18 ms·

Maybe don't write an Xorg window manager right as the replacemeant for Xorg starts to take off though

by fyrn- 5y ago

zephyr9 5y ago
Does upstream Wayland work on any platform except for Linux? Does this display server have any form of colour management for, you know, the stuff it's displaying? Wayland is taking off like the Spruce Moose...
- emersion 5y ago
  Feel free to continue using X11 of course, no one's forcing anybody to switch. That said: > Does upstream Wayland work on any platform except for Linux? Yes, FreeBSD. Patches welcome to make it work on other BSDs. > Does this display server have any form of colour management for, you know, the stuff it's displaying? No more than X11 right now, ie. none. But it's in the works.
  - zephyr9 5y ago
    I was under the impression Wayland on FreeBSD required a lot of patching on their end, but this has been merged upstream? If so that's pretty good news. Also good news re colour management. The last I heard about this was Drew DeVault (and I'm paraphrasing) calling it "precious horseshit". [0] https://drewdevault.com/2021/02/02/Anti-Wayland-horseshit.html https://drewdevault.com/2021/02/02/Anti-Wayland-horseshit.ht...
    - kaba0 5y ago
      There is work on HDR colors, but I haven’t followed up on it.
linguae 5y ago
1. The article was written in 2014. 2. While it appears that Wayland is poised to replace X11 on Linux desktops given the amount of backing Wayland has compared to X11, it is not clear whether Wayland will replace X11 in the BSD ecosystem. According to the FreeBSD Wiki, Wayland is not ready to be a daily driver (https://wiki.freebsd.org/Graphics/Wayland https://wiki.freebsd.org/Graphics/Wayland), though work has been done getting Wayland compositors and other software to work on FreeBSD. I use X11 on my FreeBSD desktop. I'm unfamiliar with the current status of Wayland on NetBSD and OpenBSD. I expect X11 to live on for quite some time in the BSD world and among more conservative Linux users, similar to the situation regarding systemd in the Linux community, which was adopted by mainstream distributions and users but faced (and still faces) opposition from some users.
- mrweasel 5y ago
  Someone has started work on OpenBSD Wayland: https://www.sizeofvoid.org/posts/2021-09-26-openbsd-wayland-report/ https://www.sizeofvoid.org/posts/2021-09-26-openbsd-wayland-... I doubt it's something that will be ready for 7.1 next spring, but it's nice to see that it's actually working.
- pimeys 5y ago
  I've been using Wayland and Sway with FreeBSD 13 quite successfully. Everything worked quite well, except some indicators in Waybar that were using some Linux specific things to get values for memory usage etc...
- mcguire 5y ago
  3. Wayland has been "starting to take off" for longer than many of the readers here have been alive.
josefx 5y ago
That statement feels like a Tesla FSD announcement. I think Wayland people started to claim that before most Linux desktops even had a working replacement for any of the hundreds of things like screenshots, copy paste, etc. that where build into X11 but stripped out of Wayland.
- 5e92cb50239222b 5y ago
  What "Wayland people"? You probably mean the former Xorg developers who shifted to full time Wayland development long ago. Xorg is on life support, it has been getting bug fixes and nothing else for the past several years. From reading the sibling comment, if BSD guys want to keep using Xorg, they'll probably have to maintain it themselves.
  - josefx 5y ago
    > Xorg is on life support, it has been getting bug fixes and nothing else for the past several years. Imagine two cars: X11 its an old one, it doesn't quite start right, the windows are chipped, the paint is peeling of and no one really wants to invest money into maintaining it, it defaults to brakes and a steering wheel from 1980 but has seen continous upgrades over time and you can generally swap in a steering wheel from 2010 with minor problems. Now imagine wayland, a brand new tesla, it doesn't have brakes or a steering wheel because history has shown that these concepts evolve and if anything it should be a third party provider that creates them. Who cares that it took ten years between the release of the car as ready for use and the first compatible steering wheel implementation? Who cares that getting it to run on half of the roads (NVIDIA) is still not a solved problem because they stripped out any abstraction. > From reading the sibling comment, if BSD guys want to keep using Xorg, they'll probably have to maintain it themselves. As opposed to wayland which pushed 90% of features on the KDE/GOME/etc. guys (to be reimplemented in dozens of incompatible APIs). Of course the people who wrote wayland also wrote X11 so removing themselves from the equation might have been the nicest thing they ever did, given their own opinion of their past work on X11.
    - Arnavion 5y ago
qwerty456127 5y ago
This is exactly why I would rather do. I see absolutely no reason to abandon X and want to learn its internals to be able to maintain it myself. To me X seems a perfect piece of software which just works and does its job flawlessly, while having all the features I ever needed (including remote execution - I used Windows apps running on a remote Linux machine with Wine over SSH over OpenVPN on a local Windows machine and that was very easy).
- Seirdy 5y ago
