22 ms·

The death watch for the X Window System has probably started

319 points by _emacsomancer_ 7y ago

konqi 7y ago
I hope they manage to standardize the majority of protocols. Last time I've checked GNOME wasn't happy but the other projects were, surprisingly, cooperating heavily. There are very interesting projects using Wayland. https://github.com/search?o=desc&q=wayland&s=updated&type=Repositories https://github.com/search?o=desc&q=wayland&s=updated&type=Re...
bitwize 7y ago
Omae wa mou shindeiru. If the future of X is uncertain, then X is already dead. No one wants to base their OS on something without a clear maintenance and development roadmap.
- johnklos 7y ago
  Except for those who pave the way. Not all OSes are products.
  - ch_123 7y ago
    I'm not sure that use of X11 could be considered "paving the way"
    - nvrspyx 7y ago
      I think they might have meant “pave their way”. Like they said, not all OS’s are products and some people have specific use cases in which X11 is the only viable option, whether that’s personal or experimental. I wouldn’t know what those use cases might be. That’s just my interpretation of the comment.
  - bitwize 7y ago
    The ones that matter are.
- OJFord 7y ago
  To save others a search: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/you-are-already-dead-omae-wa-mou-shindeiru https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/you-are-already-dead-omae-wa-...
- yyyk 7y ago
  It's not like distros contributed all that much to X in the first place. Most likely, X will remain until Wayland is ready - which it isn't yet, 'prototype' support for some very common use cases does not count as support.
lkirk 7y ago
I'm also a heavy user of an X-only window manager (xmonad). Learning about this makes me wonder if I should start learning how to work with another window manager so I'm not caught off guard when something stops working.
- _emacsomancer_ 7y ago
  I'm really attached to stumpwm, which is also X-only. We have been hearing reports of the pending death of X for at least the past decade, so I'm never certain how seriously to take them, but I've kept an eye on what looks like the closest thing to a wayland implementation of stumpwm (https://github.com/malcolmstill/ulubis https://github.com/malcolmstill/ulubis).
- FreeFull 7y ago
  You could try to transition to the sway wayland compositor (which is largely compatible with i3wm) or maybe to https://github.com/letoram/arcan https://github.com/letoram/arcan which is a lot more programmable than sway
- bestham 7y ago
  XMonad is (pardon the phun) very high level and a switch to any other window system should be trivial.
- mimimi31 7y ago
  Do you know about Waymonad? It's supposedly Xmonad for Wayland and uses wlroots like sway.
  - lkirk 7y ago
    I've heard of it, not sure how mature it is these days. Maybe I'll give it another look
atemerev 7y ago
So, RedHat decided that they do not want nvidia users anymore? I’d be more than happy to switch to Wayland, but I can’t.
- daenney 7y ago
  GNOME, which is what powers the RedHat desktop, supports nvidia on Wayland just fine, and KDE got nvidia/EGLStreams support since KWin 5.16. So at least 2 major DEs do, though quite a few others don't, and have taken a principled stand not to (Sway for example won't). When it comes to RedHat though, they're all-in on GNOME anyway so keeping X around for nvidia users isn't really a concern for them when their desktop experience supports nvidia on Wayland just fine.
  - atemerev 7y ago
    No, just checked it with the latest Fedora 30, it defaults to X when it detects an Nvidia card.
    - daenney 7y ago
      Just b/c it defaults to X does not mean it doesn't work or isn't supported on Wayland.
      - atemerev 7y ago
        It defaults to X, because it works very poorly with Wayland. Until very recently, it was impossible to run Gnome with Wayland at all (even though it theoretically supported Eglstreams), as there were many kernel errors generated by gnome-shell, etc. Now it sort of works, however, lags and freezes make it completely unusable in most cases. I am testing it every Fedora release. It _is_ possible to use Gnome with Wayland, I managed to get it working with Arch Linux once. However, it took me 4 days, manual patches (literally editing the WM code myself to fix some issues as suggested by the community) to get the configuration right, and the next rolling Arch update broke it beyond repair. Again, I am not against Wayland. Wayland API is beautiful and I want it adapted more and sooner. It is just sad that me and many other users are not getting it. Developers blame Nvidia, because they do not open source their driver (which is a valid concern), however, there are many other binary blob drivers in mainstream Linux kernel, and everybody except hardcore open source apologists are OK with that. Why Nvidia is different, I don't understand.
raverbashing 7y ago
So long and thanks for all the fish. I even think X's death came late in the game Not that it's bad per se, but it was created at a different time, for a very different use case than modern desktop computers While there's a love for the "true Unix way", I think X is one where this is embodied the least
voldacar 7y ago
Are there any major x11 features that wayland lacks other than remote operation over a network? I think at one point it locked the refresh rate to 60hz, has that been changed?
- cmm 7y ago
  arbitrary mouse (or "mouse") button remapping in libinput (my understanding is that libinput itself supports it, but due to some security-related reasons it has to be configured on behalf of the logged-in user and the UI is just not there, or something). the upshot is that I cannot use my trackball the way I'm used to, and that seriously sucks.
- hyperion2010 7y ago
  Universal keybinding and screen capture of any kind. Kind of show stoppers for people who actually use their window manager for managing windows.
  - whatshisface 7y ago
    I use screen capture and remote operation every day. Are those features planned?
    - hyperion2010 7y ago
      As far as I know not into the wayland protocol itself. The devs have been pretty adamant that wayland is 'just the compositor' and left the rest as an exercise for the community, or the toolkit developers. So for instance there is https://github.com/foss-project/green-recorder https://github.com/foss-project/green-recorder but as far as I can tell on wayland it only works for gnome, and requires dbus to work (wat?!).
      - Spivak 7y ago
        * Screen recording is a privileged operation in Wayland which is left to compositors to implement as they see fit. * Screen recording apps are therefore largely just nice frontends on whatever primitives the compositor exposes to do screen recording. * GNOME speaks dbus and exposes those primitives as dbus services. * So you need to speak dbus. You can't really avoid dbus without going really far out of your way these days. Unless something better comes along it's going to be the Linux messaging passing system.
ilovecaching 7y ago
Sway has become one of my favorite pieces of software. The only issue is that Sway or Wayland seems to have trouble implementing an easy to use redshift/nightlight. Based on my research into eye strain and talking to my optometrist I keep redshift on 24/7 and I can’t go back.
- maroonshifter 7y ago
  If you call redshift before calling sway, it works for me. I have it always on and just give it a value. redshift -m drm -PO 3000 sway
  - pmlnr 7y ago
    Wayland was meant to fix stuff, and there are already hacks to make it work with certain scenarios people had been relying on for years. It'll end up becoming just as convoluted as X and I don't understand why the devs don't see this.
- emersion 7y ago
  Redshift works with this patch: https://github.com/jonls/redshift/pull/663 https://github.com/jonls/redshift/pull/663
  - stabbles 7y ago
    Ubuntu 17.04+ also comes with a night light
beowulfey 7y ago
Is there any plan by Wayland to incorporate ssh forwarding? Last I heard it wasn't in the cards, and I think that feature is useful enough; it's probably the only feature I really would miss.
- kaendfinger 7y ago
  Waypipe does this in a really similar way to x forwarding. https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe/ https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe/
  - sprash 7y ago
    No not really similar. It is basically a raw video that transfers the full window content over the wire. X11 is capable of drawing primitives. Even though the most popular toolkits (Gtk, QT) sadly did not use them, those who did (e.g. Athena, Tcl/Tk) worked perfectly over the network, even modem lines. If Wayland would contain modern drawing primitives like those that Cairo offers which could easily be serialized, we would have real network transparency even over slow low bandwidth connections.
    - wmf 7y ago
      It is basically a raw video that transfers the full window content over the wire. Because that's more efficient. If Wayland would contain modern drawing primitives like those that Cairo offers which could easily be serialized, we would have real network transparency even over slow low bandwidth connections. Nope, drawing commands for a modern UI are more bytes than the window contents. This is a deeply counterintuitive topic and it's unfortunate that nobody implemented waypipe until recently so it was impossible to measure.
      - sprash 7y ago
        Any proof for this? I don't believe you. Every SVG is smaller than the rendered PNG counterpart. And SVG is a really inefficient way to serialize drawing commands. Also including drawing into your Compositor (like Windows and MacOS do) gives you additional infinite scaling for free which would solve the multi dpi monitor problem.
jl6 7y ago
I intend my next PC build to last ten years, like my last one has. I will be including an AMD GPU, because I don’t want to be left high and dry by NVIDIA when Wayland takes off.
hyperion2010 7y ago
My take home from this thread now with a few weeks to reflect is that if we want a real window manager that is maintained, then it will have to be a community effort. This will be hard because training an involvement with x11 has been left entirely to Red Hat too long. It will be a lot of work and money to transfer knowledge from the few who do know it. With this in mind, are there other projects that are at risk due to stewardship by a single corporation? How can we prevent this in the future?
- iso-8859-1 7y ago
  > How can we prevent this in the future? Software is dependent on hardware. If the hardware changes, as it did since X11 was invented, the software stack has to change too. You cannot prevent progress in technology. Xorg is in a better state now that it has ever been. Therefore it makes no sense to consider Red Hat some villain that adopted Xorg and ruined it. And had Red Hat not been there, Wayland would still have been invented. Xorg developers switched to Wayland. Why? Because they know it is the future. There is no need to train Xorg developers.
  - hyperion2010 7y ago
    To be clear, I am not in any way faulting RH for this, the excellent state of X11 is indeed due almost entirely to their technical and financial support. This should be celebrated. My point is that having such support can lead the community to assume that such support will always be there an neglect the need to maintain a robust multi-party collaboration around such vital projects.
  - p_l 7y ago
    Nothing prevented X11 frkm adapting with hardware. In fact, commercial implementations did just that. It's XFree86 that was running pretty much on original framebuffer-oriented code dump. Also, if you actually run on server that was more directed towards modern hardware, like Xsgi, GTK3 will simply flip out because it has heavy assumptions that pretty much break.
neilv 7y ago
