4 ms·

> The same goes for Wayland, by the way Wayland happened mainly because they could get to 90% of Xorg functionality easily and ignored the fact that the last 1

> The same goes for Wayland, by the way Wayland happened mainly because they could get to 90% of Xorg functionality easily and ignored the fact that the last 10% would take over a decade to achieve parity on.

quotemstr 6y ago
> Wayland happened mainly because they could get to 90% of Xorg functionality easily We're at 12 years of Wayland and counting and the thing still isn't really usable outside a very narrow use-case. I still run X11 myself and will for a long time. As far as I'm concerned, Wayland has set free software windowing back by a decade. After all this time, Wayland still isn't at parity with X11 even for use cases that Wayland intends to support --- and some things that X11 can do are non-goals for Wayland and will never be supported. What exactly is so compelling in Wayland that it was worth putting progress on hold since 2008? Yeah, yeah, I get that Wayland has a nice buffer-based composition system. So what? Whatever Wayland does, it could have done over an X11 extension.
- fmntf 6y ago
  While I totally agree with you in a desktop-like scenario, please note that X is totally inadequate and bloated for other domains (e.g. automotive).
  - quotemstr 6y ago
    Why? X originally ran on machines far less powerful than even the shittiest automotive head units around today.
    - stonogo 6y ago
      Because the problem isn't with X, it's that all the toolkits people want to use were written basically to use X as a glorified framebuffer. Wayland is a reorienting of the underlying stack to accomodate this. You could absolutely make an automotive stack with something like X and Motif, but nobody in the industry really wants to use those tools.
      - asveikau 6y ago
        Nokia n900 had a touch screen smartphone UI based on gtk with X, with a 600mhz arm core and 256mb ram. I had one. It was pretty good.
        owl57 6y ago
        I turned my N810 on recently and played a bit, so I can compare it directly to modern devices. "Pretty good" is a big understatement.
  - rleigh 6y ago
    As the other poster mentioned, X11 used to run on really old resource-constrained systems. Nothing about it precludes using it for embedded automotive applications. A tiny MCU could manage it. The MCUs used for current automotive stuff are powerful enough to run Linux with Vulkan for crying out loud. Though I think for many of these embedded applications both X11 and Wayland are overkill when EGL direct works just fine. A full windowing system is massive overkill.
  - michaelmrose 6y ago
    Making life easier for Ford sounds like a low priority goal.
  - metroholografix 6y ago
    Back in the day, I used to run XFree86 on a Pentium 150 with 64MB of RAM and an S3 Virge graphics card. Don't tell me that X is bloated.
    - fulafel 6y ago
      Before that, 8 MB was iffy, 16 MB good in the early Linux days.
    - hedora 6y ago
      I ran it on a 386/25MHz, 8MB of RAM. It was much faster than Windows on the same machine. Enlightenment was fast on that machine. The desktop switcher in the panel had old-school desk lamps pointing at the active desktop. I miss that theme, and I can’t find any screenshots.
  - edsac_xyzw 6y ago
    Most embedded graphical Linux applications don't use X (X Windows System), instead they use framebuffer directly or any library such as Qt Widgets or QtQuick/Qml that draws on top of the framebuffer device file. So, there is no need for developing a new Window system that can work on both Desktop or embedded systems.
- war1025 6y ago
  I also still use Xorg and can't really think of a scenario where I'd switch.
- sjy 6y ago
  Wayland was the default in Ubuntu 17 and is still the default in Fedora. I like it because dealing with multiple displays and tearing under X annoys me more than dealing with screen capture under Wayland. “Not really usable outside a very narrow use-case” overstates the problem.
- AlexMax 6y ago
  > We're at 12 years of Wayland and counting and the thing still isn't really usable outside a very narrow use-case. Must be a wide narrow you're talking about. I've been using it as my default session across two different distros and the only problem I can recall having was strange mouse-grabbing behavior in Firefox, and I don't even think that was Wayland's fault.

quotemstr 6y ago

> Wayland happened mainly because they could get to 90% of Xorg functionality easily We're at 12 years of Wayland and counting and the thing still isn't really usable outside a very narrow use-case. I still run X11 myself and will for a long time. As far as I'm concerned, Wayland has set free software windowing back by a decade. After all this time, Wayland still isn't at parity with X11 even for use cases that Wayland intends to support --- and some things that X11 can do are non-goals for Wayland and will never be supported. What exactly is so compelling in Wayland that it was worth putting progress on hold since 2008? Yeah, yeah, I get that Wayland has a nice buffer-based composition system. So what? Whatever Wayland does, it could have done over an X11 extension.

fmntf 6y ago
While I totally agree with you in a desktop-like scenario, please note that X is totally inadequate and bloated for other domains (e.g. automotive).
- quotemstr 6y ago
  Why? X originally ran on machines far less powerful than even the shittiest automotive head units around today.
  - stonogo 6y ago
    Because the problem isn't with X, it's that all the toolkits people want to use were written basically to use X as a glorified framebuffer. Wayland is a reorienting of the underlying stack to accomodate this. You could absolutely make an automotive stack with something like X and Motif, but nobody in the industry really wants to use those tools.
    - asveikau 6y ago
      Nokia n900 had a touch screen smartphone UI based on gtk with X, with a 600mhz arm core and 256mb ram. I had one. It was pretty good.
      - owl57 6y ago
        I turned my N810 on recently and played a bit, so I can compare it directly to modern devices. "Pretty good" is a big understatement.
- rleigh 6y ago
  As the other poster mentioned, X11 used to run on really old resource-constrained systems. Nothing about it precludes using it for embedded automotive applications. A tiny MCU could manage it. The MCUs used for current automotive stuff are powerful enough to run Linux with Vulkan for crying out loud. Though I think for many of these embedded applications both X11 and Wayland are overkill when EGL direct works just fine. A full windowing system is massive overkill.
- michaelmrose 6y ago
  Making life easier for Ford sounds like a low priority goal.
- metroholografix 6y ago
  Back in the day, I used to run XFree86 on a Pentium 150 with 64MB of RAM and an S3 Virge graphics card. Don't tell me that X is bloated.
  - fulafel 6y ago
    Before that, 8 MB was iffy, 16 MB good in the early Linux days.
  - hedora 6y ago
    I ran it on a 386/25MHz, 8MB of RAM. It was much faster than Windows on the same machine. Enlightenment was fast on that machine. The desktop switcher in the panel had old-school desk lamps pointing at the active desktop. I miss that theme, and I can’t find any screenshots.
- edsac_xyzw 6y ago
  Most embedded graphical Linux applications don't use X (X Windows System), instead they use framebuffer directly or any library such as Qt Widgets or QtQuick/Qml that draws on top of the framebuffer device file. So, there is no need for developing a new Window system that can work on both Desktop or embedded systems.
war1025 6y ago
I also still use Xorg and can't really think of a scenario where I'd switch.
sjy 6y ago
Wayland was the default in Ubuntu 17 and is still the default in Fedora. I like it because dealing with multiple displays and tearing under X annoys me more than dealing with screen capture under Wayland. “Not really usable outside a very narrow use-case” overstates the problem.
AlexMax 6y ago
> We're at 12 years of Wayland and counting and the thing still isn't really usable outside a very narrow use-case. Must be a wide narrow you're talking about. I've been using it as my default session across two different distros and the only problem I can recall having was strange mouse-grabbing behavior in Firefox, and I don't even think that was Wayland's fault.