5 ms·

Maybe that's true if that's your only concern, but there are other reasons to replace X11 than just this. Also, X11 is arguably not the whole graphics stack, a

Maybe that's true if that's your only concern, but there are other reasons to replace X11 than just this. Also, X11 is arguably not the whole graphics stack, at this point the DRM/Mesa piece is much larger and more significant, and Wayland doesn't replace it outright anyway -- it makes it optional if needed for backwards compatibility, in the same way that macOS has XQuartz.

jude- 6y ago
The other two concerns in GP are no screen tearing, and better hidpi / multi-monitor support. Is it truly less work and less disruptive to address these to concerns within X11 than it is to throw X11 out (and also leave all nvidia users high and dry)? Also, keep in mind that throwing X11 out and replacing it will take more than just technical legwork -- it will also take ecosystem buy-in and standardization, and if we're being honest with ourselves, this is the harder problem. Recall that the X11 ecosystem has a 30-year head start on this, and there's a crap-ton of 3rd party software that assumes an X11 environment that Wayland is going to need to emulate. If X11 does indeed go the way of the dodo, I think we can reasonably expect another 30 years of bug reports in the form of "Fuck Wayland! I upgraded to Wayland and my $IMPORTANT_THING broke!". I very much doubt that at the end of the day the switch to Wayland is going to be overall easier than just fixing X11, but would love to be convinced otherwise.
- cycloptic 6y ago
  The usual way to fix other concerns like that has been to add more WM atoms or add more X extensions, which is a similarly uphill battle requiring buy-in and standardization, and typically old X clients just won't be updated to support those new things. The way to get the most value out of such things would be to add support to the major toolkits, but those have already been ported to Wayland for some years now. The backwards compatibility is done through XWayland which functions similarly to XQuartz, in that it is just the Xorg server running using Wayland as a backend driver.
  - jude- 6y ago
    What do you think is more of an uphill battle, in terms of time and energy sunk? Adding another X extension that can be incrementally deployed, or trying to phase X out by maintaining both an X11 and Wayland back-end for all apps trying to avoid breakage? This doesn't even speak to X11 apps that aren't built with toolkits (for example, I use xterm, xpdf, xfig, Openbox, etc.). XWayland is a nice idea, don't get me wrong. But it's not a 100% replacement either. Distros offering XWayland are even up-front about it's shortcomings [1][2][3]. [1] https://wiki.debian.org/Wayland https://wiki.debian.org/Wayland [2] https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/debug-wayland-problems/ https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/debug-waylan... [3] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/wayland#XWayland https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/wayland#XWayland
    - cycloptic 6y ago
      There isn't much difference there, but it would be more of an uphill battle if you tried to put everything different that Wayland does into X extensions. That still requires maintaining an extra code path for old X servers that don't support the new extensions, and creates additional risk of breaking things and causing regressions in the X server because of all the new code you're adding. Clients like term, xpdf, and xfig should work fine in XWayland. Window managers won't work without getting ported, but someone has been working on a port of Openbox: https://github.com/johanmalm/labwc https://github.com/johanmalm/labwc
      - jude- 6y ago
        > That still requires maintaining an extra code path for old X servers that don't support the new extensions, and creates additional risk of breaking things and causing regressions in the X server because of all the new code you're adding. Yes, agreed! But why is it _more_ risky to do that than to throw the whole X server concept away and start from scratch? Rewriting such a widely-used piece of infrastructure from the ground up is a super-risky proposition.
        cycloptic 6y ago
- kaba0 6y ago
  Nvidia cards with proprietary drivers are supported under gnome’s and plasma’s wayland implementations.
  - jude- 6y ago
    Ah, I didn't know that. Kudos to them!

jude- 6y ago

The other two concerns in GP are no screen tearing, and better hidpi / multi-monitor support. Is it truly less work and less disruptive to address these to concerns within X11 than it is to throw X11 out (and also leave all nvidia users high and dry)? Also, keep in mind that throwing X11 out and replacing it will take more than just technical legwork -- it will also take ecosystem buy-in and standardization, and if we're being honest with ourselves, this is the harder problem. Recall that the X11 ecosystem has a 30-year head start on this, and there's a crap-ton of 3rd party software that assumes an X11 environment that Wayland is going to need to emulate. If X11 does indeed go the way of the dodo, I think we can reasonably expect another 30 years of bug reports in the form of "Fuck Wayland! I upgraded to Wayland and my $IMPORTANT_THING broke!". I very much doubt that at the end of the day the switch to Wayland is going to be overall easier than just fixing X11, but would love to be convinced otherwise.

cycloptic 6y ago
The usual way to fix other concerns like that has been to add more WM atoms or add more X extensions, which is a similarly uphill battle requiring buy-in and standardization, and typically old X clients just won't be updated to support those new things. The way to get the most value out of such things would be to add support to the major toolkits, but those have already been ported to Wayland for some years now. The backwards compatibility is done through XWayland which functions similarly to XQuartz, in that it is just the Xorg server running using Wayland as a backend driver.
- jude- 6y ago
  What do you think is more of an uphill battle, in terms of time and energy sunk? Adding another X extension that can be incrementally deployed, or trying to phase X out by maintaining both an X11 and Wayland back-end for all apps trying to avoid breakage? This doesn't even speak to X11 apps that aren't built with toolkits (for example, I use xterm, xpdf, xfig, Openbox, etc.). XWayland is a nice idea, don't get me wrong. But it's not a 100% replacement either. Distros offering XWayland are even up-front about it's shortcomings [1][2][3]. [1] https://wiki.debian.org/Wayland https://wiki.debian.org/Wayland [2] https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/debug-wayland-problems/ https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/debug-waylan... [3] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/wayland#XWayland https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/wayland#XWayland
  - cycloptic 6y ago
    There isn't much difference there, but it would be more of an uphill battle if you tried to put everything different that Wayland does into X extensions. That still requires maintaining an extra code path for old X servers that don't support the new extensions, and creates additional risk of breaking things and causing regressions in the X server because of all the new code you're adding. Clients like term, xpdf, and xfig should work fine in XWayland. Window managers won't work without getting ported, but someone has been working on a port of Openbox: https://github.com/johanmalm/labwc https://github.com/johanmalm/labwc
    - jude- 6y ago
      > That still requires maintaining an extra code path for old X servers that don't support the new extensions, and creates additional risk of breaking things and causing regressions in the X server because of all the new code you're adding. Yes, agreed! But why is it _more_ risky to do that than to throw the whole X server concept away and start from scratch? Rewriting such a widely-used piece of infrastructure from the ground up is a super-risky proposition.
      - cycloptic 6y ago
kaba0 6y ago
Nvidia cards with proprietary drivers are supported under gnome’s and plasma’s wayland implementations.
- jude- 6y ago
  Ah, I didn't know that. Kudos to them!