Quoting a quote from the article: > The reality is that X.org is basically maintained by us and thus once we stop paying attention to it there is unlikely to be any major new releases coming out and there might even be some bitrot setting in over time. We will keep an eye on it as we will want to ensure X.org stays supportable until the end of the RHEL8 lifecycle at a minimum, but let this be a friendly notice for everyone who rely the work we do maintaining the Linux graphics stack, get onto Wayland, that is where the future is. The fair warning is appreciated. Anytime we hear something like this in open source (sometimes after the fact), I try not to prejudge, but I definitely pay attention. Linus Torvalds notwithstanding, the parties with the development resources effectively make the decisions. Sometimes such decisions turn out to still be controversial even years after being pushed onto Linux (like GTK3 or Systemd). I haven't yet used Wayland enough to guess how it will turn out.
- nextos 7y ago
  My concern at the moment with Wayland (and Systemd, Pulseaudio, DBus and a few others) is that Linux is loosing modularity. All these dependencies seem to be getting more or less mandatory. Running a distribution without them is getting harder. Given that they are all getting pushed by the same group of people at Red Hat, it is concerning as they are effectively gaining control of the Linux userland. And given that their architectural decisions are quite contentious and at odds with many Unix design principles, this is not good.
  - ip26 7y ago
    If they are gaining control of the Linux userland because they are the only ones willing & able to put in the development effort, then IMO we can hardly complain. "Decisions are made by those who show up"
    - AsyncAwait 7y ago
      Additionally, no alternative project is even providing close to the set of features that i.e. systemd or pulseaudio does, not even via modules. sysvinit for example is only an alternative to systemd the same way a SUV is an alternative to F1. (watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_AIw9bGogo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_AIw9bGogo if you don't know why)
kabwj 7y ago
Can Wayland currently handle several monitors with different DPI? And by “handle” I mean, being able to resize (blurry, I know) windows that are not DPI-aware transparently when I move them between monitors. What Windows has been able to do for years now.
- snazz 7y ago
  It’s not Wayland’s job, as I understand. GTK3 does it, I think Qt does it, and I’m not sure about anything else. Firefox has issues with menu positioning but works fine. Because X11 applications still talk using the X protocol to XWayland, which doesn’t handle DPI scaling, there’s no guarantee of it working.
  - kabwj 7y ago
    Applications (and their toolkits) should be able to signal to Wayland whether they can handle DPI scaling or not, and if they can’t, Wayland should forcibly resize the windows (ie paint them bigger) like Windows does. If something as basic as this doesn’t work...
    - iso-8859-1 7y ago
      Do you realize that Wayland is a protocol and it involves a compositor (which is NOT called Wayland)?
- emersion 7y ago
  Yes. Note that this isn't really possible with X11.
- sprash 7y ago
  It would have been possible if Wayland decided to include drawing primitives. They religiously decided against it. Now every toolkit has to somehow manage dpi scaling by itself. Actually it is a huge mess.
  - majewsky 7y ago
lettergram 7y ago
A tad concerned about this because my system still heavily relies on X and there really isn’t an alternative for my applications (yet). Wayland isn’t supported for many applications.
- snazz 7y ago
  Does XWayland not solve your issues? It’s a pretty good (seamless) compatibility layer. Of course, it still involves running an X server, but applications can switch to Wayland one at a time and you can use both simultaneously.
  - PlutoIsAPlanet 7y ago
    Imho XWayland is "too good". There's little incentive for software like Chrome to port over to Wayland if it runs on it seamlessly via a compatibility layer.
    - the-rc 7y ago
      Nitpick: Chrome, or at least ChromeOS, already uses Wayland, in order to run Android and Linux apps.
_emacsomancer_ 7y ago
One of the comments on the article ( https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/XDeathwatchStarts?showcomments#comments https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/XDeathwatchSta... ) is also possibly of interest, suggesting possible technical routes for using existing windows managers on Wayland: > There is XWayland, and apparently it will support handling the root window, not just application windows: https://wayland.freedesktop.org/xserver.html > The missing piece of the puzzle is Xweston, which apparently allows you to run window managers for X on Wayland: https://github.com/ackalker/Xweston > or maybe xwlnest will work better: https://github.com/gschwind/xwlnest
- cwyers 7y ago
  I can't help but notice that Xweston and wwlnest are both projects that seem to have gone years without an active contribution. Sometimes projects become mature and don't need additional work, but I would be stunned if anything to do with Wayland had reached that point yet.
  - asveikau 7y ago
    > Sometimes projects become mature and don't need additional work, You mean like X? It seems to me the Wayland thing has a lot of support by people who think lack of changes in and of itself makes X completely unusable. That the software world must exist in a state of perpetual rewrite or it sucks. I predict my minimal X setup will remain usable for a long time.
- bitwize 7y ago
  Again -- XWayland is Xorg. The xorg-server codebase contains a number of components, one of which is a front end called DIX (Device Independent X) that handles protocol-level stuff, another of which are several backends collectively called DDX (Device Dependent X) that handle drawing to the actual video hardware or other graphics layer. One of these DDX backends is 'xwayland'. So the XWayland server incorporates the entire Xorg server code base except for the hardware-specific back ends. And so if Xorg languishes unmaintained... well, sucks to be an XWayland user. So your best bet is to commit now to switching, entirely, to Wayland. The aim is to get everyone off of X altogether as quickly as possible, and then stop shipping X (including XWayland) altogether.
blodovnik 7y ago
There's a lot that xwundows can do that it'll take many years for anything else to catch up to.
csande17 7y ago
I would use Wayland, but the most actively-developed tiling window manager, sway, doesn't work with the NVIDIA graphics card I own. And come to think of it, isn't that a really weird problem to have? On X, the compositor (responsible for actually drawing all the windows on the screen) and the window manager (responsible for deciding how to arrange the windows and what their title bars/borders should look like) can be separate components, so I use i3 to arrange my windows and compton to draw them without tearing. On Wayland, my impression is that the compositor and the window manager have to be built into the same program, so you run into silly situations where you can run GNOME on your graphics card but you can't run a basic tiling window manager. This also makes it a lot harder to create a new window manager, since you also have to write a compositor and test it on every graphics card. That last issue could be solved with a reusable library that provided basic compositor functionality for window managers. Except every member of the Wayland community has independently had that idea and written their own, each with a different, incompatible interface and support for different graphics cards. So either we need a meta-library that abstracts away all the different libraries, or we need a standard compositor interface like X had.
- dmix 7y ago
  Which NVIDIA graphics card do you own? I’m surprised Sway doesn’t support certain graphics cards. I believe the goal of wlroots is to solve this problem: > wlroots provides backends that abstract the underlying display and input hardware https://github.com/swaywm/wlroots https://github.com/swaywm/wlroots
  - cwyers 7y ago
    Nvidia's drive doesn't support the GBM API on Linux, and the maintainer of Sway doesn't want to support Nvidia's preferred EGLStreams API.
  - Boulth 7y ago
    Sway generally doesn't support NVIDIA, or it's rather NVIDIA that doesn't support common kernel modes that Wayland needs. Details here: https://drewdevault.com/2017/10/26/Fuck-you-nvidia.html https://drewdevault.com/2017/10/26/Fuck-you-nvidia.html
ken 7y ago
While I appreciate having choices at some levels, for infrastructure it's always good to have everyone agreed. Desktop Linux has been held back by the X11/replacement situation for years (there, I'll say it), and the sooner we can all get (back) on the same page, at least for this one piece, the better. Many open-source communities are run by perfectionists (and I must count myself among the worst of them). While it's a noble goal to create a gem that will stand the test of time, it's disheartening to see proprietary products move faster by making a decision, even a lousy one, and then shipping it and making it work.
imode 7y ago
This is troublesome, and it feels like "progress" for the sake of "progress" rather than actual improvements. The X Window System is time-tested technology, while Wayland, from what I've seen and read, is not. This isn't a good thing to me, especially considering NVIDIA hardware doesn't seem to be well supported. Someone come along and correct me, please.
- emersion 7y ago
  X11 is a pile of hacks. Have you ever tried to read the source code? When the X11 devs design a new system and stop maintaining X11, it's likely that X11 is not in a good shape. >This isn't a good thing to me, especially considering NVIDIA hardware doesn't seem to be well supported. Someone come along and correct me, please. It's the other way around: NVIDIA doesn't support GBM, the standard for buffer allocation.
  - sprash 7y ago
    How about cleaning up the mess. The most "mess" is coming from old graphics hardware drivers, a task that is now managed by the kernel. Besides, the "mess" performs better than Wayland in many use cases thanks to DRI3.
- imode 7y ago
  Thanks for downvoting, everybody. You aren't supposed to downvote because you disagree, you're supposed to downvote because I'm not contributing to the discussion. This place is an echo chamber that favors cliques and follows its own arbitrary rules while being hostile to others. lobste.rs is so much better.
carapace 7y ago
RIP ( I don't doubt for a minute that someone will pick up the slack, but that makes me wonder, who's gonna pay for it? Would you contribute to e.g. a Kickstarter for X Windows? FWIW, I'm not sure I would, meaning no disrespect I've been hoping to ditch X for something better ever since Don Hopkins opened my eyes to NeWS, &c. ) So there's Wayland. What else? Arcan? https://arcan-fe.com/about/ https://arcan-fe.com/about/ On HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22arcan%22&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22arcan%22&sort=byPopularity&... > Arcan is a powerful development framework for creating virtually anything between user interfaces for specialised embedded applications all the way to full-blown standalone desktop environments. Boot splash screen? no problem. Custom Interface for your Home Automation Project? sure thing. Stream media processing? Of course. > It has been used in a number of both experimental, hobby, academic research and commerical projects and products alike, in areas ranging from VR desktops to industrial computer vision systems for robotic automation. > At its heart lies a robust and portable multimedia engine, with a well-tested and well-documented interface, programmable using Lua. At every step of the way, the underlying development emphasises security, performance and debugability guided by a principle of least surprise in terms of API design.
- DonHopkins 7y ago
