34 ms·

The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?

• baybal2 6y ago
  Better to say both X11, and Wayland are now two pieces of abandonware.
  • LockAndLol 6y ago
    > This should hardly be surprising but a prominent Intel open-source developer has conceded that the X.Org Server is pretty much "abandonware" with Wayland being the future. Why do you say Wayland is abandonware? The last activity in the repo is from a week ago https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland
    • kbumsik 6y ago
      > The last activity in the repo is from a week ago Actually most of repos you linked have the last activity of months ago. It's pretty worrying though.
      • boudin 6y ago
        Wayland is just a protocol. Look at the work on actual compositors, like mutter and wlroots to see some activity https://github.com/GNOME/mutter https://github.com/GNOME/mutter https://github.com/swaywm/wlroots https://github.com/swaywm/wlroots
  • einpoklum 6y ago
    So what do my Linux machines run desktop sessions on?
    • agumonkey 6y ago
      webvnc -- whatwg
    • speedgoose 6y ago
      Windows?
  • Rochus 6y ago
    What's the alternative then?
    • corty 6y ago
      Lack of an alternative does not make Wayland any better unfortunately.
  • corty 6y ago
    I fear you are right. While there might be commits in the Wayland repos, featurewise progress has ceased. Waylands broken architecture has made progress hard to impossible. Porting of popular window managers is extremely slow since there is just no thought given to X compatibility. Input handling by each application on its own is insane and broken. Feature-consistency across compositors on things like screenshots is a pipe-dream. A promised easy ssh -X replacement doesn't work right after a decade. Waylands broken architecture makes progress slow through unnecessary duplication, incompatibility and the lack of a smooth migration for many software packages (usually it's rewrite-time). Wayland should be abandoned and the design redone.
    • QuesnayJr 6y ago
      In what way is Wayland's architecture broken? Is there a critique floating around I could look at?
      • corty 6y ago
        The design overview slides are their own critique: Wayland does almost nothing besides render buffer handling. Input? Applications job. Window decorations? Compositors job. Application talking to the Compositor? Somebody elses job. Clipboard? Maybe compositor or toolkit. Screenshots and remoting? Somebody elses job, but only after Wayland has bored the appropriate holes in its security model. This all leads to a ton of incompatibilities between compositors, toolkits and applications. And beyond Gnome, the full "featureset" is still not implemented, where "featureset" is barely adequate as an X11 replacement. But the buffer handling is great, no more flickering...
        • nullc 6y ago
          > But the buffer handling is great, ... so long as you don't care about latency and don't mind a $3000 top of the line 64 core desktop feeling slightly slower than a machine from 20 years ago. :(
          • heeen2 6y ago
  • pjmlp 6y ago
    ChromeOS runs on Wayland, and it is used by WSL as well.
    • tbr1 6y ago
      > ChromeOS runs on Wayland Kind of. The Chrome browser itself doesn't run on Wayland, it runs on a custom compositor (I believe Aura?). Sommelier[1] is a Wayland compositor used for Linux apps on CrOS (Crostini), but Chrome doesn't use it. There is an ongoing effort (Lacros) to make the Chrome browser itself run under Wayland on CrOS, but it's not public outside of development builds (and not yet on par with the "native" version). [1]: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/platform2/+/HEAD/vm_tools/sommelier/README.md https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/platform2/+/HEA...
  • Avamander 6y ago
    I really hate to say it, but Canonical was and still is correct with starting Mir.
    • lmedinas 6y ago
      the problem was that the "whole" open source community sponsored by RedHat, Intel etc... bashed the project to oblivion and left Canonical as the only contributor and put all the efforts on Wayland. This is just one of the reasons why Linux never reaches highs as a Desktop OS.
    • acgkmopvvgvmgv 6y ago
      Canonical announced Mir out of nowhere in an attempt to gain control just like they are trying now with Snap. After the announcement of Mir their developers went to IRC and made abundantly clear they had no idea how Wayland works and that Mir was useless. Where is Mir now? Using Wayland. People who were in the fence about supporting Wayland were now even more convinced they should ignore it. That's one of the reasons a decade later you still have this much FUD.
      • Avamander 6y ago
        > Where is Mir now? Using Wayland. It could have not gone that way. Now we've got two equally bad alternatives out there. > That's one of the reasons a decade later you still have this much FUD. I don't think you know what FUD means.
        • acgkmopvvgvmgv 6y ago
          Nice ignore the part where they realized Mir was useless. They even went on an edit spree in their wiki page. If Mir was so good and superior they would just keep developing it. Isn't that obvious? If the company who already spent all this dev time aka money on Mir doesn't believe in it, why would anybody else? They were even eating their own dog food and had some major industry pull at their disposal. The answer is they fucked it up.
• stevefan1999 6y ago
  Yes, I agree. X11 is a historic artifact that is supposed to be honored in the museum now. The C/S architecture of X11 hits the spot when terminals and thin client are the norm, that means 20-30 years ago, but today, we all have dedicated graphics display devices (GPU, monitors) even in our pocket smartphone, and the way X11 works is holding Linux desktop scene back. But without X11 there you can't show how much improvement Wayland has. We shall not forget X11.
  • corty 6y ago
    Where is that supposed Wayland progress after a decade? Input is broken and inconsistent, screenshots don't work, remoting is broken, every WM has to be rewritten or abandoned, trivialities like c&p handling are not yet there. Wayland is still in the early phase of catching up to X11, for any progress it will take another decade or maybe even a Wayland replacement. We should face it, Wayland is a dead end.
    • nsajko 6y ago
      Yeah, but Wayland won't ever be able to "catch up to X11", because it's broken by design. (See my next comment.)
      • corty 6y ago
        Waylands design is even more broken and leads to common functionality being duplicated and broken all over the place. Each app has to do input handling on its own? Comeon, a 5yearold could tell you that that is a huge design flaw. There are equally problematic design flaws in X11, just less of them and in different areas. Where Wayland tries to get rendering right and botches all the rest, X11 is weird for rendering, but at least has kind-of-ok answers for remoting, input, clipboard, screenshots, etc.
        • diegocg 6y ago
          There is no reason why window managers can't share functionality via libraries. In fact, some do (wlroots). X11 and its separation of graphic server and window manager encouraged code reuse by placing it in the server, but with Wayland that separation (and the extra context switches) are gone so there is less incentive to share code.
