6 ms·

> Wayland is staged to replaced X11 Wayland can't possibly replace X11, it's got a fundamentally different (I'd even say broken or even malicious) design. If a

by nsajko 6y ago

> Wayland is staged to replaced X11 Wayland can't possibly replace X11, it's got a fundamentally different (I'd even say broken or even malicious) design. If anything, some Wayland compositors may emerge as dominant desktop environments, but this would be a dark day for power users, if it would mean not being able to switch to an actually friendly design, as currently offered by Xorg.

yokem55 6y ago
Then I encourage you to take up leadership to get some development going on the bare metal xorg server. Odds are, within a year or two, it will need serious patches to keep working with up to date kernels, mesa, and nvidia drivers.
- michaelmrose 6y ago
  The kernels policy is not to break userspace and RHEL 8 which still supports X is 2 years into a 10 year support term. Also nvidia still provides drivers for 18 year old hardware for x under solaris If you want the current version built this year for Linux instead of the legacy version you will have to move up 2010 hardware though. I find it quite amusing that proponents of insert technology here seem to come in 2 stripes. A) Those who believe new thing is superior and think you ought to try it B) People smugly stating that you must move to new thing because the other options are going away see wayland systemd gnome. It reminds me of a supervisor at a telecom support center who gleefully explained that the new system would hang up on people who kept mashing zero on the automated phone menu that preceeded getting to a person to make you go through it. He didn't understand that people didn't want to use the new automated process because in general such systems are crappy and confusing.
  - zaxcellent 6y ago
    The kernel can choose to not support new hardware with old interfaces. If the X11 can't interface with new hardware, that's game over. No broken userspace necessary.
    - michaelmrose 6y ago
      Choosing not to support said interfaces would be the biggest breakage of userspace in 3 decades of Linux history. Such a course of action is nowhere specified by the people who would be responsible. As best I can see you have constructed it from whole cloth from suppositions that seem to be ill considered. Edit: To be clear breaking user space is when a change happens in the kernel level wherein software that used to work no longer works because the public interface presented differs. If you have evidence that this is actually going to happen other than your own misunderstandings please link it.
      - zaxcellent 6y ago
        There is a lot of detail about this in the kernel docs: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/gpu/drm-uapi.html#open-source-userspace-requirements https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/gpu/drm-uapi.html#ope... The gist of it is that breakage is OK if the userspace isn't open-source and that new uAPIs come around every few years due to the rapid pace development of GPUs. I worked on Chrome OS graphics for years on and one of my earliest projects was to bring DRM/KMS (then a newish interface) to the Cirrus display card (an ancient card that QEMU happens to emulate).
        michaelmrose 6y ago
        Does it specifically mention the kernel breaking X? One would think that would be the topic of discussion years before anyone actually did it.
        zaxcellent 6y ago
        I don't think the kernel guarantees that if X runs against Linux today, then it will run against the same X on new kernels on new hardware in perpetuity. It's more along the lines of, "if I one calls the read syscall with parameters a, b, c, it won't suddenly require a 4th parameter, or demand they be in a, c, b order." Anyways, if the kernel developers decided they wanted to invent a brand new uAPI that does graphics, I wouldn't at all be surprised if new GPU drivers only implemented the new uAPI if their target userspace programs all use the new uAPI instead of an older uAPI. Nothing in userspace is "broken" because it will seem to the old uAPI using userspace as if there is no driver for the new GPU.
  - kaba0 6y ago
    New software doesn’t get better just because it is new, but it is short-sighted to not evaluate (or evaluate on not enough context) a possibly better solution. The very people working on X decided to continue development on Wayland, do you think they would got with an inferior solution?
    - jude- 6y ago