  Thank you, I hadn't heard of it before so I'll check it out! I'm not optimistic about Wayland, since early on they decided not to use an extension language, and that's not something you can have a change of heart about later, and then just nail onto the side. It would be interesting to see how Arcan uses L ua, which is a great language for that kind of stuff. It's a lot smaller and sleeker and better designed than JavaScript. The Arcan developers should check out how Factorio modding works! (But then all work on Arcan would halt when for months while they were addicted to Factorio.) https://wiki.factorio.com/Modding https://wiki.factorio.com/Modding Lua's main problem is that it isn't JavaScript (i.e. in JavaScript's enviably lucky position of ubiquitous dominance). If I had a time machine, I'd go back and try to convince Netscape to use Lua 2.1 instead of inventing JavaScript (released December 4, 1995). And hire the Self guys (Dave Ungar, Randy Smith and the crew who eventually made the Java HotSpot compiler) away from Sun, and Mike Pall (LuaJIT) from wherever he was! https://www.lua.org/versions.html https://www.lua.org/versions.html >Lua 2.1 was released on 07 Feb 1995. Its main new features were extensible semantics via fallbacks and support for object-oriented programming. This version was described in a journal paper. Starting with Lua 2.1, Lua became freely available for all purposes, including commercial uses. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12574290 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12574290 https://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/Charles/A-Conversation-with-Bjarne-Stroustrup-Carl-Hewitt-and-Dave-Ungar https://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/Charles/A-Conversation-with-...
dpacmittal 7y ago
I'll miss x11vnc which is currently the only way on linux (afaik) to have a network connected monitor and between which I can seamlessly move my windows.
DonHopkins 7y ago
Back to the drawing board! Methodology of Window Management F R A Hopgood, D A Duce, E V C Fielding, K Robinson, A S Williams 29 April 1985 This is the Proceedings of the Alvey Workshop at Cosener's House, Abingdon that took place from 29 April 1985 until 1 May 1985. It was input into the planning for the MMI part of the Alvey Programme. The Proceedings were later published by Springer-Verlag in 1986. http://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/inf/literature/books/wm/preface.htm http://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/inf/literature/books/wm/...
logicprog 7y ago
I'm really not very sad to see X go. It was old, creaky and insecure. As advanced and cool as it may have been at one time, and as much as I respect the people who worked on it, it's time for it to go. As for the people complaining about Wayland possibly missing some of X's features, remember that it takes time for something to mature, to accrete features and fixes, and Wayland hasn't had that time yet. If we give it the time and support it could and almost definitely will grow into something even better than X. We can't stay on X forever without incurring even worse results on ourselves than what we'll get when we switch to Wayland. And another thing. For the people who complain about Wayland in the same breath as PulseAudio and SystemD: this tells is much more about you than about these projects. The only thing Wayland has in common with the other two is that it's new, and that you don't like it. It's more modular and more UNIXy and more open than X, arguably.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
  > As for the people complaining about Wayland possibly missing some of X's features, remember that it takes time for something to mature, to accrete features and fixes, and Wayland hasn't had that time yet. It has been a decade, precisely how long does it need to catch up? I ask because from what I can tell it is still missing features that were standard in Windows Vista in 2008, when that OS switched to DWM and WDDM.
  - logicprog 7y ago
    If you're talking about screen recording and screenshots, fair point, except that that lack is a result of designing for security.
    - temac 7y ago
      Hum, you can as well reach perfect security by keeping your computer powered off.
      - logicprog 7y ago
        Haha! Yeah, that's true.
noobermin 7y ago
I seek to be enlightened, not to flame: what exactly is so wrong with X that it can be retrofit to work better? Wayland is taking a while, which is expected sure, but for now, X works fine although with issues.
- robert_foss 7y ago
  The design assumptions that went into making X were made before the modern computer or Linux existed. Modern X is a Frankensteinian collection fixes upon fixes and unmaintained code.
  - quotemstr 7y ago
    You didn't actually answer the OP's question. There is nothing Wayland does that could not have been done via the X11 extension mechanism. X has already been reinvented several times --- few things use the core protocol nowadays, after all! For example, XRender for text is now universal. The thing that's different about Wayland is that for reasons that nobody ever explains clearly at a technical level, this time, a few influential people created a new and (IMHO, inferior) protocol instead of continuing to use the X extension mechanism. Security? Isolate the X session data to individual client connections. Buffer management? Do it like GLX does. Want server-side decorations for some reason? What's stopping you? Sure, ICCCM isn't trivial, but it exists, and it's flexible.
    - maxharris 7y ago
      Apple evaluated X11 when they were just starting work on Mac OS X. This comment by Mike Paquette (designer and author of Quartz!) explains why it was better to dump X11 and start over: "> they don't even use X at all! What Apple is providing is an Apple-original window system that is graphics model agnostic, as well as a vector drawing system that maps very well to PDF, which is a sort of PostScript without the non-graphical operators. This is packaged under the name 'Quartz' for easy reference by Marketing types. The window system is designed to support both buffered (like an offscreen PixMap) and unbuffered windows, and is graphics model agnostic, working equally well with QuickDraw, OpenGL, the Quartz drawing engine, X11, and third party solutions, and managing window geometry for the Classic, Carbon, and Cocoa environments. The server portion is a hybridization of screen arbiter and compositor models (and if that's all Geek to you, don't worry about it). The Quartz drawing engine supports drawing primitives similar to the graphics primitives that might be found in the DPSClient single-operator primitives library for X and NeXTSTEP. There are no math and flow control primitives, as these can be done more efficiently in the native compiled code. There are no DPS or PS wrappers, as this optimization for server-side graphics is not needed in the Quartz client-side graphics model. The operations provide imaging and path construction and filling operations as well as some interesting other bits that map well into the direction that 2D drawing is headed. (See Longhorn, or the X raster projects.) The drawing engine can output to rasters (like a window!), as well as PS and PDF streams to feed printers. The Mac OS X printing system takes advantage of the capabilities of Quartz to support all sorts of printers, and make the life of printer driver developers much, much easier. Things we'd need to add/extend in X Window software (protocol+server+manager+fonts+...): 1) Extend font server and services to vend outlines and antialiased masks, support more font types, handle font subsetting. 2) Extend drawing primitives to include PS-like path operations. 3) Add dithering and phase controls. 4) Add ColorSync support for drawing and imaging operations, display calibration 5) Add broad alpha channel support and Porter-Duff compositing, both for drawing in a window and for interactions between windows. 6) Add support for general affine transforms of windows 7) Add support for mesh-warps of windows 8) Make sure that OpenGL and special video playback hardware support is integrated, and behaves well with all above changes. 9) We find that we typically stream 200 Mb/sec of commands and textures for interactive OpenGL use, so transport efficiency could be an issue. So, yes, it looks like we can use X for Quartz. All we need do is define extensions for and upgrade the font server, add dithering with phase controls to the X marking engine, add a transparency model to X imaging with Porter-Duff compositing support, make sure GLX gets in, upgrade the window buffering to include transparency, mesh warps, and really good resampling, and maybe augment the transport layer a bit. Ummm... There doesn't appear to be much code left from the original X server in the drawing path or windowing machinery, and it doesn't appear that apps relying on these extensions can work with any other X server. Just what did we gain from this? Oh, yeah. My mom can run an xterm session on her desktop now without downloading the Apple X11 package, a shareware X server or buying a software package. Been there, evaluated that." https://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=75257&cid=6734612 https://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=75257&cid=67...
rspeele 7y ago
I can't say it any better than JWZ did over 15 years ago. This is the result of the Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers model and is why Linux will not approach Windows or OSX in usability. Cannot link to his site: JWZ dot org /doc/cadt.html A complete teardown and rebuild of the whole ecosystem (because X succccckkks) is fun! Making something backwards-compatible, or standardized, or polished that "last 90%" so it works on everybody's environment... is not.
- Sebb767 7y ago
  https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html <- works for me
  - claudiawerner 7y ago
    Well that's because if you click on that link from HN it uses the referrer details provided by your browser to show quite a rude message and picture ;)
    - tambourine_man 7y ago
      Wow, never seen this before. I don’t get the animosity HN sometimes revives. I don’t really care for startup stuff and I just ignore it, but the average level of discussion here is extremely high. One of the best in the web. Compare HN to Twitter or Reddit and it’s night and day, and it has been for years.
      - jessaustin 7y ago
        This particular juvenile humor says more about JWZ than about HN. Just look at the example ITT. The "CADT" metaphor doesn't have much to do with the developers either of X or of Wayland.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- _emacsomancer_ 7y ago
hiccuphippo 7y ago
So is there a timeline for when the RHEL8 lifecycle will end?
- slrz 7y ago
  The normal support period for a RHEL release is 10 years. RHEL8 came out earlier this year.
smartmic 7y ago
Having the Lindy effect [1] in mind, I would not be too pessimistic about an early decay of this proven (albeit imperfect) technology. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
rleigh 7y ago
Maybe the death watch for the traditional Linux desktop has also started... Linux distributions have had a decade long slide in their usability and polish. Much of this has been due to an abandonment of its historical UNIX roots in favour of half-baked "modern" replacements. Being a UNIX replacement with a full X11 server and all the rest was what made it compelling and practical in the first place. However, it's coming to the point where it's simply getting unusable. And I say this after using Linux on the desktop as my primary user and development environment for over 22 years at this point. If I want actual UNIX, I can run FreeBSD in a virtual machine, or even on the bare metal. Otherwise, I might as well resign myself to fate and use Windows with WSL or VMs for everything else. If I'm going to be forced to use something I dislike, it might as well be something that properly supports all my hardware and I can be productive with despite its annoyances.
- zbuf 7y ago