• est31 6y ago
  Today I've updated to the newest Kubuntu release 20.10 and considered switching to Wayland, but then abandoned the idea when I found out that middle click copy paste is only implemented in Plasma 5.20, and I only have Plasma 5.19. I've seen they've fixed the screenshot program though (which I remember to have been an issue on older versions). I'm looking forward to 21.04 for my next attempt to switch, maybe by then Firefox's native wayland support will have progressed as well. After all what's the point of Wayland when most of your software uses xwayland :).
  • gbil 6y ago
    Funnily enough earlier today I checked the status of Wayland on my setup- Arch - with KDE and my main issue is still mouse gestures. Currently using easystroke, which is itself an abandonware, but until I find something that works under Wayland I can't change yet nomatter the quality of DEs etc.
    • ubercow13 6y ago
      Yes and something akin to easystroke would have to be implemented in each compositor under Wayland. You are thus dependent on the window manager you want to use to implement it. I asked the maintainer of the window manager I would want to use whether they would accept a PR for something like that and they said no, they would not. So, I would have to maintain a fork of my window manager and compositor to keep using something like easystroke under Wayland, instead of using a finished tool that hasn't needed any significant maintenance in 7 years. All in the name of ‘security’.
  • boudin 6y ago
    Firefox native support is pretty much here already (I've been using it for quite a time now and it works really well). The only missing piece that is not merged yet is screen sharing unfortunately. It's available on Fedora's Firefox build. All GTK3 apps runs well on Wayland too. Qt apps runs well but it doesn't feel as polished (I mainly have issues when I use 2 screen with different scaling). The last big things are chromium and electron. Once those have ozone merged and enabled in stable, it's gonna be a massive step forward. Those are the last apps I can't run natively on wayland. Ozone is in the beta branches now so, hopefully, it will happen next year. After, it's not that much of a big deal to run those on xwayland as long there's no scaling. As soon as you're on a hidpi screen or just use scaling, it's when it becomes blurry and is quite annoying. I personally still prefer wayland over x because the experience is just better. No flickering, it's smooth and feels more snappy.
• nlayers 6y ago
  X.org works fine, Wayland seems to be another RedHat thing. I must admit I haven't tried it, but given NetworkManager, systemd and other pearls from RedHat I'm not optimistic.
  • flavor8 6y ago
    What's your problem with NetworkManager? It's generally good, and certainly much better than what came before.
    • willtim 6y ago
      This isn't true. It was never as good as Intel's Connman, which was designed to be modular from the start. NetworkManager started out as a UI app and then was evolved into what it is now. It's still not as fast as connecting to WiFi as Connman. I guess it was adopted instead of Connman because RedHat.
      • ahartmetz 6y ago
        Maybe Intel was not cooperative about Connman. Trying to contribute a patch to Connman was the worst patch contribution experience I've ever had. On the official IRC channel, over several days and times of day, there were only people who could tell me about the developers, but the developers were not there. The bug tracker required writing an e-mail to someone at Intel to open an account. I don't remember details about the mailing list, but if I did write to it I was ignored as well. In the end the patch never went in, I had enough. And yes, the patch made sense. Years later I later saw one that seemed to fix my problem in a similar way. Connman is better at least insofar that it is less code than NetworkManager and that it connects to a Wifi network in under a second instead of several seconds. But I believe it can also do less, for example regarding VPNs and such.
      • akvadrako 6y ago
        NetworkManager can work with iwd, which will give you the quickest available way of connecting to WiFi.
      • 6y ago
• jojobas 6y ago
  X.org is not abandonware, it is actively supported. The fact that it's not updated with Awesome New Features every month, well, neither is Bash or Postfix. Some things should just work.
  • boudin 6y ago
    Not it is not, that's the whole point of the article. There's been no release for the past 2 years, even if there's bug fixes and updates waiting to be released. There's no release planned. If another company steps in an decide to take over support from Redhat, it can come back to life though.
    • jojobas 6y ago
      Debian's last release is from March this year, presumably from the current tree. Do officially declared releases really matter all that much?
      • boudin 6y ago
        Yes, it's quite important, the fact that there's no official release means that the project is stalled. It doesn't prevent to create custom builds by applying patches on top of the last release but that will only work for small bug fixes, customization and security fix. Bigger pieces of work will never be tackled this way, such as a good handling of hidpi screens, fixing security flaws such as being able to grab the output of any graphical application and read all inputs.
    • tpoacher 6y ago
      Abandonware means "not actively supported" / "no people involved in the project anymore". It does not mean "the maintainers do not adhere to a regular version-bumpy release format that I approve of".
    • corty 6y ago
      The major X11 implementations always had phases of stalling development and disagreement. The last big phase lead to X.org taking over. Maybe this new big stall is the end, maybe it is just a signal for another change of direction. But there have been doom-and-gloom announcements about X11 before, yet we are still stuck with it.
• ceronman 6y ago
  I have been using Fedora with Wayland daily for over 7 months now and I it works pretty well. I see that there are a lot of complains about Wayland here on HN. About input, screenshots and other stuff. But I have not experienced any of that. Input works perfectly and I have no problem with screenshots or screencasts. Maybe it's that I have well supported hardware (Thinkpad X1C7) or is it something that I'm missing?
  • p_l 6y ago
    It depends on your desktop environment and the applications, because the only compatible parts of Wayland are the dumbest "draw a rectangular window" and simplest input support (assuming your "WM" implemented the input right). Essentially, what could depend on shared standards and implementations in X11, can't do so in Wayland, and there are two major forks when it comes to protocol extensions, as well as major fork between GNOME and everyone else on topic of Server-Side decorations.
    • kochthesecond 6y ago
      I have to say the story on server side decorations is nasty and disappointing from the GNOME devs.
      • p_l 6y ago
        It's evolution of the stance that started in early GNOME 2.x time, and crystallised with GNOME 3. Similar to how GNOME 3.8 was used to push systemd one everyone, similar to how they tried to push their own idea about input methods on everyone (since I don't use IBus, I don't know if they finally succeeded - fortunately UIM and XIM still work). "We know better" could be their motto.
        • symlinkk 6y ago
          And yet, they have built the most popular desktop environment for Linux. To me, GNOME (on Fedora) feels more polished and visually consistent than Windows 10, which is impressive considering the massive imbalance of resources between those two projects. Would that have been possible if they listened to the zealots online who complain if they don’t support every possible configuration under the sun? I don’t think so.
