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So. Couple of things. sloccount says xserver is around 370kloc. This isn't counting the drivers outside of the generic KMS support (which, practically speaking

So. Couple of things. sloccount says xserver is around 370kloc. This isn't counting the drivers outside of the generic KMS support (which, practically speaking, is what you're probably running on anything remotely modern), but ati+amdgpu+nouveau are another 102k, and intel is another 186k (partly because it embeds a copy of the software renderer for dumb reasons), so you're still not quite at two-thirds of an MLOC. The size isn't so much the issue, it's the design. The xfree86 ddx seriously believes that you have one video card driving one monitor with one keyboard and one mouse, and anything beyond that only works well because we sank a ton of effort into it. (It used to have code to disable interrupts! From userspace! What could go right.) It sounds a little like you think I'm being given these priorities as marching orders from above. That's maybe a bit insulting? I suspect I'd have the same opinion at this point regardless of my employment history, namely, that X is a tremendously successful project whose core design and reference implementation do not reflect how computers work anymore, in ways that make it painful to develop and maintain as the system display server. Frankly that was probably true in 2005 when I started on it, but at that point it was also the only thing that had credible video drivers at all. It's not that Red Hat is trying to lock anybody into a particular desktop out of some nefarious political agenda, it's that we don't have the resources to do things twice. If we want to deliver the best desktop experience we can then choose your own adventure among Gnome and KDE and XFCE and twm and i3 and whatever else simply is not going to be an efficient use of our headcount. And we're reaching that point with display services too, trying to support both X and Wayland increasingly means writing the same feature twice, sometimes with radically different approaches, and trying to implement them _at_ _all_ under X11 is more and more intractable. What would you have us do? What we're trying to build now is an Xwayland that keeps your X apps working as well as they ever did, under a hardware display server model that makes things like high-dpi and HDR and AirPlay and RDP and GPU offload straightforward, or at least feasible, instead of excruciating. You can like that or not, I guess. In all seriousness, if someone wants to take the reigns of stewardship over the xfree86 code then please, by all means, come forward and claim your prize. But I can't justify spending my time on that anymore, and given the interval since the last major release, apparently nobody else can either.

nybble41 6y ago
> It's not that Red Hat is trying to lock anybody into a particular desktop out of some nefarious political agenda, it's that we don't have the resources to do things twice. … What would you have us do? I appreciate the work that is going into the Wayland desktop ecosystem, really, but I would wonder why you would put all this general-purpose desktop environment implementation effort into Gnome specifically and not a common library like wlroots, with the Gnome compositor as a layer on top, so that all compositors would benefit. (I would ask the KDE team the same question.) It feels like what we are losing most with the transition from X11 to Wayland is commonality of implementation for the various system services other than input or presentation which were formerly handled by the X server, and which are now handled either by the compositor itself (Gnome and KDE) or by a shared library (Sway and any other wlroots-based compositors). It is good that we at least have standardization at the protocol level, but just the same in my opinion it is … unfortunate … that the two largest desktop environments chose to forge their own paths in terms of the implementations of those protocols, with various desktop-specific extensions.
dyingkneepad 6y ago
Thanks for replying to me. > 1st big paragraph Yes, I recognize I exaggerated regarding LOC. I should have not said that. I do understand that the core protocol assumes one of each thing. Sometimes I dream about declaring X12 being the same thing as X11 but with the core protocol being converted to just an additional extension marked for deprecation :). Then we also deprecate everything related to drawing and find a way to make compositing great again. > 2nd paragraph I did not mean to insult you at all. But let's be honest: if you wanted to spend your time doing something that your employer does not want, you'd either have to do it outside your normal working hours or you'd start getting bad performance reviews due to not being aligned with the business priorities. Red Hat's business alignment has much much much more influence over the Linux ecosystem as whole than people on Hacker News realize or are willing to believe. > 3rd paragraph I understand it, and that's why I say things won't change unless someone else with lot of money decides to play Linux Graphics. We can't blame RH for choosing a path and following (to quote a certain someone, "Linux is not about choice", right?). But we do have the unfortunate consequence that RH's decisions are contributing to significant fragmentation. You don't want to have to reimplement the stuff for X+Wayland, but everybody else who does not want to use the Gnome compositor will have to reimplement the stuff you put on Gnome. There's probably a lot the community (not only RH) could try to push to alleviate the fragmentation problems. > 4th paragraph I completely understand that.

nybble41 6y ago

> It's not that Red Hat is trying to lock anybody into a particular desktop out of some nefarious political agenda, it's that we don't have the resources to do things twice. … What would you have us do? I appreciate the work that is going into the Wayland desktop ecosystem, really, but I would wonder why you would put all this general-purpose desktop environment implementation effort into Gnome specifically and not a common library like wlroots, with the Gnome compositor as a layer on top, so that all compositors would benefit. (I would ask the KDE team the same question.) It feels like what we are losing most with the transition from X11 to Wayland is commonality of implementation for the various system services other than input or presentation which were formerly handled by the X server, and which are now handled either by the compositor itself (Gnome and KDE) or by a shared library (Sway and any other wlroots-based compositors). It is good that we at least have standardization at the protocol level, but just the same in my opinion it is … unfortunate … that the two largest desktop environments chose to forge their own paths in terms of the implementations of those protocols, with various desktop-specific extensions.

dyingkneepad 6y ago

Thanks for replying to me. > 1st big paragraph Yes, I recognize I exaggerated regarding LOC. I should have not said that. I do understand that the core protocol assumes one of each thing. Sometimes I dream about declaring X12 being the same thing as X11 but with the core protocol being converted to just an additional extension marked for deprecation :). Then we also deprecate everything related to drawing and find a way to make compositing great again. > 2nd paragraph I did not mean to insult you at all. But let's be honest: if you wanted to spend your time doing something that your employer does not want, you'd either have to do it outside your normal working hours or you'd start getting bad performance reviews due to not being aligned with the business priorities. Red Hat's business alignment has much much much more influence over the Linux ecosystem as whole than people on Hacker News realize or are willing to believe. > 3rd paragraph I understand it, and that's why I say things won't change unless someone else with lot of money decides to play Linux Graphics. We can't blame RH for choosing a path and following (to quote a certain someone, "Linux is not about choice", right?). But we do have the unfortunate consequence that RH's decisions are contributing to significant fragmentation. You don't want to have to reimplement the stuff for X+Wayland, but everybody else who does not want to use the Gnome compositor will have to reimplement the stuff you put on Gnome. There's probably a lot the community (not only RH) could try to push to alleviate the fragmentation problems. > 4th paragraph I completely understand that.