  I come from an environment where we have a reasonable number of Linux workstations; approaching 2000 in the company I work for, and more in the wider field. > Being a UNIX replacement with a full X11 server and all the rest was what made it compelling and practical in the first place. Yes, here as well. We have big apps, small apps, legacy apps, remote apps, all doing real work. For the enthusiast user base, who mainly live within the distribution's ecosystem, this sort of churn in the platform is exciting and interesting, or feels like progress. The platform is the end result. For us, the platform is just that -- a platform on which sits a lot of vendor applications and custom tooling assembled over decades with its idiosyncrasies carefully accommodated. This churn isn't good. Anything short of 100% compatibility is going to prompt a risky re-evaluation of what's out there on the market -- risky because Windows is in the strongest position, not Linux. Linux is already in a weakened position than it once was as a workstation OS. My colleagues will be enticed by a Windows platform which has an emerging Linux compatibility; and a tried-and-tested build of most of the vendor-driven GUI applications and GPU drivers, too.
- amyjess 7y ago
  > Otherwise, I might as well resign myself to fate and use Windows with WSL or VMs for everything else. If I'm going to be forced to use something I dislike, it might as well be something that properly supports all my hardware and I can be productive with despite its annoyances. I was going to make my own top-level comment, but you've said everything I wanted to say. The day X dies is the day I switch back to Windows. I can simply use WSL and KDE Applications to get something very close to the parts of Linux I like.
kazinator 7y ago
How many of these Xorg developers are the original people who made X11R3 in the mid 1980's? Somehow X didn't die without those people.
- ibotty 7y ago
  Keith Packard is the only one AFAIK.
djsumdog 7y ago
So what are the BSDs planning on doing? Do OpenBSD/FreeBSD just plan on maintaining their own forks of Xorg, or are there plans to try and port Wayland to these operating systems as well?
- beezle 7y ago
  FreeBSD user too, I'd like to know that as well. Not going to lay blame on RedHat for doing what is in their own best interest, but do find it troubling that the *nix world has had a major piece of software made redundant on the decision of one company/maintainer. As an end user my perspective, perhaps incorrect, is that since the late 90s development of application and system software has become increasingly siloed with less diverse views and the involvement of fewer stake holders. I suppose that would happen based on math alone (more linux end users with no interest beyond a working web browser) but I worry where that path might lead.
pmoriarty 7y ago
"Why I'm not going to switch to Wayland yet"[1] argues that: "for simple things using the compositor's screen shot tool is fine. But what if I don't like the screenshot tool for my compositor of choice? My experience with the GNOME screenshot tool (granted this was pre-wayland) was that it wasn't as good as, say, shutter, which has a lot of options, let's you easily crop and edit the screenshot from inside the screenshot tool etc. And then swaygrab doesn't even (currently) have an option to capture a rectangular region." There are some other things this article mentions which are important to me, like Wayland's lack of color picker tools and xdotool functionality. Wayland seems just way too immature for me to use for now. X works great, does everything I want, and I see no compelling reason to switch. [1] - https://old.reddit.com/r/wayland/comments/85q78y/why_im_not_going_to_switch_to_wayland_yet/ https://old.reddit.com/r/wayland/comments/85q78y/why_im_not_...
- majewsky 7y ago
  The wlroots developers are working on protocol extensions to make stuff like screen grabbing work consistently across WMs: https://github.com/swaywm/wlr-protocols https://github.com/swaywm/wlr-protocols
ht85 7y ago
Slightly off-topic, but is anyone here using Wayland with a touchpad? The last time I tried libinput, the behavior was horrendous compared to a synaptics. 2 finger scrolling had a ~2mm threshold before it activated and wouldn't compensate for the lost distance once the scroll started, making it feel very unnatural. I couldn't find an option to enable true palm detection either. There was an option to disable the touchpad for a fixed time every time the keyboard was used, which is abysmal compared to how it works normally (ignoring taps and drags if they start too close to an edge). It's hard to believe that this is the current state of things, but I did search for a way to set it up with no success. Is there a way to get those to work?
- ZeroCool2u 7y ago
  I've been using Ubuntu with Gnome on Wayland for the past year or so on my Dell XPS 13. I actually ended up switching to Wayland, because of how much better the touchpad worked with it. To be fair though, Dell has an entire team dedicated to supporting the XPS 13 Developer Edition, so the drivers are highly curated compared to most devices.
  - ht85 7y ago
    My experience was on an XPS 9570, not sure if there's a large gap in driver / support. Out of the box synaptics was pretty bad, but after tuning the palm detection zone size and a couple timings (long press, etc) it feels amazing. When I don't have to test convoluted UIs, I can go days without plugging the mouse. Don't you have the small "lag" when two fingers scrolling?
    - ZeroCool2u 7y ago
      I've been super happy with the touch pads performance out of the box, I literally haven't modified any settings related to it. Are you referring to this bug[1] in Chromium? I think these are growing pains associated with transitioning to Wayland, but this really doesn't bother me too much. I will say that the scrolling is otherwise very smooth and almost perfectly everywhere else in the UX. [1]https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=712737 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=712737
sly010 7y ago
You mean the nights watch
shmerl 7y ago
I'm all for switching to Wayland session, but it has a long way to go to become usable. The biggest issues for me: * KWin still has major bugs like flickering windows due to broken subsurfaces clipping. * No Wayland compositors support adaptive sync yet and according to KWin developers it will take "several years to arrive". * No support for drawing tablets (Wacom). So all this "X11 is dead" is way premature, as much as I want Wayland to take its place.
mpenick 7y ago
It’s still not possible to remap mouse buttons for most applications under Wayland and libinput is allergic to adding features.
shiftoutbox 7y ago
Given that ibm owns redhat and ibm aix depends on x11 I think the redhat gnome idiots are in for a rude “welcome to working at ibm” talk .
mindcrime 7y ago
I'm totally not impressed with the so-called "successor" to X... Wayland. It might be unrelated, but I just upgraded to F30 and I'm seeing all sorts of weird graphics / screen drawing related bugs using Wayland. And while it looks like somebody is finally making some meaningful headway on a remoting story for Wayland, it's still not truly on par with X in this regard. So sure, kill X... but we should probably have a replacement that actually works, first.
major505 7y ago
I would die a happy man, if I never had to open an xorg.config again.
- asveikau 7y ago
  Recent releases encourage you to remove xorg.conf altogether and let it figure out the config itself. Works pretty well from what I have seen.
  - kasabali 7y ago
    I must add ”recent” here means more than 10 years. Last release that required an xorg.conf file was released in 2006 or 2007?
    - major505 7y ago
      Id din't know that Sometime ago I was trying to make an old nvidia video card work with my pc in With Fedora. One of the instructions was to open the xorg. change the drive to replace the noveau drive, or something like that. I think it wasant't even 2 years ago. Then I just installed ubuntu and isntalled with apt-get install nvidia-wathever-version. And worked like a charm for me.
      - kasabali 7y ago
        When you need to configuration, best practice is to put only the necessary configuration in a configuration snippet inside /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/ without creating a full xorg.conf file.
rocky1138 7y ago
Can we record the screen or take screenshots yet? If not, Wayland is DOA.
- ClashTheBunny 7y ago
  https://github.com/emersion/grim https://github.com/emersion/grim
  - nsajko 7y ago
    I think that depends on a protocol that only Sway (the compositor) implements.
nsajko 7y ago
One thing that a great majority of commenters here seem to be missing is that Wayland's issues that make it unsuitable to replace X Windows will not just be ironed out in a couple of years (at least not in a way that would be an improvement over X), because it is flawed by design. The thing is, Wayland developers do not want you to take screenshots or automate input events (injection and interception). Those are both "power-user" and "accessibility" features. So respectively those who like to use the Unix (or other OS) programming environment to its full potential (hackers?), and the blind/visually impaired will have a hard time if Wayland gets forced on them. It is possible to solve those problems with effort on a per-compositor basis (meaning less choice for users and more redundant programming effort - programs that interact with GUIs will need to have separate code for each compositor!), or with protocol extensions - that, of course, would not be universally accepted. For example, I think no compositor currently give a Wayland user the option to mess with input events (key presses, etc.). This means no hot-keys! Quoting Red Hat: "Furthermore, there isn’t a standard API for getting screen shots from Wayland. It’s dependent on what compositor (window manager/shell) the user is running, and if they implemented a proprietary API to do so." An interesting Reddit discussion: "It has been almost a decade, why does Wayland not have a protocol definition for screenshots?" - answer - "Because security, dude! Wayland is designed with the thought that users download random applications from the interwebz which are not trustworthy and run them. Wayland actually makes a lot of sense if you don't think of Linux desktop distributions and desktop systems, but of smartphones. But for some reason we absolutely need this technology on the desktop, like we had not enough pain and lose ends over here without it." [7] See [1] [2]. And my previous comments on the same topic: [3] [4]. Another thing wrong with Wayland is that forced compositing means noticeably (in interactive applications) more latency. Small nitpick regarding the blog post: Chromium depends on GTK3. [1] https://wiki.gnome.org/Accessibility/Wayland https://wiki.gnome.org/Accessibility/Wayland [2] https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Accessibility/Wayland/ https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Accessibility/Wayland/ [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20310200 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20310200 [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20308011 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20308011 [7] https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/7lb5l7/new_screenshot_alternative_for_wayland/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/7lb5l7/new_screensho...
- rambojazz 7y ago
moocowtruck 7y ago
that sucks for me I guess, or for me using linux as desktop since I have nvidia ah well
souterrain 7y ago
RHEL 8.8 will be released in 2023Q4, so I suspect RedHat will continue to maintain the code at least until then.
zzo38computer 7y ago
I don't really like Wayland, and I think X is better. There are some problems with X, and I made some ideas how to fix it, including getting rid of a lot of the extensions of the X protocol, but making now XBell is like XkbBell instead, moving many things out of the protocol, and also some other stuff.