• verroq 6y ago
  Someone explain why the push to wayland when there is no discernable performance increase [0] and lots of broken applications. [0] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GNOME-Xorg-Wayland-AMD-Renoir https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GNOME-Xo...
  • roenxi 6y ago
    Most of X.Org is horrible and the entire system is unmaintainable. It is hard to even get maintenance releases for it released, as the article alludes to. Development hasn't stalled because people think X is good. Development has stalled because the fundamental design is so misaligned from the modern graphics stack that improvements are not worth attempting.
    • p_l 6y ago
      The thing is, X.Org server is not X11 the protocol. X11 could be easily implemented on new driver framework supporting new graphic stack. Instead we got a piece of sh*t that is fitting for a custom embedded device or some closed environment, but not an X11 replacement.
      • roenxi 6y ago
        Nobody in particular wants to use the X11 protocol. It is complicated and supports a bunch of weird functionality that is rather niche. The trend seems to be to use OpenGL and call that done. I haven't seen many serious complaints that Wayland doesn't support the X11 protocol since people can run an X server directly using XWayland.
        • p_l 6y ago
          As I mentioned elsewhere, XWayland isn't actually compatible if you want to support modern applications, for example ones that might expect a systray. ICCM is, iirc, broken (I haven't spent time checking after finding out some apps critical to me didn't work at all). X11 could be updated a lot. But some of the "weird functionality" is stuff that is slowly becoming available for normal people that was thrown out with the bathwater by GTK3, like ability to use more than 8bit per colour channel.
• arendtio 6y ago
  If Wayland would work out the box, I would love to switch. Last time I checked (a few months ago), it didn't work too well for me and after a week or so I returned to my working X.org setup.
• trashburger 6y ago
  I think the solution is not Wayland but an X12, that is, a protocol that solves the problems of the aging X11 protocol while also not completely breaking compatibility and requiring the use of a separate Xorg server within Wayland. I wish people had gone that way instead of fully dismissing Xorg.
  • AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
    I disagree and think a clean break was the way to go. X had acquired a whole lot of legacy baggage and compatibility with that should be provided by a separate piece of code. Wayland should have been a completely new thing built with the lessons learned from X but vastly simplified for how modern display systems are actually used. Unfortunately it was built with no intent to handle many of the common use cases X already handled just fine, leaving that up to third parties to develop their own ways handling it, leading to some fragmentation (Linux really needed more fragmentation!) and very slow adoption.
    • Avamander 6y ago
      I love how people say that an unified method of taking screenshots, screen streaming, screen recording and performance in general is legacy baggage.
      • 2ion 6y ago
        The big mistake with W was leaving so much of function specification to the implementor. W was a spec, but totally incomplete for what was needed to build a usable power user desktop. The Linux DE landscape was already fractured to the degree of inefficiency for such a small user base, and with W this fracture actually deepened due to the Great Unsharing of implementation details. Nothing global. Everything local, from decorations to whatnot. Now, besides competing implementations of an entire display server stack, you have the huge communications & politics overhead between the camps that is required to agree on such simple "protocols" like "inhibit screensaver start" (the "idle-inhibit wars") --- not a good use of resources. I think the future of X11 will be that if a vendor --- likely Nvidia --- sees any point in it down the road, they'll fork Xorg and provide, complete with their own driver bundle, the display server. For now, no vendor of drivers like Nvidia is likely to be concerned about X11 stabilizing because that's less toil for them to keep their drivers stable on Linux. They are busy enough with keeping up with the Linux kernel breaking their stuff every release <--- not a great advertisement for vendors to even support Linux; looked the same with X11 to me during the 2008-2015 period. Changing X11 was not economical to support without a great justification. Some software is finished --- maybe it's time to call X11 finished.
• pjmlp 6y ago
  Another proof that open source is only half of it, it doesn't matter if the code is available when there isn't anyone around to actually do something with it.
  • sergeykish 6y ago
    Open source gives you freedom to fix it, to share fix, to hire to fix. I see it as another proof that people who depend on the infrastructure do not want to contribute. They would better whine and critique.
    • pjmlp 6y ago
      A freedom that a large majority ignores, because they only see it as free beer.
      • sergeykish 6y ago
        I've submitted Daniel Stone "The real story behind Wayland and X (2013)", checked past submissions, there is yours 6 years ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24888454 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24888454
• znpy 6y ago
  I am not necessarily against Wayland or new things in general. But it bothers me when no clear upgrade path is defined ("drop your stuff" is not acceptable) and a half-hassed incomplete solution is proposed instead, and backwards compatibility is pretty much disregarded. For what concerns my personal computing, I'll stay on Xorg until XFCE supports Wayland. Then I'll update.
  • hobby-coder-guy 6y ago
    Who are you expecting to provide this for you?
    • cpach 6y ago
      Let me fill in with my perspective as a Mac user: I expect the vendor (i.e Apple) to supply a decent desktop environment. The did a quite good job at it. I didn’t need to pay extra, it was included in the sale of the computer.
      • freehunter 6y ago
        But X.org isn’t a hardware vendor. It’s not owned by any hardware vendor. It’s not even owned by an OS vendor, or by an OS at all. Apple is a multi-trillion dollar company. Microsoft and Google are close behind. Of course they can give away their desktop environment away for free. System76 (et al) can’t compete with that. X.org can’t compete with that. I mean, this is exactly the reason I use Mac, because it ships with a good DE out of the box supported by a trillion dollar vendor. But that doesn’t help people who prefer Linux.
        • danaris 6y ago
          It's worth noting that when Apple first developed the (early versions of the) current desktop environment, they were not just not a trillion-dollar company, they were still considered to be "doomed" and on their way out by a large percentage of those who paid any attention to them.
    • 6y ago
• tpoacher 6y ago
  '[...] but a prominent Intel open-source developer has conceded that the X.Org Server is pretty much "abandonware" with Wayland being the future.' So? A "prominent US politician" recently conceded that global warming is a hoax by the Chinese, with coal being the future. Should I be doubling over myself to dismantle my solar panels? Very weasel-wordy article if you ask me. X11 is fine.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • monoclechris 6y ago
    Are you ok?
  • aktuel 6y ago
    It's fine if you're stuck in time. No more releases, no changes, no fixes. It's great if you seek stability and don't want to upgrade anything for the rest of your life.
    • sildur 6y ago
      That sounds like paradise. Where do I have to sign? I’m tired of crapware breaking on every “upgrade”.
