes, but an effort to port XFCE to GTK 3 is underway. My understanding is that this will bring Wayland support.
- gnomewascool 7y ago
  Porting XFCE applications (Thunar etc.) to GTK3 indeed gives automatic (or near-automatic) Wayland support. This means that XFCE applications will run natively (without XWayland) in Wayland compositors (such as sway, GNOME or KDE). However, xfwm (the window manager) will also need to be ported to Wayland — i.e. become a Wayland compositor — which will probably be a more complicated undertaking, as "xfwm-wayland will need to fulfil the role of both X and the window manager. (Yes, using libraries like wlroots or libmir, will make this not completely impossible, but it will still be non-trivial.) Plausibly, XFCE might join forces and use the same Wayland compositor as, say, LXQt or Mate.
- maggotbrain 7y ago
  The Xfce port to GTK 3 is almost complete. Xfce 4.14 should be released sometime in August this year if all goes well. https://wiki.xfce.org/releng/4.14/roadmap#roadmapplanned_features https://wiki.xfce.org/releng/4.14/roadmap#roadmapplanned_fea...