I hope they manage to standardize the majority of protocols. Last time I've checked GNOME wasn't happy but the other projects were, surprisingly, cooperating heavily. There are very interesting projects using Wayland. https://github.com/search?o=desc&q=wayland&s=updated&type=Repositories https://github.com/search?o=desc&q=wayland&s=updated&type=Re...

bitwize 7y ago

Omae wa mou shindeiru. If the future of X is uncertain, then X is already dead. No one wants to base their OS on something without a clear maintenance and development roadmap.

johnklos 7y ago
Except for those who pave the way. Not all OSes are products.
- ch_123 7y ago
  I'm not sure that use of X11 could be considered "paving the way"
  - nvrspyx 7y ago
    I think they might have meant “pave their way”. Like they said, not all OS’s are products and some people have specific use cases in which X11 is the only viable option, whether that’s personal or experimental. I wouldn’t know what those use cases might be. That’s just my interpretation of the comment.
- bitwize 7y ago
  The ones that matter are.
OJFord 7y ago
To save others a search: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/you-are-already-dead-omae-wa-mou-shindeiru https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/you-are-already-dead-omae-wa-...
yyyk 7y ago
It's not like distros contributed all that much to X in the first place. Most likely, X will remain until Wayland is ready - which it isn't yet, 'prototype' support for some very common use cases does not count as support.

lkirk 7y ago

I'm also a heavy user of an X-only window manager (xmonad). Learning about this makes me wonder if I should start learning how to work with another window manager so I'm not caught off guard when something stops working.

_emacsomancer_ 7y ago
I'm really attached to stumpwm, which is also X-only. We have been hearing reports of the pending death of X for at least the past decade, so I'm never certain how seriously to take them, but I've kept an eye on what looks like the closest thing to a wayland implementation of stumpwm (https://github.com/malcolmstill/ulubis https://github.com/malcolmstill/ulubis).
FreeFull 7y ago
You could try to transition to the sway wayland compositor (which is largely compatible with i3wm) or maybe to https://github.com/letoram/arcan https://github.com/letoram/arcan which is a lot more programmable than sway
bestham 7y ago
XMonad is (pardon the phun) very high level and a switch to any other window system should be trivial.
mimimi31 7y ago
Do you know about Waymonad? It's supposedly Xmonad for Wayland and uses wlroots like sway.
- lkirk 7y ago
  I've heard of it, not sure how mature it is these days. Maybe I'll give it another look

atemerev 7y ago

So, RedHat decided that they do not want nvidia users anymore? I’d be more than happy to switch to Wayland, but I can’t.

daenney 7y ago
GNOME, which is what powers the RedHat desktop, supports nvidia on Wayland just fine, and KDE got nvidia/EGLStreams support since KWin 5.16. So at least 2 major DEs do, though quite a few others don't, and have taken a principled stand not to (Sway for example won't). When it comes to RedHat though, they're all-in on GNOME anyway so keeping X around for nvidia users isn't really a concern for them when their desktop experience supports nvidia on Wayland just fine.
- atemerev 7y ago
  No, just checked it with the latest Fedora 30, it defaults to X when it detects an Nvidia card.
  - daenney 7y ago
    Just b/c it defaults to X does not mean it doesn't work or isn't supported on Wayland.
    - atemerev 7y ago
      It defaults to X, because it works very poorly with Wayland. Until very recently, it was impossible to run Gnome with Wayland at all (even though it theoretically supported Eglstreams), as there were many kernel errors generated by gnome-shell, etc. Now it sort of works, however, lags and freezes make it completely unusable in most cases. I am testing it every Fedora release. It _is_ possible to use Gnome with Wayland, I managed to get it working with Arch Linux once. However, it took me 4 days, manual patches (literally editing the WM code myself to fix some issues as suggested by the community) to get the configuration right, and the next rolling Arch update broke it beyond repair. Again, I am not against Wayland. Wayland API is beautiful and I want it adapted more and sooner. It is just sad that me and many other users are not getting it. Developers blame Nvidia, because they do not open source their driver (which is a valid concern), however, there are many other binary blob drivers in mainstream Linux kernel, and everybody except hardcore open source apologists are OK with that. Why Nvidia is different, I don't understand.

raverbashing 7y ago

So long and thanks for all the fish. I even think X's death came late in the game Not that it's bad per se, but it was created at a different time, for a very different use case than modern desktop computers While there's a love for the "true Unix way", I think X is one where this is embodied the least

voldacar 7y ago

Are there any major x11 features that wayland lacks other than remote operation over a network? I think at one point it locked the refresh rate to 60hz, has that been changed?

cmm 7y ago
arbitrary mouse (or "mouse") button remapping in libinput (my understanding is that libinput itself supports it, but due to some security-related reasons it has to be configured on behalf of the logged-in user and the UI is just not there, or something). the upshot is that I cannot use my trackball the way I'm used to, and that seriously sucks.
hyperion2010 7y ago
Universal keybinding and screen capture of any kind. Kind of show stoppers for people who actually use their window manager for managing windows.
- whatshisface 7y ago
  I use screen capture and remote operation every day. Are those features planned?
  - hyperion2010 7y ago
    As far as I know not into the wayland protocol itself. The devs have been pretty adamant that wayland is 'just the compositor' and left the rest as an exercise for the community, or the toolkit developers. So for instance there is https://github.com/foss-project/green-recorder https://github.com/foss-project/green-recorder but as far as I can tell on wayland it only works for gnome, and requires dbus to work (wat?!).
    - Spivak 7y ago
      * Screen recording is a privileged operation in Wayland which is left to compositors to implement as they see fit. * Screen recording apps are therefore largely just nice frontends on whatever primitives the compositor exposes to do screen recording. * GNOME speaks dbus and exposes those primitives as dbus services. * So you need to speak dbus. You can't really avoid dbus without going really far out of your way these days. Unless something better comes along it's going to be the Linux messaging passing system.

ilovecaching 7y ago

Sway has become one of my favorite pieces of software. The only issue is that Sway or Wayland seems to have trouble implementing an easy to use redshift/nightlight. Based on my research into eye strain and talking to my optometrist I keep redshift on 24/7 and I can’t go back.

maroonshifter 7y ago
If you call redshift before calling sway, it works for me. I have it always on and just give it a value. redshift -m drm -PO 3000 sway
- pmlnr 7y ago
  Wayland was meant to fix stuff, and there are already hacks to make it work with certain scenarios people had been relying on for years. It'll end up becoming just as convoluted as X and I don't understand why the devs don't see this.
emersion 7y ago
Redshift works with this patch: https://github.com/jonls/redshift/pull/663 https://github.com/jonls/redshift/pull/663
- stabbles 7y ago
  Ubuntu 17.04+ also comes with a night light

beowulfey 7y ago

Is there any plan by Wayland to incorporate ssh forwarding? Last I heard it wasn't in the cards, and I think that feature is useful enough; it's probably the only feature I really would miss.

kaendfinger 7y ago
Waypipe does this in a really similar way to x forwarding. https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe/ https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe/
- sprash 7y ago
  No not really similar. It is basically a raw video that transfers the full window content over the wire. X11 is capable of drawing primitives. Even though the most popular toolkits (Gtk, QT) sadly did not use them, those who did (e.g. Athena, Tcl/Tk) worked perfectly over the network, even modem lines. If Wayland would contain modern drawing primitives like those that Cairo offers which could easily be serialized, we would have real network transparency even over slow low bandwidth connections.
  - wmf 7y ago
    It is basically a raw video that transfers the full window content over the wire. Because that's more efficient. If Wayland would contain modern drawing primitives like those that Cairo offers which could easily be serialized, we would have real network transparency even over slow low bandwidth connections. Nope, drawing commands for a modern UI are more bytes than the window contents. This is a deeply counterintuitive topic and it's unfortunate that nobody implemented waypipe until recently so it was impossible to measure.
    - sprash 7y ago
      Any proof for this? I don't believe you. Every SVG is smaller than the rendered PNG counterpart. And SVG is a really inefficient way to serialize drawing commands. Also including drawing into your Compositor (like Windows and MacOS do) gives you additional infinite scaling for free which would solve the multi dpi monitor problem.

jl6 7y ago

I intend my next PC build to last ten years, like my last one has. I will be including an AMD GPU, because I don’t want to be left high and dry by NVIDIA when Wayland takes off.

hyperion2010 7y ago

My take home from this thread now with a few weeks to reflect is that if we want a real window manager that is maintained, then it will have to be a community effort. This will be hard because training an involvement with x11 has been left entirely to Red Hat too long. It will be a lot of work and money to transfer knowledge from the few who do know it. With this in mind, are there other projects that are at risk due to stewardship by a single corporation? How can we prevent this in the future?

iso-8859-1 7y ago
> How can we prevent this in the future? Software is dependent on hardware. If the hardware changes, as it did since X11 was invented, the software stack has to change too. You cannot prevent progress in technology. Xorg is in a better state now that it has ever been. Therefore it makes no sense to consider Red Hat some villain that adopted Xorg and ruined it. And had Red Hat not been there, Wayland would still have been invented. Xorg developers switched to Wayland. Why? Because they know it is the future. There is no need to train Xorg developers.
- hyperion2010 7y ago
  To be clear, I am not in any way faulting RH for this, the excellent state of X11 is indeed due almost entirely to their technical and financial support. This should be celebrated. My point is that having such support can lead the community to assume that such support will always be there an neglect the need to maintain a robust multi-party collaboration around such vital projects.
- p_l 7y ago
  Nothing prevented X11 frkm adapting with hardware. In fact, commercial implementations did just that. It's XFree86 that was running pretty much on original framebuffer-oriented code dump. Also, if you actually run on server that was more directed towards modern hardware, like Xsgi, GTK3 will simply flip out because it has heavy assumptions that pretty much break.