      • nix23 6y ago
        OS: OpenBSD Phone: Nokia8110 Watch: Vostok or Raketa
        • tupputuppu 6y ago
          That's not correct - OpenBSD is being actively maintained. Although they're using a lot of old, stable and proven software, they're also doing security and bug fixes and even creating new functionality.
          • 6y ago
• kriive 6y ago
  I have been using sway on Fedora for a year. It's been really good so. It's a smaller niche than X.org's, but I get to do everything I need. HiDPI support is just right, just throw output eDP1-1 scale 2 in the config and you're set. Clipboard works perfectly splendid, screen-sharing works (not as perfectly splendid as clipboard does), input works, chromium/electron is getting support for native wayland. Qt and GTK Wayland support's quite good. I have had no problems whatsoever and I invite you to try it. I have no hard-proof evidence or numbers to support my opinion, just try it.
  • arpa 6y ago
    Just out of curiosity, how does screenshare work for you? I've been trying setting it up for work (slack/teams), but to this day it just doesn't work. Using debian sid, so pretty up-to date packages tbh. I just start new xorg session for screenshare, which, frankly, sucks.
    • kriive 6y ago
      Well, it works on FF and certain builds of chromium (those built with ENABLE_PIPEWIRE flag on). I am using xdg-desktop-portal-wlr and it works quite good. I was able to present my desktop to others without significant hiccups. Once Electron enables Ozone (and builds with PIPEWIRE on) we will be able to use screen sharing also on teams and other electron-packaged apps. This obviously works for my workflow and I understand it won't work for everyone. I don't know about Zoom, but I heard (and thus not entirely sure) it works only on specific distros with some specific GNOME versions. EDIT. I misread Slack for Zoom.
    • horsawlarway 6y ago
      Yup, this is sort of here with pipewire at this point, but it hasn't propagated through to the electron apps. Slack is still a pain point for me as well, but mainly because Slack continues to demand that I install the desktop app for calls/screen sharing. Zoom's desktop app also doesn't work, but I can use zoom-redirector and have the calls immediately open in my browser (you can get the same thing without the extension, but it requires you pretend that you can't install their desktop app and several button presses for every meeting). My guess is that we're about 12 months away from having it work by default in most places.
• roel_v 6y ago
  Is there a summary somewhere of what's wrong with x.org/x11? I haven't been keeping up.
  • sergeykish 6y ago
    The real story behind Wayland and X https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWQh_DmDLKQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWQh_DmDLKQ
• 0x_rs 6y ago
  Is there anything to admit, though? X.org has been in the so called "maintenance mode" for years and any development on the current main project is dead in its tracks, this is a well known fact. But no "drop in" replacement exists as of now, nor in the foreseeable future it seems there will be one - Wayland is an alternative, if you limit yourself to anything that is properly supported, with fundamental design differences (necessary for a more "modern", efficient approach to the current technologies), but I personally can't but think it's dead on arrival. There was some quote from the original developers of X.org about only few people in the world being able to grasp it in its entirety and I believe it's gotta be true.
• swiley 6y ago
  Sure X.org is abandonware but there are serious problems Wayland still hasn't solved that X has. 1) Wayland is really slow. I don't know if it's the compositing or what but it's unusable on lighter hardware that X ran fine on. 2) Widget toolkits handling window decoration is awful. Before the large number of toolkits just meant some controls were a little different but now basic behavior changes based on how programmers decided to build an app. And if you don't like the window decorations (say, they take up too much screen space) your choices are suck it up, or if you're lucky and willing to spend a bunch of time reconfigure every different toolkit your apps use. 3) basic stuff that worked fine on X11 doesn't work on wayland in the name of "security" (screenshots are a big one, there are extensions but isn't that the complaint about X? And if there's a security problem with something isn't hacking around with it because people need it a really strong indication that the idea is broken and probably making the situation worse?)
  • goatinaboat 6y ago
    Wayland is really slow. I don't know if it's the compositing or what but it's unusable on lighter hardware that X ran fine on. This is crazy when you think about it. I remember running an X server, Hummingbird I think it was called, on 386 and 486 machines connecting to Suns and it was fine, this was a perfectly acceptable way to work. Couple of xterms, an Emacs, xbiff for email, maybe some xeyes just for fun. Developing with Tcl/Tk and running those applications. Now we have several orders of magnitude more CPU, memory, network and Wayland doesn't even perform as well as that! My mind is truly boggled.
    • Flex247A 6y ago
      What could be the reason behind this? Asking as a noob.
      • beowulfey 6y ago
        I personally don’t know, but most likely when you are not forced to think about memory, efficiency, etc... most people just don’t. So if you aren’t actively developing on those lightweight systems your code won’t run efficiently on them.
• varbhat 6y ago
  I recently came to know about Arcan which is the alternative to both Wayland and Xorg . https://github.com/letoram/arcan https://github.com/letoram/arcan
  • dralley 6y ago
    standards.xkcd
    • snazz 6y ago
      I don't think we'll ever get into that situation. Mir is gone now and Arcan is a pretty niche solution, so I think that Wayland will continue replacing X.org unabated now.
      • horsawlarway 6y ago
        And honestly, it's doing a decent job. Happy to see Ubuntu make the switch, it'll pull in a good number of daily users and we can iron out the last few remaining issues. Frankly, Wayland has been excellent to me. It's hard to describe how nice it is that I can't remember the last time I had to open an xorg conf file to try to get monitors working, or get even basic functionality from my touchpad.
        • snazz 6y ago
          Oh, I totally agree—Sway is my favorite window manager on Linux by far. systemd and Wayland and other similar projects are controversial, but they're making huge improvements in the Linux desktop space and the lack of fragmentation is refreshing.
• kyberias 6y ago
  Microsoft should contribute their Windows compositing engine (Desktop Window Manager or Desktop Compositing Engine) to Linux and we can move one.
  • IshKebab 6y ago
    The fact that the Windows desktop works reliably with basically zero issues and the Linux desktop is a complete mess is quite a compelling reason to use Windows surely? I can't see Microsoft giving away that advantage, even if it were technically possible, which it probably isn't.
• oriesdan 6y ago
  This sounds like a bad case of Cult of Release. X works perfectly for me, and there is nothing I would want it to do that it doesn't do now. Why should it change? I have many programs I wrote years ago that I don't change and I use every day. Constant changes are not a measure of utility. But again and again, you'll find users looking at repositories and deciding that something is "dead" because there isn't any recent commit, often blaming developers for not doing more free work for them. This is a toxic attitude. When we have a software that works well and solves our problems, we should celebrate it, not complain it doesn't find new problems to solve.
