27 ms·

On Abandoning the X Server

• pmoriarty 6y ago
  It's a couple of years old, but this post on "Why I'm not going to switch to Wayland yet."[1] summarizes some of the concerns I have about switching to Wayland: "at the moment there are several types of applications that not only don't work in wayland, but would be very difficult, or impossible to work natively in all major wayland compositors. Examples (in order of importance to me): * Programmatic output configuration (xrandr, arandr, etc.) * CLI clipboard access (xsel, xclip) * Third party app launcher/window switcher (rofi, dmenu, albert, docky). * Clipboard managers (parcellite, klipper, Gpaste, clipman, etc.) * Third party screen shot/capture/share (shutter, OBS, ffmpeg, import, peek, scrot, VNC, etc.) * Color picker (gpick, gcolor3, kcolorchooser) * xdotool Until Wayland has all these (and more) and they are as stable and feature-rich as the existing apps on X, I will not willingly switch to Wayland. [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_...
  • mnd999 6y ago
    I always get downvoted for saying this but anyway. Wayland needs the Nvidia problem to be solved. I don't see how it's sustainable to have to build everything for GBM and EGLStreams.
    • jordan_curve 6y ago
      Yep. People can complain about Nvidia’s refusal to comply to standards as much as they want, but at the end of the day, there is never going to be widespread adoption of Wayland until Nvidia hardware is fully supported.
    • sergeykish 6y ago
      Probably because it is solved? > EGLStreams (NVIDIA): GNOME, KDE, Weston https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/wayland#Requirements https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/wayland#Requirements
      • account42 6y ago
        > I don't see how it's sustainable to have to build everything for GBM and EGLStreams.
        • sergeykish 6y ago
          That's life. I've checked OpenBSD once, no audio support. I've bought Intel Poulsbo based netbook [1], no video acceleration beyond XOrg 1.9 and kernel 2.6. I've patched source for 3.* compatibility [2] and finally bought new hardware. I would dance if GNOME or KDE had Poulsbo support. Soon (if not already [3]) NVIDIA would be second class citizen on Linux. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Controller_Hub https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Controller_Hub [2] http://sergeykish.com/linux-poulsbo-emgd http://sergeykish.com/linux-poulsbo-emgd [3] https://www.gamingonlinux.com/index.php?module=statistics&view=trends https://www.gamingonlinux.com/index.php?module=statistics&vi...
  • emersion 6y ago
    I can find Wayland equivalents for my compositor for all of these tools: https://github.com/swaywm/sway/wiki/i3-Migration-Guide#common-x11-apps-used-on-i3-with-wayland-alternatives https://github.com/swaywm/sway/wiki/i3-Migration-Guide#commo...
    • magicalhippo 6y ago
      Ok so I've mainly used Windows, but I got a secondary machine with Linux, which for the last few years has been running KDE Neon which I rather enjoy. This whole "desktop stack" on Linux always makes my head hurt, so these might be really dumb questions: If I install some distro, Arch say, and I wanted to use Sway, and I then want to run Kile, will Kile then run through XWayland? Will it work just as well as Kile on KDE Neon? I understand KWin has some Wayland support but it also seems not quite ready for prime time the times I've tried it. So was curious about alternatives, just for curiosities sake.
      • chungy 6y ago
        Kile most likely runs as a native Wayland application. Though for any legacy apps/games that use X, yeah they'll run in XWayland and should be seamless.
        • CarelessExpert 6y ago
          Right... seamless... https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/1065 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/1065
      • emersion 6y ago
        >If I install some distro, Arch say, and I wanted to use Sway, and I then want to run Kile, will Kile then run through XWayland? Kile seems to use Qt5, so should work without Xwayland. > Will it work just as well as Kile on KDE Neon? It should, yes. I don't use Kile though, so I haven't checked.
      • josefx 6y ago
        > Kile Since Kile is a KDE application it should run using Qts wayland backend. > Will it work just as well as Kile on KDE Neon? Depends, do you need anything more fancy than mouse and keyboard? No? Then great. Power user functionality like copy paste on the other hand? https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/4007 https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/4007 might want to pray before using that.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • CarelessExpert 6y ago
    Hell, I'd be happy if there was just fewer bugs. Case in point: Gnome + Wayland + guake. If you configure guake to use anything less than 100% of the width of the screen, then it suddenly appears in the wrong position. But wait, maybe that's a guake bug, right? Wrong. I tried a couple of other options for similar functionality and they demonstrated the same issue. So odds are it's actually a bug in the compositor. And that's ignoring that basic things like global keybinding don't work (edit: ya ya, the Wayland proponents will tell you that's by design, but it's a) user hateful b) totally different than literally any other desktop OS out there today, and c) breaks apps, right now, in ways that will require major code changes to fix) so I have to put a hack in place to allow F12 to open guake up in the first place. Meanwhile, we only just got the "official" solution for screensharing (what Zoom does is an incredible hack: they just take lots of screenshots! No, I'm not kidding, that's actually how it works, which is why the framerate is so bad) and it involves yet more new stuff (pipewire, et al) that I'm sure will be a source of its own raft of bugs. I'd say "maybe in a year or two", but we've been saying that for a long time, now...
    • djsumdog 6y ago
      The trouble with your guake bug is it might be Gnome + Wayland specific. With the separation between the server and composer, bugs might need to be fixed in multiple places. Some window managers use wlroots, so maybe some bugs can be fixed there, but others have their own forks and implementations. The hotkey thing is big and it's annoying because it's another thing that might need to be implemented/fixed in each and every composer and environment (and it could be different in every environment). I've seen the X11/Wayland talks and I agree Xorg has tons of old crufty garbage in it, and screen locking in Xorg is not very secure. But the Wayland team seems to have made little effort in addressing even the most basic things like hotkeys, screenshots, etc. I'm not sure if "user hateful" is the right term, but they don't seem to be prioritizing the most basic things people are asking for.
      • Spivak 6y ago
        It's not that they're user-hateful it's just that they're (I think rightfully) being aggressive about scoping Wayland to things related to drawing surfaces and handling input events. If people started treating as one domain specific protocol that display servers use for drawing stuff on the screen and not "everything a desktop app might want to do" protocol there would be less conflict. I'm glad they're leaving all the "desktop" stuff out and letting desktops agree on dbus interfaces. I doubt people writing little CLI utilities want to have to create dummy Wayland surfaces to do interact with the display server which is how wl-clipboard works.