neilv 7y ago

Quoting a quote from the article: > The reality is that X.org is basically maintained by us and thus once we stop paying attention to it there is unlikely to be any major new releases coming out and there might even be some bitrot setting in over time. We will keep an eye on it as we will want to ensure X.org stays supportable until the end of the RHEL8 lifecycle at a minimum, but let this be a friendly notice for everyone who rely the work we do maintaining the Linux graphics stack, get onto Wayland, that is where the future is. The fair warning is appreciated. Anytime we hear something like this in open source (sometimes after the fact), I try not to prejudge, but I definitely pay attention. Linus Torvalds notwithstanding, the parties with the development resources effectively make the decisions. Sometimes such decisions turn out to still be controversial even years after being pushed onto Linux (like GTK3 or Systemd). I haven't yet used Wayland enough to guess how it will turn out.

nextos 7y ago
My concern at the moment with Wayland (and Systemd, Pulseaudio, DBus and a few others) is that Linux is loosing modularity. All these dependencies seem to be getting more or less mandatory. Running a distribution without them is getting harder. Given that they are all getting pushed by the same group of people at Red Hat, it is concerning as they are effectively gaining control of the Linux userland. And given that their architectural decisions are quite contentious and at odds with many Unix design principles, this is not good.
- ip26 7y ago
  If they are gaining control of the Linux userland because they are the only ones willing & able to put in the development effort, then IMO we can hardly complain. "Decisions are made by those who show up"
  - AsyncAwait 7y ago
    Additionally, no alternative project is even providing close to the set of features that i.e. systemd or pulseaudio does, not even via modules. sysvinit for example is only an alternative to systemd the same way a SUV is an alternative to F1. (watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_AIw9bGogo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_AIw9bGogo if you don't know why)

kabwj 7y ago

Can Wayland currently handle several monitors with different DPI? And by “handle” I mean, being able to resize (blurry, I know) windows that are not DPI-aware transparently when I move them between monitors. What Windows has been able to do for years now.

snazz 7y ago
It’s not Wayland’s job, as I understand. GTK3 does it, I think Qt does it, and I’m not sure about anything else. Firefox has issues with menu positioning but works fine. Because X11 applications still talk using the X protocol to XWayland, which doesn’t handle DPI scaling, there’s no guarantee of it working.
- kabwj 7y ago
  Applications (and their toolkits) should be able to signal to Wayland whether they can handle DPI scaling or not, and if they can’t, Wayland should forcibly resize the windows (ie paint them bigger) like Windows does. If something as basic as this doesn’t work...
  - iso-8859-1 7y ago
    Do you realize that Wayland is a protocol and it involves a compositor (which is NOT called Wayland)?
emersion 7y ago
Yes. Note that this isn't really possible with X11.
sprash 7y ago
It would have been possible if Wayland decided to include drawing primitives. They religiously decided against it. Now every toolkit has to somehow manage dpi scaling by itself. Actually it is a huge mess.
- majewsky 7y ago

lettergram 7y ago

A tad concerned about this because my system still heavily relies on X and there really isn’t an alternative for my applications (yet). Wayland isn’t supported for many applications.

snazz 7y ago
Does XWayland not solve your issues? It’s a pretty good (seamless) compatibility layer. Of course, it still involves running an X server, but applications can switch to Wayland one at a time and you can use both simultaneously.
- PlutoIsAPlanet 7y ago
  Imho XWayland is "too good". There's little incentive for software like Chrome to port over to Wayland if it runs on it seamlessly via a compatibility layer.
  - the-rc 7y ago
    Nitpick: Chrome, or at least ChromeOS, already uses Wayland, in order to run Android and Linux apps.

_emacsomancer_ 7y ago

One of the comments on the article ( https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/XDeathwatchStarts?showcomments#comments https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/XDeathwatchSta... ) is also possibly of interest, suggesting possible technical routes for using existing windows managers on Wayland: > There is XWayland, and apparently it will support handling the root window, not just application windows: https://wayland.freedesktop.org/xserver.html > The missing piece of the puzzle is Xweston, which apparently allows you to run window managers for X on Wayland: https://github.com/ackalker/Xweston > or maybe xwlnest will work better: https://github.com/gschwind/xwlnest

cwyers 7y ago
I can't help but notice that Xweston and wwlnest are both projects that seem to have gone years without an active contribution. Sometimes projects become mature and don't need additional work, but I would be stunned if anything to do with Wayland had reached that point yet.
- asveikau 7y ago
  > Sometimes projects become mature and don't need additional work, You mean like X? It seems to me the Wayland thing has a lot of support by people who think lack of changes in and of itself makes X completely unusable. That the software world must exist in a state of perpetual rewrite or it sucks. I predict my minimal X setup will remain usable for a long time.
bitwize 7y ago
Again -- XWayland is Xorg. The xorg-server codebase contains a number of components, one of which is a front end called DIX (Device Independent X) that handles protocol-level stuff, another of which are several backends collectively called DDX (Device Dependent X) that handle drawing to the actual video hardware or other graphics layer. One of these DDX backends is 'xwayland'. So the XWayland server incorporates the entire Xorg server code base except for the hardware-specific back ends. And so if Xorg languishes unmaintained... well, sucks to be an XWayland user. So your best bet is to commit now to switching, entirely, to Wayland. The aim is to get everyone off of X altogether as quickly as possible, and then stop shipping X (including XWayland) altogether.

blodovnik 7y ago

There's a lot that xwundows can do that it'll take many years for anything else to catch up to.

csande17 7y ago

I would use Wayland, but the most actively-developed tiling window manager, sway, doesn't work with the NVIDIA graphics card I own. And come to think of it, isn't that a really weird problem to have? On X, the compositor (responsible for actually drawing all the windows on the screen) and the window manager (responsible for deciding how to arrange the windows and what their title bars/borders should look like) can be separate components, so I use i3 to arrange my windows and compton to draw them without tearing. On Wayland, my impression is that the compositor and the window manager have to be built into the same program, so you run into silly situations where you can run GNOME on your graphics card but you can't run a basic tiling window manager. This also makes it a lot harder to create a new window manager, since you also have to write a compositor and test it on every graphics card. That last issue could be solved with a reusable library that provided basic compositor functionality for window managers. Except every member of the Wayland community has independently had that idea and written their own, each with a different, incompatible interface and support for different graphics cards. So either we need a meta-library that abstracts away all the different libraries, or we need a standard compositor interface like X had.

dmix 7y ago
Which NVIDIA graphics card do you own? I’m surprised Sway doesn’t support certain graphics cards. I believe the goal of wlroots is to solve this problem: > wlroots provides backends that abstract the underlying display and input hardware https://github.com/swaywm/wlroots https://github.com/swaywm/wlroots
- cwyers 7y ago
  Nvidia's drive doesn't support the GBM API on Linux, and the maintainer of Sway doesn't want to support Nvidia's preferred EGLStreams API.
- Boulth 7y ago
  Sway generally doesn't support NVIDIA, or it's rather NVIDIA that doesn't support common kernel modes that Wayland needs. Details here: https://drewdevault.com/2017/10/26/Fuck-you-nvidia.html https://drewdevault.com/2017/10/26/Fuck-you-nvidia.html

ken 7y ago

While I appreciate having choices at some levels, for infrastructure it's always good to have everyone agreed. Desktop Linux has been held back by the X11/replacement situation for years (there, I'll say it), and the sooner we can all get (back) on the same page, at least for this one piece, the better. Many open-source communities are run by perfectionists (and I must count myself among the worst of them). While it's a noble goal to create a gem that will stand the test of time, it's disheartening to see proprietary products move faster by making a decision, even a lousy one, and then shipping it and making it work.

imode 7y ago

This is troublesome, and it feels like "progress" for the sake of "progress" rather than actual improvements. The X Window System is time-tested technology, while Wayland, from what I've seen and read, is not. This isn't a good thing to me, especially considering NVIDIA hardware doesn't seem to be well supported. Someone come along and correct me, please.

emersion 7y ago
X11 is a pile of hacks. Have you ever tried to read the source code? When the X11 devs design a new system and stop maintaining X11, it's likely that X11 is not in a good shape. >This isn't a good thing to me, especially considering NVIDIA hardware doesn't seem to be well supported. Someone come along and correct me, please. It's the other way around: NVIDIA doesn't support GBM, the standard for buffer allocation.
- sprash 7y ago
  How about cleaning up the mess. The most "mess" is coming from old graphics hardware drivers, a task that is now managed by the kernel. Besides, the "mess" performs better than Wayland in many use cases thanks to DRI3.
imode 7y ago
Thanks for downvoting, everybody. You aren't supposed to downvote because you disagree, you're supposed to downvote because I'm not contributing to the discussion. This place is an echo chamber that favors cliques and follows its own arbitrary rules while being hostile to others. lobste.rs is so much better.

carapace 7y ago

RIP ( I don't doubt for a minute that someone will pick up the slack, but that makes me wonder, who's gonna pay for it? Would you contribute to e.g. a Kickstarter for X Windows? FWIW, I'm not sure I would, meaning no disrespect I've been hoping to ditch X for something better ever since Don Hopkins opened my eyes to NeWS, &c. ) So there's Wayland. What else? Arcan? https://arcan-fe.com/about/ https://arcan-fe.com/about/ On HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22arcan%22&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22arcan%22&sort=byPopularity&... > Arcan is a powerful development framework for creating virtually anything between user interfaces for specialised embedded applications all the way to full-blown standalone desktop environments. Boot splash screen? no problem. Custom Interface for your Home Automation Project? sure thing. Stream media processing? Of course. > It has been used in a number of both experimental, hobby, academic research and commerical projects and products alike, in areas ranging from VR desktops to industrial computer vision systems for robotic automation. > At its heart lies a robust and portable multimedia engine, with a well-tested and well-documented interface, programmable using Lua. At every step of the way, the underlying development emphasises security, performance and debugability guided by a principle of least surprise in terms of API design.