  • Aeolun 6y ago
    We do need some form of signal that indicates a project has a maintainer though. It doesn’t matter that he has been inactive for 4 years (on that project), but if I submit a PR, it’s nice if there’s someone at the end of the line.
    • Keyframe 6y ago
      Repos could really have exactly that. A dead man's switch that asks you every, I don't know, three.to six months - via email even - "you good for this repo still?". You answer with a click "yup" and that's it - a signal on a repo on github or whatever that says "still alive". Otherwise "uh oh - we need help" and then a mechanism there to immediately offer alternative forks with a good enough signal "strength". It's like a pinky promise instead of actual repo activity.
      • Wowfunhappy 6y ago
        You wouldn’t even necessarily need git/github to implement a new system! Agree on a standard file name like .githeartbeat containing a timestamp. Every few months (or w/e), active maintainers could push a commit to update the timestamp.
        • oriesdan 6y ago
          It sounds like a good idea, but I'm afraid it may be a nightmare for packagers (like the ones providing packages on GNU/linux distros), as they see updates to upstream only to realize they are just pings and don't need to be repackaged. It wouldn't be that often, though. And maybe they would actually love to have such heartbeat. I would love to hear a packager on that.
• ac130kz 6y ago
  Nvidia doesn't care about proper support of Wayland, many devs don't care about proper support of Wayland, Wayland's configuration itself is very limited, for example, forced software compositing. As much as I want to switch from X.org, I simply can't due to these limitations
• art4ur 6y ago
  The last time I checked Wayland I still couldn't share only one monitor when I screen shared in Jitsi. The CPU jumped to 100 when I recorded my desktop with OBS and had a terrible delay. It's just not ready yet.
• tristor 6y ago
  The fact that both X.org and Wayland are unusable and have horrible architectures for various different reasons, plus both seem to be abandonware, does not give me hope that desktop Linux will ever become a meaningful thing within the next two decades.
• jasoneckert 6y ago
  I'm all for Wayland - I agree with its direction and focus. However, Wayland will take a long time to reach the maturity that X.org has had for decades, including remote support. As a result, having both X.org and Wayland available on your disto is probably going to be the norm (and should be the norm) for a while. X.org is less "abandonware" and more "transitionware" in my opinion.
  • yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
    > Wayland will take a long time to reach the maturity that X.org has had for decades Xorg (the server) is from 2004 (16 years ago), the X Consortium was founded in 1988, and Wikipedia puts X11 itself at 1984 (36 years ago). Wayland's initial release was 2008 (12 years ago). Wayland is either 3/4ths the age of Xorg, or 1/3rd the age of X11 - bluntly, if they don't have their act together now, why should I expect them to ever get it together?
    • tbr1 6y ago
      Developers willing/able to work on X11/Wayland plumbing are a (very) finite number. A single developer can have a large impact. With more of them switching their primary efforts to Wayland, the past few years have seen large improvements in the landscape, and this trend is bound to continue. Granted, there are rough edges, and I wouldn't claim any Wayland compositor is as polished as an X11 one -- but we're not that far off, and for many people the benefits of running a Wayland session today outweigh the cons.
      • yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
        The thing is, that's also been true since at least 2015 - the claim is that Xorg is dead and all the devs who were working on it are on Wayland now and it'll be working any day now. And that's been the claim for at least the 5 years that I've been following it. And in fairness, they have made progress in that time - by the time Wayland is as old as Xorg, it might even reach feature parity!
        • 6y ago
• gjvc 6y ago
  This is a rather worrying stance to be pushing on something which is relied upon day in and day out. The phoronix author has lost credibility with me by the opinion expressed in this article. With this kind of FUD, it is no wonder Linux has a hard time being accepted on the desktop. What enterprises -- and everyday developers like me -- need, is a stable desktop to run IDEs and the like. As an example, Debian with Xorg has been fantastic for me for several years for JetBrains tools and GSuite for mail and docs, which is a pretty complete setup, and in the WFH era, Zoom and Teams just work. This is what we should be striving for -- boring, predictable, reliability, not juggling with chainsaws on the bleeding edge. X11 comes from a different time, but any successor must be worthy, not just have a different approach. It's also worth remembering that much of Windows' practical longevity is due to its backwards compatibility. It's not shiny, but it works, and that begets loyalty.
  • tupputuppu 6y ago
    Apologies, but I don't understand your comment. The original article said X.org is unmaintained. Your comment basically replied "it works for me and I like it, Wayland doesn't cut it". Sure - great opinion - but doesn't change the state of the world, which is that X.org is unmaintained and all the real development firepower has moved on to Wayland. We can all have opinions and I kind of agree with yours, but the article is about the realities of life and facts which we need to accept.
    • ddingus 6y ago
      "Need to accept" vs "get stuff done" = "use Windows or OSX" Fact is the people who developed X thought through multi user graphical computing. That process has not really happened since. It needs to, or we just won't see desktop Linux compete.
      • pjmlp 6y ago
        2% after 30 years in the making, and hatred for the GNOME and KDE communities, always pushing for PDP-11 experience with multiple xterms like I was doing in 1994 on IBM X Window terminals on the university campus with DG/UX, I already gave up around Windows 7 release.
• flurdy 6y ago
  Wayland's poor screen sharing support in these days of WFH is a big issue.
  • freedomben 6y ago
    Yep. It works ok with some apps, but Bluejeans and Webex refuse to play nice. Google Meet seems to work ok. I'm sure these are complicated issues and that Linux desktop users are a tiny minority, but dang it's painful. I try to steer everyone toward Google Meet if possible, and unfortunately for the others, I have a decent amount of sway :-D
• agurk 6y ago
  One important point to note in these discussions is that X.Org is a specific implementation of the X11 protocol (the canonical implementation as it happens). Wayland is the protocol and compared to X11 in this context. There are multiple implementations including: 1) Weston (the reference implementation) 2) Mutter (Gnome) 3) Kwin (KDE, also implements X11) It's important to draw the distinction as many/most of the limitations people come across are in the implementation not with the protocol. People using different implementations will come across different issues too.
  • kbumsik 6y ago
    > People using different implementations will come across different issues too. ...which is the biggest problem of Wayland in my opinion. By defining protocols only, we now have the development fragmentation problem. The desktop experiences will be more inconsistent between DEs than the era of X11, and minor DE users eventually are forced to switch to major DEs like Gnome because other DEs won't have enough devs to maintain its low-level implementation.