  • creese 6y ago
    I switched to Sway recently. I couldn't believe how snappy it is. Some of your issues are solved: CLI clipboard access: wl-clipboard: https://github.com/bugaevc/wl-clipboard https://github.com/bugaevc/wl-clipboard App launcher: bemenu: https://github.com/Cloudef/bemenu https://github.com/Cloudef/bemenu
    • djsumdog 6y ago
      > Wayland is only supported by compositors that implement the wlr-layer-shell protocol. Typically wlroots-based compositors. I'm really concerned about Wayland fragmentation. Will some tools work on only wlroot implementations and not others? X11 apps generally work across window managers, although the weird ones (tiling window managers like i3) may have some interesting things you have to work around. If wlroots became the standard for all window managers on Wayland and everyone used it, I guess it would be fine. But if not, we're going to see a lot of apps that have to be adapted for each and every composer.
      • Spivak 6y ago
        I don't know why people are so afraid of fragmentation in this respect. There are lots of "de specific" protocols that are well supported everywhere like org.freedesktop.Notifications. If the world can agree on Wayland then desktops can agree on some dbus interfaces for doing stuff like screenshots, screencasts, and automation. Wayland is a shiny new thing and lots of people are writing compositors since it's suddenly possible for people to write them in a way that you simply couldn't with X11. The ecosystem will eventually mature but I think it would be a mistake to recreate the Xorg monoculture with wlroots. People seem to see the value of multiple browser implementations agreeing on standard but not display servers.
        • simias 6y ago
          I'm personally concerned because I like to use "niche" tiling WMs (I used Ratpoison then StumpWM for over a decade, then I switched to a rather heavily customized DWM a couple of years ago). Even with a relatively monolithic and "opinionated" protocol such as X11 it's not uncommon to encounter applications that don't play very nicely with alternative paradigms (because they expect a tray to be available, or to be able to place floating windows anywhere they want for instance). Still, overall with a few hacks here and there it works mostly very well. Basically I know that we're 2nd class citizens within the unix desktop world but at least the X11 model gives us enough of preemption to get things working mostly correctly. From what I see of Wayland I'm very concerned in the long run. Not being able to just beat a window into submission X-style seems like it would create a world of troubles. And because tiling environment are fairly niche I don't expect the ecosystem to organically evolve solutions to all of these problems. And if you think "well just stop using tiling WMs and use whatever else is using you weirdo" please do note that these issues are also often the same that are encountered by people with disabilities who need to rig their UIs in certain ways to make them usable. Also you'll have to pry my tiling WM from my cold dead hands, you heathen.
  • boogies 6y ago
    > Until Wayland has all these (and more) and they are as stable and feature-rich as the existing apps on X, I will not willingly switch to Wayland. For me it’s some of those, dwm, sxhkd, keynav, xcape, the Compose key, and simple highlight + middle click/Shift+Insert copypasta. I’m a bit confused about the extent to which the Wayland devs have changed their minds about the last one.
    • tincholio 6y ago
      xcape and the compose key are really killer tools. Not having them would really screw with productivity
      • codethief 6y ago
        FYI There are lots of alternatives to xcape (and even better ones because, in my experience, xcape is not compatible with VirtualBox or hot-plugging one's keyboard), e.g.: https://gitlab.com/interception/linux/plugins/dual-function-keys https://gitlab.com/interception/linux/plugins/dual-function-... (currently using this – very powerful) https://gitlab.com/at-home-modifier/at-home-modifier-evdev https://gitlab.com/at-home-modifier/at-home-modifier-evdev (used this for years – works extremely well) Two more projects I've found that should work on Wayland: https://github.com/myfreeweb/evscript https://github.com/myfreeweb/evscript https://github.com/wbolster/evcape https://github.com/wbolster/evcape
        • tincholio 6y ago
          Thanks for the links!
    • simias 6y ago
      Man reading this thread confirmed that I probably shouldn't even attempt to use Wayland in the near future, I basically use every single of the features you've listed. So far I basically kept using X11 because it mostly just works for me, but I didn't expect that Wayland was still so far behind.
    • akvadrako 6y ago
  • heinrichhartman 6y ago
    I would not consider this examples "Applications", but more configuration tools. I would also not expect to be able to port the OSX Clipboard manager to Windows or the "Displays" utility. From a new window server I would expect to have some ways to configure output, switch applications, manage clip-board but I would not expect to have my existing tools continuing to work. If you are re-architecting a system from the ground-up there is always some fallout expected.
    • account42 6y ago
      > I would also not expect to be able to port the OSX Clipboard manager to Windows or the "Displays" utility. I would also not expect people to suggest deprecation OS X in favor of Windows and then shit on people what want to keep using their OS X Clipboard manager. This is the real problem with all this forcing to move people to Wayland / Pulse / SystemD crap: They are new platforms instead of compatible improvements to the existing platform, but somehow you still expect everyone to just jump ship.
  • mkhalil 6y ago
    Wow. I was suprised to read that OBS doesn't work with Wayland. I found some articles [0] on how it runs well using XWayland [1] - which I guess let's you run X-Clients under Wayland - but it seems that the amount of work to get this to work is not trivial, considering the official PR for the work, is on part 3 and that has been open since March![2]. Oh, how did it get so bad? --------------- [0]:https://feaneron.com/2019/11/21/screencasting-with-obs-studio-on-wayland/ https://feaneron.com/2019/11/21/screencasting-with-obs-studi... [1]:https://wayland.freedesktop.org/xserver.html#heading_toc_j_3 https://wayland.freedesktop.org/xserver.html#heading_toc_j_3 [2]:https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/pull/2484#issuecomment-604775154 https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/pull/2484#issuecomm...
  • markstos 6y ago
    I recently switched to Sway on Wayland. Sway has good dynamic output configuration. `wl-clipboard` and `wl-paste` are there for CLI clipboard access. There's a rofi fork that works on Wayland, and can also emulate `dmenu`. `clipman` is Wayland compatible. I use `grimshot` with `rofi` integration for screenshots. I have a HTML Color Picker script for sway that's launched from `rofi` that I should share. `ydotool` and `wtype` emulate the parts of `xdotool` that I care about. Also, there's no longer tearing when I resize windows!
  • pkulak 6y ago
    You kinda just need to use new stuff when it's all so heavily dependent on an X server. * swaymsg (no idea what Gnome or KDE do here) * wl-clipboad * wofi, or a Wayland fork of rofi (https://github.com/lbonn/rofi) * I don't use a clipboard manager, so I'm gonna skip this one. :D * slurp, grim, wf-recorder, mpv (OBS and ffmpeg work fine, not sure about the others) I think I was lucky to get back into Linux this year because I didn't have to unlearn anything to use Wayland. You mention a dozen tools I've never heard of! If I had some X flow I'd been using for years with 10s of tools that no longer work on the other side, that would be overwhelming.