      Yes, I do. I very much believe that the Wayland architectural decisions are motivated by non-technical reasons (look at who pays them, and who stands to benefit by controlling the majority of commits across the whole fd.o stack).
      - kaba0 6y ago
        Well, you can imagine some evil behind everything if you wish.. Or just look at a technical video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWQh_DmDLKQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWQh_DmDLKQ I don’t see these conteos regarding linux, especially goddamn desktop with the minuscule user share. It is literally a hobby thing for some graphics enthusiasts without any sort of money. Yeah sure, red hat or whatever..
        jude- 6y ago
        Except, I've seen this same exact song and dance routine played out already with systemd. Some RedHat developers make a thing no one wants to use, so they tightly couple many orthogonal concerns into one giant hairball, and they go on a road show to get a few crucial players (like GNOME and ConsoleKit, which was deprecated by the systemd devs) to hard-depend on it so distros have to choose between using the hairball or losing something that was entirely unrelated. It's a great play by RedHat, because now things are so interdependent that you need full-salaried developers working full-time on it, since the cognitive overhead required to understand how everything interacts now precludes a loosely-connected network of part-time volunteers from maintaining it themselves. Oh, and this whole affair has the obnoxious side-effect of stirring up all the /r/linuxmasterrace dipshits into a feeding frenzy that spills over onto HN, where they scramble over themselves to spam everyone who dares disagree with the same half-assed links and excuses.
anhanhanh 6y ago
Not sure what have I missed but how is X window system a "friendly design"?
- nsajko 6y ago
  Friendly compared to Wayland. X Windows offers many features that the designers of Wayland decided to exclude to keep their protocol simple, and for some security theatre reasons. But this simplicity is deceptive, as it means that implementing all the excluded features, and deciding on relevant interfaces, is left to the Wayland compositors. This is the reason "Wayland" (or, more correctly, Wayland compositors) still miss many important features that are * expected by users of X11, Windows, or Mac * expected by power users * needed by the visually impaired And it is also the reason why the Wayland ecosystem is destined for horrible fragmentation of interfaces, features and implementations. Another consequence is that the X11 model of having the possibility of easily making a window manager to one's liking is not possible with Wayland, as compositors are monstrous beasts compared to window managers. I also wrote about all this in some of my previous comments, e.g. there was a large thread here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24886074 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24886074 EDIT: there's another perspective to this that I didn't express very well, so here are some quotes from Arch BBS: By user neosix: > You can't send keystrokes, move mouse, move windows, you can't even get active window. And all that because of security? > But guess what it's not safe walking down the street, something can kill you, so let's just stay in the house and never go out again :) By user Trilby: > While I place a very high value on security and well designed software, the strategy of saying "you shouldn't want to do that" is not a sane policy. Yet this has been the approach of wayland from the start. Can you have a system panel? No, you should not want to have one. Can you have one client talk to another client? No, you should not want to do this. Can you turn on your computer and do anything even remotely productive with it? No, you should not want to be productive: here, watch a cat video. Emphasis mine.
  - taway098123 6y ago
    That's not a Wayland problem. The features you're asking for are probably still there but they're implemented at a different spot in the stack instead of trying to stuff everything into the same protocol like in X11. This is actually done to reduce fragmentation. Make a service its own daemon with a dbus interface or something like that, and then it can run the same on X or on any Wayland compositor. In my experience it's actually the simplicity of building window managers in X11 that's misleading. It's easy to get something up and running that lets you move windows around, but to build a full desktop that does everything you'd expect is a giant task, and X11 only really gets in the way of that.

