4 ms·

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 e

by 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.

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.