    • mikenew 6y ago
      clipman, for a clipboard manager. Also here's a oneliner for color picking: grim -g "$(slurp -p)" - -t png -o | convert png:- -format '%[pixel:s]\n' info:- | awk -F '[(,)]' '{printf("#%02x%02x%02x\n",$2,$3,$4)}'
      • falsaberN1 6y ago
        May I recommend CopyQ as well? I moved to it when Plasma changed Klipper some time ago and I am quite glad I did. Can even install it on Windows in a portable fashion. I can't shake the feeling that I can do so much with it yet I'm barely scratching the surface as user, it's quite powerful.
        • mkhnews 6y ago
          +1 for CopyQ from me, it is awesome.
    • account42 6y ago
      Yeah no, requiring users to switch applications makes your display server DOA.
  • DCKing 6y ago
    The problem with Wayland is really that people understand it to be a drop-in replacement of X11, or something close to it. But it's not a replacement of X11. You don't "switch to Wayland", despite what that GDM button seems to indicate. Wayland is just a protocol, whereas X11 is a protocol and entire system around it. So Wayland is not a replacement of X11. Gnome on Wayland should be a replacement for Gnome on X11. KDE on Wayland should be replacement for KDE on X11. Sway on Wayland should be a replacement for i3 and X11. But as you can imagine in this equation, KDE, Gnome and Sway are permitted and required to take on more responsibilities. You might take issue with the fact that a lot more of the display stack gets tied up in specific desktop environments. It's KDE and Gnome and Sway that are not providing you these command line tools/screen recording/clipboard access. I don't mean to say this as nitpicking or that """Wayland""" (whatever that means) is dropping the ball, but this is really the responsibility of the desktop environment (or WM) in Wayland's design. Wayland is just a protocol. What you're observing as shortcomings in Wayland is really a lock of pace and direction of development for (e.g. Freedesktop) standards that standardize clipboard access/screen recording use cases, and the adoption of those standards. The Linux community seems to have been hit by 1) not realizing Wayland does not replace X11 and 2) realizing that, not being to coordinate standardization well of the pieces of the X11 stack that should be replaced as well. If you need to replace X11, you need a lot more than just Wayland. But that seems to keep on catching people by surprise. I think it'd be helpful for the future of the Linux desktop if more people recognized that.
    • ubercow13 6y ago
      Deprecating Xorg and providing no replacement standard/protocol for almost everything it does and enables is kind of the whole problem, isn't it?
    • andyjpb 6y ago
      No matter how horrible X may be, it has a lot of value for end users. Almost all of this value is in the ecosystem around X. You can't capture an ecosystem unless you provide that value, plus the activation energy needed to persuade people to change. systemd (as an example of a large, recent, change to the "whole system") touched end-users far less than X so the pain was felt mainly by distributors and sysadmins. Time and again, software that's "better" fails in the market because it doesn't provide the things that users need, want or use. Backwards compatibility is usually key when trying to capture a large, long established user base. ...and that means backwards compatibility even (or especially!) with all the "bad" or "wrong" stuff. This is one of the things that makes software "products" much harder than software "engineering" (which in turn is "harder" than computer science). Science is how it works. Engineering is getting it to work and productisation is getting people to adopt it. Wayland has to solve problems that end-users actually care about rather than just being better in technical ways.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • shmerl 6y ago
    There are few replacements: * https://github.com/bugaevc/wl-clipboard https://github.com/bugaevc/wl-clipboard * https://github.com/ReimuNotMoe/ydotool https://github.com/ReimuNotMoe/ydotool OBS / ffmpeg and etc. should get integrated with Pipewire I think for screen capture and the like? But I'm not sure how far that progressed.
  • vidarh 6y ago
    For me the only reason is that my window manager would need to change (bspwm) and I have no compelling reason to switch unless it's 100% painless. This is the biggest problem. I accept Wayland brings benefits for some people, but I couldn't care less. Since I don't care about the benefits it brings, it needs to be entirely painless. Until the switch is more painless than holding on to Xorg, there will be a good chunk of users with no incentive to make the move. EDIT: I'd also say that the fact that so many of the tools need to change, rather than e.g. get support added to them to support Wayland compositors is a huge indictment of the whole thing. It seems like no thought was put into planning for transition.
    • CountSessine 6y ago
      This is the biggest problem. I accept Wayland brings benefits for some people, but I couldn't care less. Since I don't care about the benefits it brings, it needs to be entirely painless. Until the switch is more painless than holding on to Xorg, there will be a good chunk of users with no incentive to make the move. That depends a lot on how difficult it is to keep Xorg working with modern distros. You might get forced into Wayland when your favourite distro and all acceptable alternatives don’t want to put the work into integrating and patching an aging Xorg. Whether it’s with a carrot or a stick, you’re going to Wayland sooner or later.
      • CountSessine 6y ago
        The good news is that by the time that happens, hopefully the desktop environments will have picked up the slack and the feature-gap will be narrower.
      • account42 6y ago
        If you need to make the alternatives worse in order for people to switch then Wayland has failed.
        • majewsky 6y ago
          No, it means it has succeeded in attracting the X developers over, so the old stack starts bitrotting. Remember, this was not some guys just randomly showing up and pushing their shiny new thing on people. Wayland was started by one of the developers who had already worked on the Xorg stack for several years.
  • phkahler 6y ago
    >> Until Wayland has all these (and more) and they are as stable and feature-rich as the existing apps on X, I will not willingly switch to Wayland. Every time this topic comes up, a bunch of people bring up the things X has that Wayland doesnt yet have, or have in the form they think it should. I'm not sure if it's just me but these comments come across as some combination of defiant, demanding, or I dont know what. It's like they don't understand that the world is moving on and doesnt really give a $h!t about them and their love of X. I mean here is a post from "the guy" whose been keeping X going for a long time saying "this shit is done" and people keep complaining about that as if they have some say in it without actually contributing to the code. It reads like entitlement - some kind of expectation that other people exist just to make things the way they want them to be.
    • clusterfish 6y ago
      The comment you're responding to lists very concrete issues. Try accepting constructive criticism instead of accusing people of entitlement just because they dare to disagree with you. Entitled developers who think their work is above criticism just because it's open source are just as annoying as entitled users who think they are owed something.