    • MayeulC 6y ago
      Wlroots as a library for implementing a Wayland compositor has done wonders to help develop small-scale Wayland "desktop environments". Sure, you pull the whole wlroots things, but under X, you pull xlib, plus some X11 server. https://github.com/swaywm/wlroots/wiki/Projects-which-use-wlroots https://github.com/swaywm/wlroots/wiki/Projects-which-use-wl...
• ansible 6y ago
  Maybe when it hits 10 years without a release (like its predecessor), we can really call it abandonware: https://www.xfree86.org/cvs/changes.html https://www.xfree86.org/cvs/changes.html
• naveen99 6y ago
  I wonder why we don’t see anything out of China for x.org ? They want to be self reliant in hardware, why not start with software ? Then I wonder if the us government will come around and ban open-source like they want to ban encryption in the name of protecting the economy... not that I want the last thing to happen of course.
• nsajko 6y ago
  If Wayland is the future, the future is grim. People often complain that Wayland is taking a long time to catch up to X11, but that actually stems from a deeper issue: Wayland has a horrible design, for an X11 replacement, a design that leads to massive fragmentation issues across the graphical part of the Linux ecosystem. Implementing a Wayland compositor requires much more effort than implementing an X11 window manager and each new compositor implementation reinvents the wheel many times, leaving users with less options for a desktop environment than on X11. Even worse, Wayland does not standardize on or is hostile to some essential features, meaning that users need to rely on compositor specific behavior for those features, if they are even available. E.g., an application that needs to grab the entire screen will need separate code for each compositor it supports screenshots on, or it must use a protocol outside Wayland to get the screenshot. 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 xdotool (an input event automation tool, imagine wanting to inject or intercept input events) replacement is not possible on Wayland (without having separate support for each compositor, of course). These seem to be intentional design decisions (marketed as being necessary for security, but really being power-user hostile), this[0] Reddit comment puts it nicely: > 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. But the lack of these features AFAIK also causes big trouble for users with special accessibility needs. Wayland is also, with its forced composition, hostile to interactive applications requiring low latency, e.g. video games. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/7lb5l7/new_screenshot_alternative_for_wayland/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/7lb5l7/new_screensho...
  • dralley 6y ago
    > Wayland is also, with its forced composition, hostile to interactive applications requiring low latency, e.g. video games. https://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/gnomes-mutter-gets-fullscreen-unredirect-supported-on-wayland.16457 https://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/gnomes-mutter-gets-fu...
• ddevault 6y ago
  Oh, look, more non-experts spreading misinformation about Wayland on HN. Must be Sunday. https://drewdevault.com/2019/02/10/Wayland-misconceptions-debunked.html https://drewdevault.com/2019/02/10/Wayland-misconceptions-de...
  • verroq 6y ago
    I only really care about performance and Wayland hasn’t been very convincing [0] with no discernible improvement over X11. [0] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GNOME-Xorg-Wayland-AMD-Renoir https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GNOME-Xo...
    • ddevault 6y ago
      GNOME is not a good representative of Wayland. Wayland is just a protocol - it's up to the compositors to have good performance to distinguish it from Xorg, and GNOME does not do well in this regard. Other compositors, particularly wlroots, enjoy excellent performance. Wayland also opens the door to many performance improvements which are not possible on Xorg, and which take advantage of newer GPU features, especially on embedded systems but moreso every year on desktop and laptop GPUs as well.
      • verroq 6y ago
        Is there a benchmark where it blows X11 out of the water?
        • ddevault 6y ago
          I am not aware of any up-to-date benchmarks which make a fair comparison (i.e. not just benchmarking GNOME), but I am intimately familiar with the technology and its performance characteristics.
          • taeric 6y ago
            Gnome is a fair comparison. Since it is the main comparison for many users, it is the most fair comparison. Otherwise, this is starting the benchmark wars with meaningless comparisons at the outset. :(
• ravenstine 6y ago
  If Wayland is the future, then the future was 12 years ago. Since it hasn't really caught on or solved the same problems that X.Org accomplished a long time ago, it seems kind of pointless to continue pursuing it at this point. In my opinion, the best thing about X.Org is that it's no longer changing. I remember installing updates for X.Org all the time and booting to a black screen on multiple occasions.
  • 1_player 6y ago
    The issue is not Wayland or "something else". The issue is trying to implement a radical change in the userspace Linux ecosystem. It's not possible without a ton of effort, so it takes an incredible amount of time, sweat and tears. That's the reason it takes 12 years and counting. The utopian philosophy of "Linux is about choice" has doomed any idea of a Linux desktop.
    • badsectoracula 6y ago
      > The utopian philosophy of "Linux is about choice" has doomed any idea of a Linux desktop. If it isn't about "choice" - ie. user control and freedom - then what is the point of using Linux in the first place and not stick with Windows where things are already chosen for you and way more often than not work out of the box because it is by far the most tested against desktop environment?
      • 1_player 6y ago
        Libre/open source is the point. Not being restricted by proprietary software and walled gardens. The only truly successful open source software running on a Linux system is the kernel, because there's NO choice. No talented teenager can write their own Linux kernel that does Y instead. Imagine what would the world look like if there were 50 half compatible, community-managed forks of the Linux kernel. The year of the Linux desktop won't come because apart from the kernel the ecosystem is incredibly fragmented and reaching consensus is pretty much impossible, so in 2020 we're still deciding whether to do client side or server side decorations.
• badsectoracula 6y ago
  So why not just fork it? If the maintainers do not want to maintain it anymore... why not just fork it? I've heard people saying that it is big and complex but some time ago i downloaded the code of the X server itself and it didn't seem that big (i've worked in much bigger codebases myself).
  • sergeykish 6y ago
    No one wants? XOrg developers started Wayland, they don't want to work on XOrg anymore. Red Hat does not need anymore.
    • badsectoracula 6y ago
      One X.org developer started Wayland and some (but not all) others joined. In any case, i wasn't referring to X.org developers - i explicitly mentioned that they do not want to maintain it anymore. I was referring to those who want to see it continue existing in one way or another.