  1. Wayland does support remote execution; see waypipe for an example. 2. X11 does lack critical features that lots of users need: GUI isolation (a very basic security measure that's otherwise been standard practice for decades), mixed DPIs, and perf on low-end ARM devices (compare Sway with dwm/openbox/i3 on a rbpi or pinebook and the difference is kinda shocking).
  - vidarh 5y ago
    X worked just fine on early 90s hardware. Performance today is about implementation, nothing inherent about X.
    - Seirdy 5y ago
      ARM chips did not exist in the early 90s, and compositors weren't the norm either. Current integrated graphics processors are optimized for a very different landscape. A typical X setup also includes a compositor to mitigate screen tearing. Factor all this into account and I'd be interested in seeing an X setup without screen tearing that performs at least as well as Sway on a Pinebook or a rbpi.
      - qwerty456127 5y ago
        What are, if any, use cases where one would need a compositor? Other than transparent window decorations, wobbling windows and overlay dock? These are kinda cool but not worth any additional complexity or hardware resources IMHO. I have never seen any screen tearing in my life by the way. Despite I have always been generally using decade-old PCs with lowest-end (mostly built-in) GPUs and Raspberry Pi is the only way I watch TV. The only annoyance I have with Raspberry Pi is YouTube the website (not the actual video, it plays Ok) being rather slow.
loxias 5y ago
> replacemeant for Xorg WHY. What's the compelling reason for Wayland? How will it make my life better? As someone who's used Linux as their only computing environment for 20 years, I'm terrified of my Xorg being taken away. It works! I understand it! And, I'm still bitter over my init system becoming unnecessarily complicated and stupid with systemd. There's what feels like a rising attitude in the F/OSS community of people wanting to replace things simply because they are old.
- perth 5y ago
  Well it doesn't rely on using a giant buffer for multiple monitors so it supports hidpi scaling. Have you ever tried hidpi on xorg? It's a mess, even on Ubuntu where they tried their best to clean it up. The xorg apps from the compatibility layer still suffer from it, probably until they update to Wayland. Sidenote: Google tried to use xorg for ChromeOS and ended up writing their own UI system for hidpi scaling among other things when it didn't work Some relevant links for those curious about other people hitting into this: https://www.foell.org/justin/simple-hidpi-monitor-scaling-with-wayland-in-ubuntu-18-04/ https://www.foell.org/justin/simple-hidpi-monitor-scaling-wi... Gnome team: https://wiki.gnome.org/Initiatives/Wayland/XWayland https://wiki.gnome.org/Initiatives/Wayland/XWayland
  - jcelerier 5y ago
    Setting DPI in .Xresources had worked fine for me since 2014 except for Firefox and Chrome which took a year or so to adapt
    - perth 5y ago
      Try to set two different DPIs in that.
      - AshamedCaptain 5y ago
        You certainly can, but the problem is that there is no agreed standard from the toolkits to do it. E.g. Qt has its own way.
sprash 5y ago
> right as the replacemeant for Xorg starts to take off though It has been "taking off" for 13 years at this point. It seems like it doesn't have much thrust behind it.
- Seirdy 5y ago
  Fedora, Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, RHEL/Rocky, and Debian all have their default desktops on Wayland. Both GNOME and KDE have already switched and will keep legacy X around for compatibility purposes for another few years. On the more minimal side to compete with X-based window managers: Sway is very mature and River is turning out nicely. All that's left is an Openbox alternative. I believe there are a few, but I'm not familiar. Wayland has already taken off; once we get XFCE to switch we should be able to move on.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - sprash 5y ago
    This is not an organic transition. Major organizations seems to "push" it but there is not much "pull". Compare this to the "transition" from CVS/SVN to git. There was no need to even advertise git. People saw it and wanted it. The X11 ecosystem is more than just GNOME, KDE and i3 and porting XFCE will not be enough to "move on" (For me it is the small things like Xdotool, Xsel, Xcalib, etc. that are holding me back). Maybe X11 needs to be replaced but Wayland is not the answer. It's just not good enough and because of fundamental flaws of its philosophical concepts it will never be.
    - Seirdy 5y ago
      Xdotool and xsel have had Wayland equivalents for years: see ydotool/wtype and wl-clipboard. The reason why major orgs have had to push for Wayland is the same as the reasons they had to push for HTTPS and TLSv1.2, unique passwords, keeping software up to date, etc: using outdated and insecure software with significant attack surface has real costs even if it's convenient.
upofadown 5y ago
It is relatively easy to write an X based window manager that is actually usable. So the article could not exist in a Wayland context ... and it is not at all clear what framework will make Wayland usable in such a simple and straightforward way or if one is even possible.
- kaba0 5y ago
  Wlroots would like a word with you.
  - upofadown 5y ago
    Here is a discussion of what that involves from someone who used wlroots to write a window manager other than Sway: * http://inclem.net/2021/04/17/wayland/writing_a_wayland_compositor_with_wlroots/ http://inclem.net/2021/04/17/wayland/writing_a_wayland_compo...