      • izacus 6y ago
        They also seem to "dare" to disagree with major Linux distribution direction so perhaps it's not the responders opinion that's in the minority? I mean, this really sounds very similar to systemd and pulse audio type gnashing of teeth where the new solutions added plenty of widely required features while compromising on niche use cases which had other workarounds.
        • The_rationalist 6y ago
          So non laggy screensharing is niche use case? Such statement does not make any sense to someone that live in the reality, especially since covid. Wayland bring the risk of having critical bugs on compositor Y and critical missfeatures/missoptimizations. Staying on X does not have any major user facing issue. Therefore choosing to use Wayland right now is an irrational action which pros does not offset the cons. Maybe that it'll make sense in the next 5 years, then I'd reconsider
  • app4soft 6y ago
    > Examples (in order of importance to me): * Image editor, with own modern looking GUI-toolkit built on top of X11 (AzPainter)[0] > Until Wayland has all these (and more) and they are as stable and feature-rich as the existing apps on X, I will not willingly switch to Wayland. Same thing actually decided by AzPainter developer: they already tried to add Wayland support to its GUI-toolkit (additionally to already supported X11), but postponed it due to Wayland still is not fully usable.[1,2] [0] https://github.com/Symbian9/azpainter https://github.com/Symbian9/azpainter [1] https://aznote.jakou.com/prog/wayland/index.html https://aznote.jakou.com/prog/wayland/index.html [2] http://azsky2.html.xdomain.jp/memo/index.html http://azsky2.html.xdomain.jp/memo/index.html
  • nsajko 6y ago
    I agree those features are essential for an Xorg replacement, but you're missing the fact that the Wayland designers excluded them intentionally, so Wayland is intrinsically hostile to the features and the power-users that use them. See my comment at the top level of this thread.
  • xvilka 6y ago
    For me it's XMonad - there was an attempt to write Wayland alternative Waymonad[1][2] but it is now dead. [1] https://github.com/waymonad/waymonad https://github.com/waymonad/waymonad [2] https://github.com/xmonad/xmonad/issues/193 https://github.com/xmonad/xmonad/issues/193
  • mFixman 6y ago
    This is a good time to ask a question I wondered for a long time: why is does the clipboard depend on the window manager at all? Wouldn't it be easier to make it a separate service instead of having X or Wayland deal with it?
    • account42 6y ago
      There is no technical reason why it needs to be in the window system (well in X the clipboard goes away if you if the client that set it exits, but that is unwanted anyway) but from a user perspective it is very close to keyboard input so it makes sense to have it be handled by the same system.
• hacknat 6y ago
  When the last discussion of X being abandon-ware came up one of the things I wanted to say, being the creator of a highly used open source project myself, is that people are ultimately responsible for software. I was going to speculate that the maintainer of X might be burnt out and that none of us have any right to his free labour, and that the people whining should probably step up or shut up. Open source software is also free (as in beer) software. There's a word for people who complain about free things.
  • romanoderoma 6y ago
    > There's a word for people who complain about free things. You don't complain about the weather?
    • hacknat 6y ago
      I don't think I do (I'm generally not easily put out by weather), but I would argue that the weather isn't free. I have to survive and deal with weather (clothes, shelter, etc) no matter where I live or what I do.
      • nextaccountic 6y ago
        Well, it's free as in free beer. I'm not paying for the weather, but I still complain about it.
    • sergeykish 6y ago
      Do you complain about people building new shelter (for free)? The one (also free) we are using is impossible to fix though some people still maintain it.
  • yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
    > There's a word for people who complain about free things. The post and comments are free, yet here you are complaining. Consider why you think that's okay, and you'll understand.
• lallysingh 6y ago
  > I don't have any real desire to get there while still pretending that the xfree86 hardware-backed server code is a real thing What does he mean by that? That there isn't really a hardware-accelerated Xorg server? If that's true, is the post indicating that Adam sees the Xorg code as an interface layer to some other rendering system that had hardware acceleration? Is that XWayland? I'm guessing at all this.
  • wmf 6y ago
    He means that running Xorg "normally" without Wayland is abandoned and will begin to bitrot. He's planning to support XWayland indefinitely.
    • bitwize 6y ago
      If the only X driver left were the modesetting driver, I could probably live with that. Xwayland can lick my sack.
  • dyingkneepad 6y ago
    The xserver code base is huge and supports a lot of stuff. It supports drawing through hardware-backed drivers (e.g., xf86-video-radeon on Xorg), through generic drivers (e.g., xf86-video-modesetting on Xorg) and even through weirder drivers (e.g., xf86-video-nested). It also supports servers other than Xorg (e.g., Xephyr, Xvfb) and many other things. In an ideal world where everything uses KMS or everybody uses something like Xwayland we would be able to kill million of lines of code from the Xserver. While this doesn't happen, those millions of lines not exercised by these paths remain unmaintand. Remember, Ajax works for Red Hat, which is trying to push really hard for Wayland on Gnome. They don't seem to care about anything graphics-related that's not Wayland+Gnome. Red Hat has much more decision power on the Linux community than people imagine it has. A huge problem here is that a lot of efforts that were previously redirected at X11 are now being done on the Gnome compositor, due to Red Hat. We just won't get to see a solution to the fragmentation power unless someone with a lot of money decides to play Linux Graphics.
    • 6y ago
• smabie 6y ago
  So, I need nvidia proprietary drivers, use a window manager that doesn't support wayland (cwm), do I have any options besides using Xorg? I think the answer is no, but I'm not super well versed in these things. Xorg seems to work just great for me, not sure what all the fuss is about. But then again, I'm not an expert, so I'm happy to adopt any other solution, assuming I can get fast graphics/cuda at 144hz and use my favorite window manager, cwm.
  • johncolanduoni 6y ago
    Compositors are starting to implement Wayland EGLStreams support, but it’s very shaky at the moment. As always, X works fine in some setups but is hopelessly broken in others (e.g. multiple NVidia GPUs connected to multiple monitors).
    • dreamer_ 6y ago
      AFAIK Gnome and KDE already have EGLStreams support in place, but it does not work for XWayland because incompatibilities in NVIDIA-maintained libraries.
    • babypuncher 6y ago
      Kwin supposedly got it over a year ago, but trying to boot into a Plasma Wayland session on Nvidia still kicks me back to a TTY. I'm not convinced it will ever actually happen.