DonHopkins 7y ago
Thank you, I hadn't heard of it before so I'll check it out! I'm not optimistic about Wayland, since early on they decided not to use an extension language, and that's not something you can have a change of heart about later, and then just nail onto the side. It would be interesting to see how Arcan uses L ua, which is a great language for that kind of stuff. It's a lot smaller and sleeker and better designed than JavaScript. The Arcan developers should check out how Factorio modding works! (But then all work on Arcan would halt when for months while they were addicted to Factorio.) https://wiki.factorio.com/Modding https://wiki.factorio.com/Modding Lua's main problem is that it isn't JavaScript (i.e. in JavaScript's enviably lucky position of ubiquitous dominance). If I had a time machine, I'd go back and try to convince Netscape to use Lua 2.1 instead of inventing JavaScript (released December 4, 1995). And hire the Self guys (Dave Ungar, Randy Smith and the crew who eventually made the Java HotSpot compiler) away from Sun, and Mike Pall (LuaJIT) from wherever he was! https://www.lua.org/versions.html https://www.lua.org/versions.html >Lua 2.1 was released on 07 Feb 1995. Its main new features were extensible semantics via fallbacks and support for object-oriented programming. This version was described in a journal paper. Starting with Lua 2.1, Lua became freely available for all purposes, including commercial uses. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12574290 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12574290 https://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/Charles/A-Conversation-with-Bjarne-Stroustrup-Carl-Hewitt-and-Dave-Ungar https://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/Charles/A-Conversation-with-...

dpacmittal 7y ago

I'll miss x11vnc which is currently the only way on linux (afaik) to have a network connected monitor and between which I can seamlessly move my windows.

DonHopkins 7y ago

Back to the drawing board! Methodology of Window Management F R A Hopgood, D A Duce, E V C Fielding, K Robinson, A S Williams 29 April 1985 This is the Proceedings of the Alvey Workshop at Cosener's House, Abingdon that took place from 29 April 1985 until 1 May 1985. It was input into the planning for the MMI part of the Alvey Programme. The Proceedings were later published by Springer-Verlag in 1986. http://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/inf/literature/books/wm/preface.htm http://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/inf/literature/books/wm/...

logicprog 7y ago

I'm really not very sad to see X go. It was old, creaky and insecure. As advanced and cool as it may have been at one time, and as much as I respect the people who worked on it, it's time for it to go. As for the people complaining about Wayland possibly missing some of X's features, remember that it takes time for something to mature, to accrete features and fixes, and Wayland hasn't had that time yet. If we give it the time and support it could and almost definitely will grow into something even better than X. We can't stay on X forever without incurring even worse results on ourselves than what we'll get when we switch to Wayland. And another thing. For the people who complain about Wayland in the same breath as PulseAudio and SystemD: this tells is much more about you than about these projects. The only thing Wayland has in common with the other two is that it's new, and that you don't like it. It's more modular and more UNIXy and more open than X, arguably.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
> As for the people complaining about Wayland possibly missing some of X's features, remember that it takes time for something to mature, to accrete features and fixes, and Wayland hasn't had that time yet. It has been a decade, precisely how long does it need to catch up? I ask because from what I can tell it is still missing features that were standard in Windows Vista in 2008, when that OS switched to DWM and WDDM.
- logicprog 7y ago
  If you're talking about screen recording and screenshots, fair point, except that that lack is a result of designing for security.
  - temac 7y ago
    Hum, you can as well reach perfect security by keeping your computer powered off.
    - logicprog 7y ago
      Haha! Yeah, that's true.

noobermin 7y ago

I seek to be enlightened, not to flame: what exactly is so wrong with X that it can be retrofit to work better? Wayland is taking a while, which is expected sure, but for now, X works fine although with issues.

robert_foss 7y ago
The design assumptions that went into making X were made before the modern computer or Linux existed. Modern X is a Frankensteinian collection fixes upon fixes and unmaintained code.
- quotemstr 7y ago
  You didn't actually answer the OP's question. There is nothing Wayland does that could not have been done via the X11 extension mechanism. X has already been reinvented several times --- few things use the core protocol nowadays, after all! For example, XRender for text is now universal. The thing that's different about Wayland is that for reasons that nobody ever explains clearly at a technical level, this time, a few influential people created a new and (IMHO, inferior) protocol instead of continuing to use the X extension mechanism. Security? Isolate the X session data to individual client connections. Buffer management? Do it like GLX does. Want server-side decorations for some reason? What's stopping you? Sure, ICCCM isn't trivial, but it exists, and it's flexible.
  - maxharris 7y ago
    Apple evaluated X11 when they were just starting work on Mac OS X. This comment by Mike Paquette (designer and author of Quartz!) explains why it was better to dump X11 and start over: "> they don't even use X at all! What Apple is providing is an Apple-original window system that is graphics model agnostic, as well as a vector drawing system that maps very well to PDF, which is a sort of PostScript without the non-graphical operators. This is packaged under the name 'Quartz' for easy reference by Marketing types. The window system is designed to support both buffered (like an offscreen PixMap) and unbuffered windows, and is graphics model agnostic, working equally well with QuickDraw, OpenGL, the Quartz drawing engine, X11, and third party solutions, and managing window geometry for the Classic, Carbon, and Cocoa environments. The server portion is a hybridization of screen arbiter and compositor models (and if that's all Geek to you, don't worry about it). The Quartz drawing engine supports drawing primitives similar to the graphics primitives that might be found in the DPSClient single-operator primitives library for X and NeXTSTEP. There are no math and flow control primitives, as these can be done more efficiently in the native compiled code. There are no DPS or PS wrappers, as this optimization for server-side graphics is not needed in the Quartz client-side graphics model. The operations provide imaging and path construction and filling operations as well as some interesting other bits that map well into the direction that 2D drawing is headed. (See Longhorn, or the X raster projects.) The drawing engine can output to rasters (like a window!), as well as PS and PDF streams to feed printers. The Mac OS X printing system takes advantage of the capabilities of Quartz to support all sorts of printers, and make the life of printer driver developers much, much easier. Things we'd need to add/extend in X Window software (protocol+server+manager+fonts+...): 1) Extend font server and services to vend outlines and antialiased masks, support more font types, handle font subsetting. 2) Extend drawing primitives to include PS-like path operations. 3) Add dithering and phase controls. 4) Add ColorSync support for drawing and imaging operations, display calibration 5) Add broad alpha channel support and Porter-Duff compositing, both for drawing in a window and for interactions between windows. 6) Add support for general affine transforms of windows 7) Add support for mesh-warps of windows 8) Make sure that OpenGL and special video playback hardware support is integrated, and behaves well with all above changes. 9) We find that we typically stream 200 Mb/sec of commands and textures for interactive OpenGL use, so transport efficiency could be an issue. So, yes, it looks like we can use X for Quartz. All we need do is define extensions for and upgrade the font server, add dithering with phase controls to the X marking engine, add a transparency model to X imaging with Porter-Duff compositing support, make sure GLX gets in, upgrade the window buffering to include transparency, mesh warps, and really good resampling, and maybe augment the transport layer a bit. Ummm... There doesn't appear to be much code left from the original X server in the drawing path or windowing machinery, and it doesn't appear that apps relying on these extensions can work with any other X server. Just what did we gain from this? Oh, yeah. My mom can run an xterm session on her desktop now without downloading the Apple X11 package, a shareware X server or buying a software package. Been there, evaluated that." https://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=75257&cid=6734612 https://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=75257&cid=67...

rspeele 7y ago

I can't say it any better than JWZ did over 15 years ago. This is the result of the Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers model and is why Linux will not approach Windows or OSX in usability. Cannot link to his site: JWZ dot org /doc/cadt.html A complete teardown and rebuild of the whole ecosystem (because X succccckkks) is fun! Making something backwards-compatible, or standardized, or polished that "last 90%" so it works on everybody's environment... is not.

Sebb767 7y ago
https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html <- works for me
- claudiawerner 7y ago
  Well that's because if you click on that link from HN it uses the referrer details provided by your browser to show quite a rude message and picture ;)
  - tambourine_man 7y ago
    Wow, never seen this before. I don’t get the animosity HN sometimes revives. I don’t really care for startup stuff and I just ignore it, but the average level of discussion here is extremely high. One of the best in the web. Compare HN to Twitter or Reddit and it’s night and day, and it has been for years.
    - jessaustin 7y ago
      This particular juvenile humor says more about JWZ than about HN. Just look at the example ITT. The "CADT" metaphor doesn't have much to do with the developers either of X or of Wayland.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
_emacsomancer_ 7y ago

hiccuphippo 7y ago

So is there a timeline for when the RHEL8 lifecycle will end?

slrz 7y ago
The normal support period for a RHEL release is 10 years. RHEL8 came out earlier this year.

smartmic 7y ago

Having the Lindy effect [1] in mind, I would not be too pessimistic about an early decay of this proven (albeit imperfect) technology. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect

rleigh 7y ago

Maybe the death watch for the traditional Linux desktop has also started... Linux distributions have had a decade long slide in their usability and polish. Much of this has been due to an abandonment of its historical UNIX roots in favour of half-baked "modern" replacements. Being a UNIX replacement with a full X11 server and all the rest was what made it compelling and practical in the first place. However, it's coming to the point where it's simply getting unusable. And I say this after using Linux on the desktop as my primary user and development environment for over 22 years at this point. If I want actual UNIX, I can run FreeBSD in a virtual machine, or even on the bare metal. Otherwise, I might as well resign myself to fate and use Windows with WSL or VMs for everything else. If I'm going to be forced to use something I dislike, it might as well be something that properly supports all my hardware and I can be productive with despite its annoyances.