      • sergeykish 6y ago
        Ah, I red "fork" as in ffmpeg-libav case, it is not what you meant, I would say "contribute". I am too surprised by critique. Anyone can contribute to X.Org [1], maybe there are no stable releases but it works, have active contributors [2] and recent commits [3] [4]. Wayland lives, ten years ago it was demo, now it has a lot of compositors [5], wlroots shared among many projects. [1] https://github.com/freedesktop/xorg-xserver https://github.com/freedesktop/xorg-xserver [2] https://github.com/freedesktop/xorg-xserver/graphs/contributors https://github.com/freedesktop/xorg-xserver/graphs/contribut... [3] https://github.com/freedesktop/xorg-xserver/commits/master https://github.com/freedesktop/xorg-xserver/commits/master [4] https://github.com/freedesktop/xorg-xserver/graphs/commit-activity https://github.com/freedesktop/xorg-xserver/graphs/commit-ac... [5] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/wayland https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/wayland
        • badsectoracula 6y ago
• fugufugu 6y ago
  Curiously, noone mentioned Xenocara[1] yet? [1]: https://www.xenocara.org/ https://www.xenocara.org/
• blitblitblit 6y ago
  So can we revive any of these also abandoned alternatives? * Tiny X (Still Xorg just barebones and faster) - https://github.com/tinycorelinux/tinyx https://github.com/tinycorelinux/tinyx * Xynth - https://github.com/alperakcan/xynth https://github.com/alperakcan/xynth * Nano-X / MicroWindows - http://microwindows.org/ http://microwindows.org/ (Seems still active? Just needs some modern GUI ports.) * DirectFB (Needs modern driver support) - https://web.archive.org/web/20120118003245/http://www.directfb.org/ https://web.archive.org/web/20120118003245/http://www.direct... * SVGALib (Needs modern driver support) - https://github.com/akosela/svgalib https://github.com/akosela/svgalib * FBUI (Needs porting to modern kernels) - https://github.com/8l/fbui https://github.com/8l/fbui
  • moonchild 6y ago
    > Tiny X Probably not, because: > Design choices [...] no gl
  • pengaru 6y ago
    You left out GGI/KGI. But most of this stuff is basically irrelevant in a post-KMS/DRM linux world. So few apps were ever written targeting directfb and libggi it's as if they never existed. SVGAlib apps frequently performed direct hardware access requiring root and disrupting graphics hardware state WRT other graphical apps like X or fb. Unfortunately we have a significant collection of old demos and games targeting SVGAlib, but at this point it's probably best to just run them in a virtualized linux environment lacking any graphics drivers so SVGAlib can run the show on a faked VGA. For such apps where source is available, it's better to just port to something like SDL.
    • anthk 6y ago
      I think directdb stuff is KMS/DRM compatible. Mplayer on the fbdev2 driver works perfectly. So is DirectFB Links. >Unfortunately we have a significant collection of old demos and games targeting SVGAlib, but at this point it's probably best to just run them in a virtualized linux environment lacking any graphics drivers so SVGAlib can run the show on a faked VGA. Or a wrapper trapping SVGAlib calls to SDL/SDL2.
• openfuture 6y ago
  Okay so Wayland is a no go and X.org is too crufty to attract contributors.... Where is the "rewrite it in rust" crowd when you need it? :) The X11 protocol is the surface you need to maintain but swapping the internals should be do-able. Maybe we should have some call to action or reverse-auction or something. I'd love to support a viable path forward (I feel this effort would be a bit like neovim). Personally I think it could start as a Xephyr or Xnest type project (to allow you to run rootless X) and then extend it with a from-scratch protocol that slowly replaces X (starting with support for simple but useful applications and going from there). But clearly I only barely know what I'm talking about. Probably the reason things are the way they are is because of how the whole OpenGL / Vulcan etc. thing is not resolved, so any potential replacement has no foundation to build on (but this is something I don't know anything about).
  • Spivak 6y ago
    The problem is that if you were going to rewrite a display server from scratch you would probably want to implement Wayland over X11. X11 is barely a protocol anymore because Xorg is so dominant, you either do what Xorg does bug-for-bug and with all the extensions or apps will break.
• podiki 6y ago
  What's the tiling WM landscape like on Wayland these days? I know of Sway (i3-like), but is that the best game in town? I started with i3 but now love StumpWM (Common Lisp) and XMonad (Haskell), and can't imagine being without something very similar.
• emersion 6y ago
  This talk "The Real Story Behind Wayland and X" by Daniel Stone (a longtime X developer) may debunk some misconceptions in this thread: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIctzAQOe44 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIctzAQOe44
  • sergeykish 6y ago
    It is not controversial so it is down here.
• peatmoss 6y ago
  Does anyone know the status of Freesync / VRR on Gnome-Wayland? Last time I investigated this, I went down a rabbit hole that made me vow to buy a Playstation.
• dekhn 6y ago
  X.org is one of my longest-used pieces of software. I've used it for 25 years (at the time it was called XFree86 and you had to calculate your own modelines to get hi res), and it has worked incredibly well for me. I've written software some 20 years ago that still runs just fine (some xscreensavers) and I still use it today. Kind of a shame.
  • cbm-vic-20 6y ago
    Oh, man. "It this a Sony Trinitron 19in CRT running at 65Hz, or is this a Gateway 17in monitor running at 60Hz? Why can I only see the left half of my desktop on the right side of the screen?", etc.
• nailer 6y ago
  Old Linux person here - what does Keith Packard (man who restarted work on X when it was stagnant and made x.org) work on these days?
• jbirer 6y ago
  I have defaulted to using X.Org on my Debian GNOME installation because of awful font rendering on Wayland along with other issues such as recording. This desperate push by Wayland people is putting me off of Wayland. You can't FUD a software into being dropped in favor of yours.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• remexre 6y ago
  I'm kinda annoyed this is the case before the GBM/EGLStreams argument got resolved... I've done some programming against GBM directly (wanted an OpenGL ES application to be in a "kiosk mode," didn't want to have to install X / a Wayland compositor + configure it), and the whole DRM+GBM stack is kinda _terrible_. Generously, one could call it barely documented; the majority of the useful and correct documentation I found was on Mesa contributors' blogs, and there were still edge cases in the API that were getting ironed out in the 5.9 kernel release. I haven't needed to write against EGLStreams, but I might give it a try to see if it's as much of a pain or not; from the 1-page overview on the nvidia docs, I suspect not -- it sounds quite similar to the VK_KHR_swapchain extension.