• numpad0 6y ago
  I wonder what this “only what is current may exist” culture is, whether it’s manifestation of survival of the fittest, a baby step towards the machine uprising of 2037; whether it acknowledges a notion, that an environment, where what without a change may sustain, cannot host a life.
  • politician 6y ago
    It's a solution to the trust problem. Without consensus on what good, stable software looks like -- there are zero trustworthy review sites anymore (cf Amazon reviews) -- the only metrics we really have left are (a) backed by large corporation, and (b) is newer than the alternatives. The other problems like environment drift and maintainer interest are secondary to the trust problem.
• https443 6y ago
  For someone not familiar with this world, what is X Server and xfree86? What problem does it solve?
  • billsmithaustin 6y ago
    See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System.
  • waynecochran 6y ago
    It provides an implementation for the X Window System (aka X11) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System It has a long a storied history. The concept of running an app remotely and use a local display server is probably the thing that sets X11 apart from the rest of the pack. This is still really useful in my humble opinion -- I can run X11 apps (e.g. xv) on a headless EC2 server running Linux in the cloud and have the UI/display on my Mac (using Xquartz). This story runs in parallel with the history of Unix itself.
    • https443 6y ago
      Thanks!
    • Wowfunhappy 6y ago
      The fact that there is an implementation of X on Mac speaks to the power of this system, IMO. However, regarding remote setups, is X forwarding significantly superior to using something like VNC? I've never done a side-by-side myself, but most of what I've read indicates that VNC is usually faster. As a semi-experiment, a few months ago I decided to try running Firefox in a Linux VM, and render it in XQuartz on my Mac host. The experience was not pleasant, to say the least. And that's what I'd think to be the best-case-scenario for latency. Hard for me to imagine using it over WAN.
      • freeone3000 6y ago
        Depends on the era of apps. If you're doing mostly bitmaps (that is, Qt4+, GTK2+, anything that draws its own UI, anything with HTML incl all electron, anything using GL, anything using composition) then VNC will work better, as it transfers better bitmaps. Working with Xlib, GTK1, or Qt3-era or earlier apps, X will perform astoundingly better. Test with xemacs next time, and you should see your results inverted.
• adobecs3 6y ago
  This is what happens when the losing player is humble enough to say GG because this was just a game. Nice RE at the end there. That said- Wayland might be the only future but I'm not convinced it is the present. It still misses a specified way to handle shortcut keys and screenshots.
  • emersion 6y ago
    Shortcut keys are configured in the compositor, and screenshots/screencasts work in a cross-compositor fashion via xdg-desktop-portal.
• acomjean 6y ago
  As a user of desktop linux (PopOS), I wonder what is going on here and how this effects me. I know enough about X, but. What the heck is wayland? wikipedia says (display server using the Wayland protocol is called a Wayland compositor, because it additionally performs the task of a compositing window manager.) Whats the compositor doing? Does this effect local linux or only trying to run windows remotely? Xwayland? I've used X (Xwindows) to run windowing apps remotely (ssh -X) occasionally. It works, excepting that now that I WFH it doesn't. Linux moves very slowly, but shouldn't replacing X be a great thing?
  • edent 6y ago
    I use Wayland on Pop_OS. It works flawlessly. Much better than X for rotated displays and fractional scaling. I guess it would be nice to have Wobbly Windows - but there's nothing about it that is missing for me.
    • vially 6y ago
      > I guess it would be nice to have Wobbly Windows Wayfire got you covered: https://wayfire.org/ https://wayfire.org/
      • ghostpepper 6y ago
        As a user of sway who recently found out about wayfire, it feels a bit strange that I need to switch out sway for something similar but not the same (totally separate codebase?) to get a few additional features (animations). As much as I like sway, this smells like bad architectural decisions when so much code needs to be rewritten many times.
        • ccmcarey 6y ago
          Indeed, and how the answer to this problem always seems to be "use wlroots". The wlroots github page[0] even says so: "about 50,000 lines of code you were going to write anyway". Seems to me that if there's a necessary 50k LoC that every compositor needs, it should actually be a part of Wayland. [0] https://github.com/swaywm/wlroots https://github.com/swaywm/wlroots
• hapless 6y ago
  It's worth noting this is not the first time that X has become abandonware. It's not even the second time. This is the third time X development has been abandoned. And yet, millions of us use X11 every day. Don't hold your breath for Wayland to replace X11.
  • iso8859-1 6y ago
    I am curious, what are the others? When XFree86 was forked to X.org, is that what you call the first?
    • rjsw 6y ago
      XFree86 was itself a fork.
      • na85 6y ago
        What's the difference between X11 and xfree86 (and I guess Xorg)?
        • kstrauser 6y ago
          XFree86 was an implementation of the X11 protocol. X.org is a fork of the XFree86 project (short version: XF86 license changed, and a huge chunk of the core contributors saw that as the final reason to take their work elsewhere).
          • rjsw 6y ago
            XFree86 was a fork of X11R5.
            • mcguire 6y ago
              I thought it was R6.
  • jdub 6y ago
• djsumdog 6y ago
  Have any of the BSD (FreeBSD/OpenBSD/NetBSD) started the transition to Wayland yet? X is more than just Linux? There are a lot of other operating systems out there and many have their own X11 forks they maintain.
  • wahern 6y ago
    https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/wayland_on_netbsd_trials_and https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/wayland_on_netbsd_trials_a...
  • trasz 6y ago
    FreeBSD certainly has: https://www.freebsd.org/news/status/report-2020-07-2020-09.html#FreeBSD-Graphics-Team-status-report https://www.freebsd.org/news/status/report-2020-07-2020-09.h...
  • emersion 6y ago
    The compositor I maintain (Sway) has continuous integration for FreeBSD.