by nsajko 6y ago

yokem55 6y ago

Then I encourage you to take up leadership to get some development going on the bare metal xorg server. Odds are, within a year or two, it will need serious patches to keep working with up to date kernels, mesa, and nvidia drivers.

michaelmrose 6y ago
The kernels policy is not to break userspace and RHEL 8 which still supports X is 2 years into a 10 year support term. Also nvidia still provides drivers for 18 year old hardware for x under solaris If you want the current version built this year for Linux instead of the legacy version you will have to move up 2010 hardware though. I find it quite amusing that proponents of insert technology here seem to come in 2 stripes. A) Those who believe new thing is superior and think you ought to try it B) People smugly stating that you must move to new thing because the other options are going away see wayland systemd gnome. It reminds me of a supervisor at a telecom support center who gleefully explained that the new system would hang up on people who kept mashing zero on the automated phone menu that preceeded getting to a person to make you go through it. He didn't understand that people didn't want to use the new automated process because in general such systems are crappy and confusing.
- zaxcellent 6y ago
  The kernel can choose to not support new hardware with old interfaces. If the X11 can't interface with new hardware, that's game over. No broken userspace necessary.
  - michaelmrose 6y ago
    Choosing not to support said interfaces would be the biggest breakage of userspace in 3 decades of Linux history. Such a course of action is nowhere specified by the people who would be responsible. As best I can see you have constructed it from whole cloth from suppositions that seem to be ill considered. Edit: To be clear breaking user space is when a change happens in the kernel level wherein software that used to work no longer works because the public interface presented differs. If you have evidence that this is actually going to happen other than your own misunderstandings please link it.
    - zaxcellent 6y ago
      There is a lot of detail about this in the kernel docs: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/gpu/drm-uapi.html#open-source-userspace-requirements https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/gpu/drm-uapi.html#ope... The gist of it is that breakage is OK if the userspace isn't open-source and that new uAPIs come around every few years due to the rapid pace development of GPUs. I worked on Chrome OS graphics for years on and one of my earliest projects was to bring DRM/KMS (then a newish interface) to the Cirrus display card (an ancient card that QEMU happens to emulate).
      - michaelmrose 6y ago
        Does it specifically mention the kernel breaking X? One would think that would be the topic of discussion years before anyone actually did it.
        zaxcellent 6y ago
        I don't think the kernel guarantees that if X runs against Linux today, then it will run against the same X on new kernels on new hardware in perpetuity. It's more along the lines of, "if I one calls the read syscall with parameters a, b, c, it won't suddenly require a 4th parameter, or demand they be in a, c, b order." Anyways, if the kernel developers decided they wanted to invent a brand new uAPI that does graphics, I wouldn't at all be surprised if new GPU drivers only implemented the new uAPI if their target userspace programs all use the new uAPI instead of an older uAPI. Nothing in userspace is "broken" because it will seem to the old uAPI using userspace as if there is no driver for the new GPU.
- kaba0 6y ago
  New software doesn’t get better just because it is new, but it is short-sighted to not evaluate (or evaluate on not enough context) a possibly better solution. The very people working on X decided to continue development on Wayland, do you think they would got with an inferior solution?
  - jude- 6y ago
    Yes, I do. I very much believe that the Wayland architectural decisions are motivated by non-technical reasons (look at who pays them, and who stands to benefit by controlling the majority of commits across the whole fd.o stack).
    - kaba0 6y ago
      Well, you can imagine some evil behind everything if you wish.. Or just look at a technical video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWQh_DmDLKQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWQh_DmDLKQ I don’t see these conteos regarding linux, especially goddamn desktop with the minuscule user share. It is literally a hobby thing for some graphics enthusiasts without any sort of money. Yeah sure, red hat or whatever..
      - jude- 6y ago
        Except, I've seen this same exact song and dance routine played out already with systemd. Some RedHat developers make a thing no one wants to use, so they tightly couple many orthogonal concerns into one giant hairball, and they go on a road show to get a few crucial players (like GNOME and ConsoleKit, which was deprecated by the systemd devs) to hard-depend on it so distros have to choose between using the hairball or losing something that was entirely unrelated. It's a great play by RedHat, because now things are so interdependent that you need full-salaried developers working full-time on it, since the cognitive overhead required to understand how everything interacts now precludes a loosely-connected network of part-time volunteers from maintaining it themselves. Oh, and this whole affair has the obnoxious side-effect of stirring up all the /r/linuxmasterrace dipshits into a feeding frenzy that spills over onto HN, where they scramble over themselves to spam everyone who dares disagree with the same half-assed links and excuses.

anhanhanh 6y ago

Not sure what have I missed but how is X window system a "friendly design"?

nsajko 6y ago
Friendly compared to Wayland. X Windows offers many features that the designers of Wayland decided to exclude to keep their protocol simple, and for some security theatre reasons. But this simplicity is deceptive, as it means that implementing all the excluded features, and deciding on relevant interfaces, is left to the Wayland compositors. This is the reason "Wayland" (or, more correctly, Wayland compositors) still miss many important features that are * expected by users of X11, Windows, or Mac * expected by power users * needed by the visually impaired And it is also the reason why the Wayland ecosystem is destined for horrible fragmentation of interfaces, features and implementations. Another consequence is that the X11 model of having the possibility of easily making a window manager to one's liking is not possible with Wayland, as compositors are monstrous beasts compared to window managers. I also wrote about all this in some of my previous comments, e.g. there was a large thread here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24886074 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24886074 EDIT: there's another perspective to this that I didn't express very well, so here are some quotes from Arch BBS: By user neosix: > You can't send keystrokes, move mouse, move windows, you can't even get active window. And all that because of security? > But guess what it's not safe walking down the street, something can kill you, so let's just stay in the house and never go out again :) By user Trilby: > While I place a very high value on security and well designed software, the strategy of saying "you shouldn't want to do that" is not a sane policy. Yet this has been the approach of wayland from the start. Can you have a system panel? No, you should not want to have one. Can you have one client talk to another client? No, you should not want to do this. Can you turn on your computer and do anything even remotely productive with it? No, you should not want to be productive: here, watch a cat video. Emphasis mine.
- taway098123 6y ago
  That's not a Wayland problem. The features you're asking for are probably still there but they're implemented at a different spot in the stack instead of trying to stuff everything into the same protocol like in X11. This is actually done to reduce fragmentation. Make a service its own daemon with a dbus interface or something like that, and then it can run the same on X or on any Wayland compositor. In my experience it's actually the simplicity of building window managers in X11 that's misleading. It's easy to get something up and running that lets you move windows around, but to build a full desktop that does everything you'd expect is a giant task, and X11 only really gets in the way of that.