  • Const-me 6y ago
    Interesting, probably depends on hardware then. On Pi4, that same workflow (drm/kms without desktop managers, with GLES on top) delivers superior image with no tearing (tearing does happen in windowed mode under load), while consuming less resources than windowed mode. This library: https://github.com/Const-me/Vrmac https://github.com/Const-me/Vrmac
  • yissp 6y ago
    NVIDIA's EGLDevice / EGLOutput / EGLStream API isn't too bad in and of itself. The annoying thing is trying to have backends for both it and DRM / GBM in the same application. The programming models are just so different.
  • emersion 6y ago
    Yeah, the KMS docs need some love. I'm trying to help with that. But note that even with EGLStreams you'd still be using KMS. And GBM's API is pretty small, basically just gbm_bo_import/gbm_bo_create/gbm_bo_get_*.
• mamon 6y ago
  The best Linux desktop environment is Windows 10 (with WSL2) That's why some journalists have already called 2020 "Year of Linux On Desktop". Let's be honest, Linux has a good (but not great) kernel, good-to-great apps on server side, and the crappy UI side (Wayland, windows managers, desktop environments) The best way to interact with Linux is throught API or commandline. Leave UI stuff for more competent folks (Microsoft or Apple)
• bekantan 6y ago
  As a XMonad user, I am not considering X11 alternatives for the foreseeable future. I have zero issues with it.
• forgotmypw17 6y ago
  The beauty of the software world is that "abandonware" can live on for decades. Let the impatient get on with beta-testing today's developments, and I'll get around to using them 20 years from now, when only the good stuff remains. I still do most of my writing and publishing work from Windows 95 and Me, and I love it, because everything is a solved problem, and no new patches to break things are coming out. Keeping it within NAT and VM is plenty secure enough for my purposes, and IE6 is plenty enough modern for me. At least I can still read my config files.
• coliveira 6y ago
  Most work on X.org happens on its extensions and drivers. Just because the main server is stable (i.e., no new features are introduced) doesn't mean that the project is dead.
• emilsedgh 6y ago
  How is this news? The long term plan was to abandon X.org and move to Wayland. Of course Wayland is still not there, but X.org is mature and stable enough to keep users happy for the time being, until the whole ecosystem catches up with Wayland. As a matter of fact, abandoning X.org (except for security patches) would be a good strategy to incentivize the ecosystem not to build on top of it anymore. Maybe X.org should do what request.js and momen.js did and call it done at some point.
• moonchild 6y ago
  > Then again, that coming from an Intel Linux developer isn't too surprising considering it's been more than six years since the last xf86-video-intel DDX release I don't quite follow? modesetting was supposed to replace xf86-video-intel, so it shouldn't be surprising if the latter isn't getting updated.
• udioron 6y ago
  I am still waiting for bug 865 (now 258) to be resolved. https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/issues/258 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/issues/258
• WesolyKubeczek 6y ago
  What looks like "typical Linux geeks being geeks" with this situation: 1) the old, mostly working thing is being abandoned in favor of 2) that new thing which doesn't work in so many cases it's laughable, even after 11 years. How many years was it between the concept of X and a working release at Palo Alto? Note that the new situation is so perfect for passing the buck from the windowing system to the compositors, and compositor folks are busy fighting feuds over which one another's private protocols or even public ones they are not going to support. Oh, and the browsers. Chromium is making its first shy bumbling steps towards actually working on Wayland! A mere decade after! I've heard it was so much easier to write Wayland clients, what could have happened? Upd: This toxic development culture in a nutshell is exactly what this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24165445 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24165445 is about. Well, we know it's not limited to Google.
  • wegs 6y ago
    Newer isn't better-designed. Unix was really well-designed, compared to so much of the modern stuff, and it does everything I need. Nineties Linux was a nice Unix. I wish we hadn't spent the past quarter-century turning it into nineties Windows, with layers upon layers upon layers of cruft. I don't get why Wayland is slow, when Enlightenment was fast on machines with 32MB of RAM, a 3dfx Voodoo, a spinning HDD, and a 66MHz CPU...
    • WesolyKubeczek 6y ago
      I've heard enlightenment can be a Wayland compositor now, could you try it? Also I think 3dfx Voodoo was the magic pixie dust, once you ever go OpenGL, you're not going back.
      • modified001 6y ago
        https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/15001/enlightened https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/15001/enlightened
      • modified001 6y ago
• m0zg 6y ago
  I tried Wayland last year. It was nowhere near ready for prime time. Perceptibly slower, and I had video tearing when watching video in the browser. This is with bog standard Intel iGPU in a laptop a couple years old. In its present state it can't beat "abandonware" I'm afraid. X.org works. Wayland does not. And that's all there is to it at the moment.
• epx 6y ago
  So x.org is abandoned, Wayland does not work/is not mature, Linux for desktop is dead? Adopting the upper-half of Android AOSP UI would be the escape hatch?
• xaduha 6y ago
  Linux is nice, but as soon as new LTSC is out I will probably switch to it to use WSL2.
• DonHopkins 6y ago
  Implement the window system in the web browser and be done with it. Sheez.
• p2t2p 6y ago
  I recently went back to dwm (X11) from Sway (Wayland). As much as I love Sway, doing all sorts of weird stuff just to share my screen in zoom is too much of a hustle. I'll probably keep using Sway on my personal device where I don't need that feature, but my work computer will be X11 for a while.
  • emersion 6y ago
    You can thank Zoom for using the proprietary GNOME D-Bus API instead of xdg-desktop-portal. (And you can also thank Zoom for being bad in general, I guess.)
• aboutyourmom 6y ago
  I dunno. I use Fedora, and do a clean install of Fedora every new release. That's often. I try Wayland every time. And every time, I'm implementing several work arounds because things don't work, and when I hit 5 work arounds (the magic number), I disable Wayland with a script I wrote, that kills it at multiple levels, it doesn't even rear it's ugly head in the gdm. Then it's back to Xorg, and no more work arounds, everything works. I support several thousand servers. I only have so much time to dick around in Wayland.
• jitendrac 6y ago
  Rather I believe, X.org server is really stable. I think its in a stage where it can be leftout without updates for years. For me its stable, works fine and as expected. I don't mind long duration updates with stable systems.
• bicolao 6y ago
  Some IRC discussion from airlied https://lobste.rs/s/vqv6nu/it_s_time_admit_it_x_org_server_is#c_1pqf44 https://lobste.rs/s/vqv6nu/it_s_time_admit_it_x_org_server_i...
• AzzieElbab 6y ago
  X11 has to go because of flickering and the way it renders text. It is bad for your eyes
• notorandit 6y ago
  Nope. Look at autoconf. Last release came in 2012. Next is due now.