    • merqurio 6y ago
      Thanks for sway!! It's my favorite compositor by far
  • joshklein 6y ago
    OpenBSD uses and actively supports a customized (not forked) X called Xenocara, which takes the opposite philosophical route from Wayland by putting a wider part of the ecosystem of X features into one coherent project so it can be maintained, improved, and culled (simultaneously, and without committees). You can learn about it on the Xenocara project pages and in its robust manual pages. If you read other comments in separate parts of the threads here, you’ll see people describing re-scoping certain elements “out” of Wayland and “into” other layers to fix “broken” parts of X. Those “widely agreed upon” solutions for other layers exclude considerations for the way OpenBSD works in fairly fundamental ways that make it seem (to me, at least) there is no practical purpose in exploring Wayland on OpenBSD beyond the point it has already been explored. I’m speaking about the coherent and supported OpenBSD operating system, not what can be found in packages. If there ever become features fundamental to the current user-developers of OpenBSD that are enabled by Wayland, I would expect them to further modify Xenocara to support those use cases, but it is hard to even imagine what those could be. Most of Wayland’s promised future features are anti-features to the OpenBSD approach. I expect that in 5-10 years, many user applications will be Linux-only, and there will be many conversations about how stubborn BSD (and Windows/Mac) designers are for not aligning to earlier decisions made on their behalf. These are just my personal opinions with no inside knowledge from any part of this intellectual territory, and I do not accuse or blame ANY developer on ANY project for working on what they are interested in, but I expect this unified Linux (and Linux-only) outcome is the unstated but express purpose behind promoting Wayland for some of the commercial interests that support it. I want to doubly emphasize that I am talking about the motivations of executives determining the allocation of capital and human resources, not about the motivations of the developers, which are clearly to facilitate cool or useful new things.
• entropy1111 6y ago
  Where can I find a list of protocols and standards, and what compositors have implemented them? I don't want to dig between issues and thousands of repos or docs. I imagine commercial software have even less patience, maybe that's why Zoom used the proprietary GNOME thing instead of the open standard. Wayland works really well, I think people who can't use it yet because of features they miss should just use x.org and stop complaining and harassing open source developers. I'm using sway and wayfire but I have no clue how they work behind the scenes or wayland itself.
  • dyingkneepad 6y ago
    The X11 protocol is highly documented. There are many decent books about it. The Xlib and XCB are small wrappers around the protocol. Once you learn one, jumping to the protocol bits is easy. Wayland is also a protocol and also documented, somewhere. I heard it has support for extensions and they are also in some repo. Search: https://cgit.freedesktop.org/ https://cgit.freedesktop.org/ A big difference between the Wayland and X11 protocols is that X11 covers a lot more things, like drawing. Also, X11 has the concept of a client that is also a compositor and tons of interfaces for clients and compositors and the Xserver to interact. Wayland has none of those things, because the entity that implements the protocol is the compositor, unlike X. Everything that's not covered by the Wayland protocol or extensions has to be defined/implemented by the Compositor, and that's where Fragmentation is killing us. Each compositor is allowed to implement whatever it wants to deal with those things. I am not aware of any standards here, although I would recommend trying to look if any XDG standards exist for those.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  • ywei3410 6y ago
    Here's a link with a (partial) [1] answer. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24889703 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24889703
• Santosh83 6y ago
  This ship has sailed for better or worse. The people who take these decisions don't hang out in forums to listen to every complaint and gripe. They work for the main corporations and foundations steering Linux development and they have decided that Wayland is the future, even if the transition is going to be ugly. Linux is no longer the "community" OS that it once was. In a way it has gone more mainstream than even MacOS or Windows, and that means it will cater to the larger market forces than the "community's" wants.
  • diegocg 6y ago
    Wayland is not corporate policy. It was developed as a side project by some guy from Red Hat, people liked it. Corporations would have likely pressured to keep using X11 to avoid breaking compatibility with applications.
  • emersion 6y ago
    The people who take decisions can take decisions because they contributed a lot to the project. If you want to take decisions too, there's no need to be part of a big company, all you need is getting involved. The ecosystem is still powered by the community. I see a lot of patches coming from hobbyists in many related projects.
  • ATsch 6y ago
    This makes no sense. The community of people working on Xorg aren't gone, they're just working on wayland now. Wayland was designed by long time Xorg maintainers. This "hostile takeover" narrative is complete FUD.
• albertgomariz 6y ago
  ugjg
• djhaskin987 6y ago
  I'd love to hear more about Xwayland, a project the OP talks about. It sounds like a way to run X on wayland, or maybe the other way around. It sounds like a really nice way to bridge the gap while wayland is still working out some of its kinks and providing backwards compatibility for X apps.
  • emersion 6y ago
    Yes, Xwayland lets users run X11 applications inside Wayland compositors.
  • sprash 6y ago
    Xwayland is more of a hack if anything. Half of the programs don't work because the security model of Wayland is fundamentally different than that of X11. E.g. Xeyes won't follow the mouse cursor because Wayland developers decided it is a security risk to read out mouse coordinates when the mouse is not positioned above the window. More severe in the age of home office work is the lack of support for XGetImage() that makes using X11 videoconferencing software almost impossible to run on XWayland.
  • ATsch 6y ago
    This has been working by default in all compositors for a while now, it is not a new feature or project.
• sprash 6y ago
  Good! Xorg needs to become a community project again. The current maintainers are almost without exception full time paid employees and act solely in the interest of their employers and NOT in the interest of the FOSS community. Their employers have decided to sabotage the ecosystem by breaking established community standards. Maintaining backwards compatibility is the most important thing to keep any ecosystem alive. This means the community should abandon their software (e.g. Wayland) and put people in charge of X11 that start acting in their interest.
  • dyingkneepad 6y ago
    Just because Red Hat is moving resources away it doesn't really mean it is sabotaging the project, just that it's realigning the priorities. Instead of blaming them for not caring anymore, we should blame ourselves for empowering them so much? Ajax seems pretty open in his invitation for people to come and help maintain the things RH doesn't care about anymore...
    • sprash 6y ago
      I'm blaming nobody. I'm just saying that there is a chance for X11 to become a real community project again. Never waste a good crisis.
      • sergeykish 6y ago
        > Their employers have decided to sabotage the ecosystem by breaking established community standards.
    • nsajko 6y ago
      > Just because Red Hat is moving resources away it doesn't really mean it is sabotaging the project I think you may have misunderstood the commenter you replied to: they were probably referring to the careless breaking of backwards compatibility that was being done while Xorg was still nominally being maintained. I think a good example is refactoring the Server while silently breaking extensions they don't care about. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xorg-server/+bug/315456 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xorg-server/+bug/3...
• cmrdporcupine 6y ago
  My problem with switching from X to Wayland is not that Wayland doesn't do enough of the things that X does. It's that at it's not different enough. I've been waiting for a really good Linux desktop experience and windowing system since I first started using Linux in 1991. I've always found X hacky and awkward in the entire almost-30 years I've been using it -- it's definitely improved from the era of manual modeline and input device configuration, but it's still ... yuck. Especially things like clipboard. But I don't feel like Wayland is the thing that's going to move us towards any world of consistency and usability. It's just another way for very heterogeneous and mismatched applications to draw arbitrary stuff on the screen.