Maybe don't write an Xorg window manager right as the replacemeant for Xorg starts to take off though

by fyrn- 5y ago

Maybe don't write an Xorg window manager right as the replacemeant for Xorg starts to take off though

Does upstream Wayland work on any platform except for Linux? Does this display server have any form of colour management for, you know, the stuff it's displaying? Wayland is taking off like the Spruce Moose...

emersion 5y ago
Feel free to continue using X11 of course, no one's forcing anybody to switch. That said: > Does upstream Wayland work on any platform except for Linux? Yes, FreeBSD. Patches welcome to make it work on other BSDs. > Does this display server have any form of colour management for, you know, the stuff it's displaying? No more than X11 right now, ie. none. But it's in the works.
- zephyr9 5y ago
  I was under the impression Wayland on FreeBSD required a lot of patching on their end, but this has been merged upstream? If so that's pretty good news. Also good news re colour management. The last I heard about this was Drew DeVault (and I'm paraphrasing) calling it "precious horseshit". [0] https://drewdevault.com/2021/02/02/Anti-Wayland-horseshit.html https://drewdevault.com/2021/02/02/Anti-Wayland-horseshit.ht...
  - kaba0 5y ago
    There is work on HDR colors, but I haven’t followed up on it.

linguae 5y ago

1. The article was written in 2014. 2. While it appears that Wayland is poised to replace X11 on Linux desktops given the amount of backing Wayland has compared to X11, it is not clear whether Wayland will replace X11 in the BSD ecosystem. According to the FreeBSD Wiki, Wayland is not ready to be a daily driver (https://wiki.freebsd.org/Graphics/Wayland https://wiki.freebsd.org/Graphics/Wayland), though work has been done getting Wayland compositors and other software to work on FreeBSD. I use X11 on my FreeBSD desktop. I'm unfamiliar with the current status of Wayland on NetBSD and OpenBSD. I expect X11 to live on for quite some time in the BSD world and among more conservative Linux users, similar to the situation regarding systemd in the Linux community, which was adopted by mainstream distributions and users but faced (and still faces) opposition from some users.

mrweasel 5y ago
Someone has started work on OpenBSD Wayland: https://www.sizeofvoid.org/posts/2021-09-26-openbsd-wayland-report/ https://www.sizeofvoid.org/posts/2021-09-26-openbsd-wayland-... I doubt it's something that will be ready for 7.1 next spring, but it's nice to see that it's actually working.
pimeys 5y ago
I've been using Wayland and Sway with FreeBSD 13 quite successfully. Everything worked quite well, except some indicators in Waybar that were using some Linux specific things to get values for memory usage etc...
mcguire 5y ago
3. Wayland has been "starting to take off" for longer than many of the readers here have been alive.

josefx 5y ago

That statement feels like a Tesla FSD announcement. I think Wayland people started to claim that before most Linux desktops even had a working replacement for any of the hundreds of things like screenshots, copy paste, etc. that where build into X11 but stripped out of Wayland.