zbuf 7y ago
I come from an environment where we have a reasonable number of Linux workstations; approaching 2000 in the company I work for, and more in the wider field. > Being a UNIX replacement with a full X11 server and all the rest was what made it compelling and practical in the first place. Yes, here as well. We have big apps, small apps, legacy apps, remote apps, all doing real work. For the enthusiast user base, who mainly live within the distribution's ecosystem, this sort of churn in the platform is exciting and interesting, or feels like progress. The platform is the end result. For us, the platform is just that -- a platform on which sits a lot of vendor applications and custom tooling assembled over decades with its idiosyncrasies carefully accommodated. This churn isn't good. Anything short of 100% compatibility is going to prompt a risky re-evaluation of what's out there on the market -- risky because Windows is in the strongest position, not Linux. Linux is already in a weakened position than it once was as a workstation OS. My colleagues will be enticed by a Windows platform which has an emerging Linux compatibility; and a tried-and-tested build of most of the vendor-driven GUI applications and GPU drivers, too.
amyjess 7y ago
> Otherwise, I might as well resign myself to fate and use Windows with WSL or VMs for everything else. If I'm going to be forced to use something I dislike, it might as well be something that properly supports all my hardware and I can be productive with despite its annoyances. I was going to make my own top-level comment, but you've said everything I wanted to say. The day X dies is the day I switch back to Windows. I can simply use WSL and KDE Applications to get something very close to the parts of Linux I like.

kazinator 7y ago

How many of these Xorg developers are the original people who made X11R3 in the mid 1980's? Somehow X didn't die without those people.

ibotty 7y ago
Keith Packard is the only one AFAIK.

djsumdog 7y ago

So what are the BSDs planning on doing? Do OpenBSD/FreeBSD just plan on maintaining their own forks of Xorg, or are there plans to try and port Wayland to these operating systems as well?

beezle 7y ago
FreeBSD user too, I'd like to know that as well. Not going to lay blame on RedHat for doing what is in their own best interest, but do find it troubling that the *nix world has had a major piece of software made redundant on the decision of one company/maintainer. As an end user my perspective, perhaps incorrect, is that since the late 90s development of application and system software has become increasingly siloed with less diverse views and the involvement of fewer stake holders. I suppose that would happen based on math alone (more linux end users with no interest beyond a working web browser) but I worry where that path might lead.

pmoriarty 7y ago

"Why I'm not going to switch to Wayland yet"[1] argues that: "for simple things using the compositor's screen shot tool is fine. But what if I don't like the screenshot tool for my compositor of choice? My experience with the GNOME screenshot tool (granted this was pre-wayland) was that it wasn't as good as, say, shutter, which has a lot of options, let's you easily crop and edit the screenshot from inside the screenshot tool etc. And then swaygrab doesn't even (currently) have an option to capture a rectangular region." There are some other things this article mentions which are important to me, like Wayland's lack of color picker tools and xdotool functionality. Wayland seems just way too immature for me to use for now. X works great, does everything I want, and I see no compelling reason to switch. [1] - https://old.reddit.com/r/wayland/comments/85q78y/why_im_not_going_to_switch_to_wayland_yet/ https://old.reddit.com/r/wayland/comments/85q78y/why_im_not_...

majewsky 7y ago
The wlroots developers are working on protocol extensions to make stuff like screen grabbing work consistently across WMs: https://github.com/swaywm/wlr-protocols https://github.com/swaywm/wlr-protocols

ht85 7y ago

Slightly off-topic, but is anyone here using Wayland with a touchpad? The last time I tried libinput, the behavior was horrendous compared to a synaptics. 2 finger scrolling had a ~2mm threshold before it activated and wouldn't compensate for the lost distance once the scroll started, making it feel very unnatural. I couldn't find an option to enable true palm detection either. There was an option to disable the touchpad for a fixed time every time the keyboard was used, which is abysmal compared to how it works normally (ignoring taps and drags if they start too close to an edge). It's hard to believe that this is the current state of things, but I did search for a way to set it up with no success. Is there a way to get those to work?

ZeroCool2u 7y ago
I've been using Ubuntu with Gnome on Wayland for the past year or so on my Dell XPS 13. I actually ended up switching to Wayland, because of how much better the touchpad worked with it. To be fair though, Dell has an entire team dedicated to supporting the XPS 13 Developer Edition, so the drivers are highly curated compared to most devices.
- ht85 7y ago
  My experience was on an XPS 9570, not sure if there's a large gap in driver / support. Out of the box synaptics was pretty bad, but after tuning the palm detection zone size and a couple timings (long press, etc) it feels amazing. When I don't have to test convoluted UIs, I can go days without plugging the mouse. Don't you have the small "lag" when two fingers scrolling?
  - ZeroCool2u 7y ago
    I've been super happy with the touch pads performance out of the box, I literally haven't modified any settings related to it. Are you referring to this bug[1] in Chromium? I think these are growing pains associated with transitioning to Wayland, but this really doesn't bother me too much. I will say that the scrolling is otherwise very smooth and almost perfectly everywhere else in the UX. [1]https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=712737 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=712737

sly010 7y ago

You mean the nights watch

shmerl 7y ago

I'm all for switching to Wayland session, but it has a long way to go to become usable. The biggest issues for me: * KWin still has major bugs like flickering windows due to broken subsurfaces clipping. * No Wayland compositors support adaptive sync yet and according to KWin developers it will take "several years to arrive". * No support for drawing tablets (Wacom). So all this "X11 is dead" is way premature, as much as I want Wayland to take its place.

mpenick 7y ago

It’s still not possible to remap mouse buttons for most applications under Wayland and libinput is allergic to adding features.

shiftoutbox 7y ago

Given that ibm owns redhat and ibm aix depends on x11 I think the redhat gnome idiots are in for a rude “welcome to working at ibm” talk .

mindcrime 7y ago

I'm totally not impressed with the so-called "successor" to X... Wayland. It might be unrelated, but I just upgraded to F30 and I'm seeing all sorts of weird graphics / screen drawing related bugs using Wayland. And while it looks like somebody is finally making some meaningful headway on a remoting story for Wayland, it's still not truly on par with X in this regard. So sure, kill X... but we should probably have a replacement that actually works, first.

major505 7y ago

I would die a happy man, if I never had to open an xorg.config again.

asveikau 7y ago
Recent releases encourage you to remove xorg.conf altogether and let it figure out the config itself. Works pretty well from what I have seen.
- kasabali 7y ago
  I must add ”recent” here means more than 10 years. Last release that required an xorg.conf file was released in 2006 or 2007?
  - major505 7y ago
    Id din't know that Sometime ago I was trying to make an old nvidia video card work with my pc in With Fedora. One of the instructions was to open the xorg. change the drive to replace the noveau drive, or something like that. I think it wasant't even 2 years ago. Then I just installed ubuntu and isntalled with apt-get install nvidia-wathever-version. And worked like a charm for me.
    - kasabali 7y ago
      When you need to configuration, best practice is to put only the necessary configuration in a configuration snippet inside /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/ without creating a full xorg.conf file.

rocky1138 7y ago

Can we record the screen or take screenshots yet? If not, Wayland is DOA.

ClashTheBunny 7y ago
https://github.com/emersion/grim https://github.com/emersion/grim
- nsajko 7y ago
  I think that depends on a protocol that only Sway (the compositor) implements.

nsajko 7y ago

One thing that a great majority of commenters here seem to be missing is that Wayland's issues that make it unsuitable to replace X Windows will not just be ironed out in a couple of years (at least not in a way that would be an improvement over X), because it is flawed by design. The thing is, Wayland developers do not want you to take screenshots or automate input events (injection and interception). Those are both "power-user" and "accessibility" features. So respectively those who like to use the Unix (or other OS) programming environment to its full potential (hackers?), and the blind/visually impaired will have a hard time if Wayland gets forced on them. It is possible to solve those problems with effort on a per-compositor basis (meaning less choice for users and more redundant programming effort - programs that interact with GUIs will need to have separate code for each compositor!), or with protocol extensions - that, of course, would not be universally accepted. For example, I think no compositor currently give a Wayland user the option to mess with input events (key presses, etc.). This means no hot-keys! Quoting Red Hat: "Furthermore, there isn’t a standard API for getting screen shots from Wayland. It’s dependent on what compositor (window manager/shell) the user is running, and if they implemented a proprietary API to do so." An interesting Reddit discussion: "It has been almost a decade, why does Wayland not have a protocol definition for screenshots?" - answer - "Because security, dude! Wayland is designed with the thought that users download random applications from the interwebz which are not trustworthy and run them. Wayland actually makes a lot of sense if you don't think of Linux desktop distributions and desktop systems, but of smartphones. But for some reason we absolutely need this technology on the desktop, like we had not enough pain and lose ends over here without it." [7] See [1] [2]. And my previous comments on the same topic: [3] [4]. Another thing wrong with Wayland is that forced compositing means noticeably (in interactive applications) more latency. Small nitpick regarding the blog post: Chromium depends on GTK3. [1] https://wiki.gnome.org/Accessibility/Wayland https://wiki.gnome.org/Accessibility/Wayland [2] https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Accessibility/Wayland/ https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Accessibility/Wayland/ [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20310200 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20310200 [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20308011 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20308011 [7] https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/7lb5l7/new_screenshot_alternative_for_wayland/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/7lb5l7/new_screensho...

rambojazz 7y ago

moocowtruck 7y ago

that sucks for me I guess, or for me using linux as desktop since I have nvidia ah well

souterrain 7y ago

RHEL 8.8 will be released in 2023Q4, so I suspect RedHat will continue to maintain the code at least until then.

zzo38computer 7y ago

I don't really like Wayland, and I think X is better. There are some problems with X, and I made some ideas how to fix it, including getting rid of a lot of the extensions of the X protocol, but making now XBell is like XkbBell instead, moving many things out of the protocol, and also some other stuff.