  • nullc 6y ago
    I like the X11 clipboard behaviour a lot better than windows/mac. Having the additional clipboard is well worth the occasional weirdness where a non-natively-x11-thing uses the wrong one.
  • pmoriarty 6y ago
    What specifically do you want to see?
• busterarm 6y ago
  How well do fcitx & ibus work in Wayland yet? I need good l10n support. Who is using Wayland without X in Asia right now and isn't using English?
  • Arnavion 6y ago
    fcitx works fine for me under sway. I couldn't get ibus to work, but I used to use fcitx under X as well so I didn't try too hard to get ibus to work. That said, the way fcitx works is to use toolkit integration directly, rather than work with the compositor via the input-methods protocol. So it only works for programs using those toolkits. Thus gtk2, gtk3, qt programs will work, but not something like alacritty. (This is good enough for my use case.)
• Ericson2314 6y ago
  I like the sentiment....but I don't know a single person who actually uses Wayland. This concerns me.
  • Ericson2314 6y ago
    Why the downvotes? I generally try to run the latest stuff I can get away with on my laptop in solidarity of the devs who rather not be backporting fixes or putting up with technical debt. But I'm not even sure what to do about Wayland, other than switch to Fedora and meet that people that use it. I'm in a complete we-all-wish-we-were-using-wayland-but-aren't bubble. It's unfortunate.
• nightfly 6y ago
  If Canonical hadn't wasted a few years developing and trying to push Mir I feel like Wayland could be a lot further along now than it is.
• jandrese 6y ago
  Reading this post, it strikes me that there could have been standalone monitors with an Ethernet port that had just enough compute power to run an X server.
  • PAPPPmAc 6y ago
    There were. They were called X terminals ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_terminal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_terminal ) and there were quite a few of them on the market around the early 90s, supplanting the traditional terminal protocols. Then there were quite a number of Thin Client ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thin_client https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thin_client ) devices that were a hair more independent than dumb X terminals, from players like Sun (Sun Ray) and Wyse (Now part of Dell). There was an inversion from "Users per to Computer" to "Computers per User" and that model mostly fell out of favor.
    • erik_seaberg 6y ago
      There are third-party X servers for Windows, but almost nobody has heard of them, while everyone has a browser. So we’re abusing Javascript and HTML to replace X as a remote UI protocol for desktops/laptops that barely have any installed software.
      • sergeykish 6y ago
        X application draws on X Server, imagine server drawing on <canvas> over websocket. Each character I type would be handled by server. I can't imagine hardware requirements for HN in this model. NeWS is a better comparison to web browser.
    • GekkePrutser 6y ago
      Yes and those X-Terminals were exactly what X was invented for. This is why the net transparency is not great over high-latency connections, it was never designed for that. In those days companies only had a handful of "computers" and people worked on terminals. Usually shared over a 10 megabit shared ethernet bus, which was surprisingly responsive! However they were more than a simple terminal. Most of them were basically small Unix computers (like the SPARC X-terminal which was just a diskless low-powered SPARCstation, it could actually run full Solaris). HP's EnvizeX stuff was similarly complex though I don't think they could run HP-UX. But they weren't nearly as 'dumb' as the text terminals of the days. I still have a few Sun Rays here but they used a very different protocol that only worked with their proprietary software. However I do expect a return of this model. Now with the cloud, a lot of computing is once again shifting to a central model rather than on the endpoint.
• jrm4 6y ago
  As a part outsider/part insider (long time Linux user, not much of a programmer) let me see if I can try to summarize my frustration with this transition process -- it simply seems to be a much different methodology than the one that got Linux to where it is. As I understand it, Linus' number one deal is "don't break backward compatibility." The Unix Way is "Write programs that talk to one another..." etc. This is the foundation that I believe put Linux where it is today, this is why I love it and use it so much. Which is why I'm dismayed to see so much comfort with what feels in line with a proprietary top-down control attitude, the thing that Microsoft and Apple et al do, i.e. "This thing is going to change, so get over it." I appreciate that there is work being done. I'm willing to trust that there is a point to Wayland (I literally don't get it at this stage; trying to use it presently creates FAR more problems than it solves) -- but it seems like it should be axiomatic that the project works harder to preserve the space than it appears to now.
  • wmf 6y ago
    For whatever reason, people who follow the classic Unix/Linux philosophy no longer write much code. The people who are coding the desktop are all using a more Mac-like philosophy.
    • jrm4 6y ago
      Right, though I don't think that's quite it -- I think that the "Mac-like" projects/philosophies are more visible because of spaces like Hacker News and Reddit et al, plus perhaps the greater level of PR that bigger projects like Gnome and KDE (and Ubuntu, Mint, PopOs, etc) get. I have to remind myself to try to dig a bit deeper around to find out about the things I'm more into; what matters more to me than "the desktop" is "applications/programs" -- and that seems to be harder to seek out these days.
    • sergeykish 6y ago
      It never was true, UNIX is bloated, hence Plan 9, `cat -v`.
  • kllrnohj 6y ago
    On the contrary, Wayland is very much in the spirit of Unix & Linux philosophy, while X11 isn't. Wayland is an attempt to do one thing and do it well, hence why it doesn't have solutions for things like clipboard management. Because that's not part of display management & composition. Wayland only does that one thing. By contrast the common complaint about Wayland is that it doesn't have the vast variety of unrelated features rammed into it like X does. Part of the problem here then is that there's A) no big pushes for 'does one thing & does it well' for all the other X features (like clipboard or global keyboard shortcuts), and B) fragmented implementations of the wayland protocol. There really should have been a much better, and more singular, reference implementation that Gnome, KDE, etc... all just embedded instead. Which means the "does it well" part is taking a really long time, as developer communities are split up.
• arexxbifs 6y ago
  Funny how Wayland is trying to replace one of the few crucial parts of the *nix ecosystem that _isn't_ fragmented. Everyone's got their own take on everything from basic stuff like kernels, shells, userland, and directory structures to bigger stuff like desktop environments. Except X. X is X and everybody agrees that X is X. It's not perfect, but it's there, and it mostly just works, and all the programs are written for it. Instead of trying to fix the one thing we've all managed to agree upon, we're going to replace it with something completely different. I'm not sure this is a good idea.
  • jart 6y ago
    Imagine if Microsoft abandoned the WIN32 API. It feels like only yesterday that GNOME2 was scrapped in favor of Unity despite everyone's wishes. Or the day GNOME unilaterally required all distros switch to Systemd. The GNOME project has a long history of stirring the pot and helping Linux to continually destroy itself. The project itself was actually born from petty drama and unwillingness to cooperate with the Qt developers, who unlike GNOME actually had a decent API and went out of their way to address community concerns, but were ignored.
    • the_why_of_y 6y ago
      The GNOME project was started because KDE required the non-free (at the time) Qt library. Probably you forgot this little detail because Qt has been free software for such a long time now.
• rhabarba 6y ago
  I love how these blog entries keep ignoring the non-Linux world.
  • wmf 6y ago
    The non-Linux world isn't paying its way. They're just doing the bare minimum (or less) to port Linux desktop code and hoping that doesn't get too difficult.
• nsajko 6y ago
  > we can finally abandon xfree86 The trouble here for those who use Unix-likes as graphical programming environments is that Wayland is the intended replacement for Xorg, and the quoted statement comes from the perspective of making products for non-technical end-users instead of something power-users (like many of us here) can use efficiently. I will not claim here that it is theoretically impossible for efficient graphical programming environments to be based on a Wayland compositor, but the facts are firstly that currently Wayland based systems are a downgrade compared to Xorg (I think the Wlroots/Sway is currently the only compositor that tries to cater to power users, and the issue with Wayland is also that support from the compositor is necessary and difficult for almost any feature), and secondly that the Wayland design is hostile to features that power users are already accustomed to from X Windows. More broadly, Wayland is actually hostile to features like screenshots that all users of other operating systems are accustomed to, meaning that Wayland is actually causing an unnecessarily ugly image of Linux systems among users of other systems. Causally related to the above is the fact that the Wayland design necessitates great duplication of effort for both compositor implementations and applications that want to be able to use more than one incompatible compositor. Three days ago there was a discussion here on basically the same topic, and because my comment there[1] is completely relevant, I'm going to mostly just copy it here: A too common complaint about Wayland (or Wayland compositors, more specifically) is that it is taking a long time to catch up to X11. The elephant in the room is that this situation 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... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24886074 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24886074
• amelius 6y ago
  I have to disable wayland in gdm3 (on ubuntu), otherwise I end up in a login loop ...
• hsbauauvhabzb 6y ago
  On two occasions I’ve heavily modified WM source (originally ratpoison, now write). Without caring about graphical extensions will I be able to hack similarly under Wayland?
• speeder 6y ago
  Seemly people want badly to abandon X Server (not the protocol, I mean the server). Assuming they do. Is there any software that can replace the server part of it? For example in my current work I SSH -X to another machine, and use X apps installed on that machine, any other software can do that?
  • jlokier 6y ago
    The trend for now is to use remote desktops instead. VNC, RDP, that sort of thing. Use Xvnc or Xrdp on the remote machine, so the apps on that machine have something to connect to. Although X was remote-capable from early on, it was never especially well designed for remote uses. For example you can't easily detach from a display and move an app to a different display. And it's not very good at latency on a high-latency network. Partly that's because of how it assigned XIDs in the protocol; they should have been client-assigned. It would still be possible to make that change (as an extension) but it hasn't been done. It would be great if there was a modern remote desktop application protocol, that works well over all kinds of networks and allows application windows be moved between different display clients easily (e.g. from your laptop to your desktop at work). Or even better, let the application move as well, for ideal responsiveness everywhere. I think we will get that eventually, because it's such a natural evolution of all the distributed things we're building. But I think it will be a long time coming.
    • GekkePrutser 6y ago
      That's not a great trend though. Having actual programs rather than entire desktops run remotely is amazingly handy. A desktop inside a window has never been a great experience. Indeed it's not great at high-latency, it was invented for rooms full of local X-terminals (that were on constantly so connection loss wasn't an issue either, unless someone messed with the cable terminators :P ) I would love for this to continue being developed though, as there is still a great usecase for it IMO. But the protocol could really be cleaned up removing a lot of round-trips with locally cached variants (basically what NoMachine NX and X2GO are doing). I do agree it makes sense in this increasingly cloud-centric world.. I hope it will eventually come too!
  • 6y ago
• jll29 6y ago
  The X Window System (X11 for short) looks and feels the same on my Intel Ubuntu Linux laptop and on my HP 9000 UNIX workstation running HP-UX 11 on PA-RISC. X11 is ancient (1987), but it's brilliant. Its designers even anticipated having 16 mouse buttons, and (more importantly) opening a window on a remote system. The system is flexible, programmable, customizable; I've got all development manual volumes here on my shelf. While I'm open and sympathetic to any new ideas and improved software systems, including novel windowing concepts, personally, I don't have any unmet window manager needs at present. Any new system shouldn't just replicate a subset of X11, they should go beyond the state of the art to justify the time investment.
  • GekkePrutser 6y ago
    Indeed, this network transparency, I use it every day... It is the #1 feature I couldn't do without on Wayland. But X11 has been stale so long it would really benefit from a back-to-the-drawing-board approach. From many points of view. Network latency, security etc. But Wayland isn't it for me... It's too desktop centric IMO.
    • thespoonbends 6y ago
      What is your usecase for network transparency? Remote desktop? Is that not supported in a Wayland world?
      • GekkePrutser 6y ago
        No, running apps remotely. I specifically don't want to run desktops within Windows. Having remotely running programs on my desktop within my native window manager (or even on Mac and Windows) is much better. I mainly use it when logging into headless servers by the way. Saves me setting up a complete desktop environment there. All they need is the GUI apps I need and some X libs.
  • bluGill 6y ago
    Well the people behind Wayland maintained X for a long time, so they know something about it and the real problems. There were several other X replacements that never went anywhere over the years because the people who maintain X looked at it and said it didn't fix any of the real problems.
• victor9000 6y ago
  X Server made my Dell XPS 13 suffer from horizontal tearing. Each Ubuntu release came with its own set of tricks to circumvent the issue until the release of Ubuntu 20.04, when nothing seemed to work. Switched to Wayland and the issue went away without doing anything at all. Never looked back.
• ineedasername 6y ago
  I've never used Wayland. Are there inherent advantages that make it preferable, even if the community could successfully revive X? (And assuming Wayland's deficiencies were addressed-- speed as an example, from other comments I've seen)
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• DonHopkins 6y ago
  The whole window system situation on Unix is and has always been like a Rubik's Cube that somebody switched the stickers on so it's impossible to solve.
• known 6y ago
  X consumes 900 MB and Wayland consumer 1 GB RAM in my laptop
• anticristi 6y ago
  GNOME on Wayland allows me to set my FullHD laptop screen at 100% and my 4K display at 200%. I'm sold. :D