5e92cb50239222b 5y ago
What "Wayland people"? You probably mean the former Xorg developers who shifted to full time Wayland development long ago. Xorg is on life support, it has been getting bug fixes and nothing else for the past several years. From reading the sibling comment, if BSD guys want to keep using Xorg, they'll probably have to maintain it themselves.
- josefx 5y ago
  > Xorg is on life support, it has been getting bug fixes and nothing else for the past several years. Imagine two cars: X11 its an old one, it doesn't quite start right, the windows are chipped, the paint is peeling of and no one really wants to invest money into maintaining it, it defaults to brakes and a steering wheel from 1980 but has seen continous upgrades over time and you can generally swap in a steering wheel from 2010 with minor problems. Now imagine wayland, a brand new tesla, it doesn't have brakes or a steering wheel because history has shown that these concepts evolve and if anything it should be a third party provider that creates them. Who cares that it took ten years between the release of the car as ready for use and the first compatible steering wheel implementation? Who cares that getting it to run on half of the roads (NVIDIA) is still not a solved problem because they stripped out any abstraction. > From reading the sibling comment, if BSD guys want to keep using Xorg, they'll probably have to maintain it themselves. As opposed to wayland which pushed 90% of features on the KDE/GOME/etc. guys (to be reimplemented in dozens of incompatible APIs). Of course the people who wrote wayland also wrote X11 so removing themselves from the equation might have been the nicest thing they ever did, given their own opinion of their past work on X11.
  - Arnavion 5y ago

qwerty456127 5y ago

This is exactly why I would rather do. I see absolutely no reason to abandon X and want to learn its internals to be able to maintain it myself. To me X seems a perfect piece of software which just works and does its job flawlessly, while having all the features I ever needed (including remote execution - I used Windows apps running on a remote Linux machine with Wine over SSH over OpenVPN on a local Windows machine and that was very easy).

Seirdy 5y ago
1. Wayland does support remote execution; see waypipe for an example. 2. X11 does lack critical features that lots of users need: GUI isolation (a very basic security measure that's otherwise been standard practice for decades), mixed DPIs, and perf on low-end ARM devices (compare Sway with dwm/openbox/i3 on a rbpi or pinebook and the difference is kinda shocking).
- vidarh 5y ago
  X worked just fine on early 90s hardware. Performance today is about implementation, nothing inherent about X.
  - Seirdy 5y ago
    ARM chips did not exist in the early 90s, and compositors weren't the norm either. Current integrated graphics processors are optimized for a very different landscape. A typical X setup also includes a compositor to mitigate screen tearing. Factor all this into account and I'd be interested in seeing an X setup without screen tearing that performs at least as well as Sway on a Pinebook or a rbpi.
    - qwerty456127 5y ago
      What are, if any, use cases where one would need a compositor? Other than transparent window decorations, wobbling windows and overlay dock? These are kinda cool but not worth any additional complexity or hardware resources IMHO. I have never seen any screen tearing in my life by the way. Despite I have always been generally using decade-old PCs with lowest-end (mostly built-in) GPUs and Raspberry Pi is the only way I watch TV. The only annoyance I have with Raspberry Pi is YouTube the website (not the actual video, it plays Ok) being rather slow.

loxias 5y ago

> replacemeant for Xorg WHY. What's the compelling reason for Wayland? How will it make my life better? As someone who's used Linux as their only computing environment for 20 years, I'm terrified of my Xorg being taken away. It works! I understand it! And, I'm still bitter over my init system becoming unnecessarily complicated and stupid with systemd. There's what feels like a rising attitude in the F/OSS community of people wanting to replace things simply because they are old.

perth 5y ago
Well it doesn't rely on using a giant buffer for multiple monitors so it supports hidpi scaling. Have you ever tried hidpi on xorg? It's a mess, even on Ubuntu where they tried their best to clean it up. The xorg apps from the compatibility layer still suffer from it, probably until they update to Wayland. Sidenote: Google tried to use xorg for ChromeOS and ended up writing their own UI system for hidpi scaling among other things when it didn't work Some relevant links for those curious about other people hitting into this: https://www.foell.org/justin/simple-hidpi-monitor-scaling-with-wayland-in-ubuntu-18-04/ https://www.foell.org/justin/simple-hidpi-monitor-scaling-wi... Gnome team: https://wiki.gnome.org/Initiatives/Wayland/XWayland https://wiki.gnome.org/Initiatives/Wayland/XWayland
- jcelerier 5y ago
  Setting DPI in .Xresources had worked fine for me since 2014 except for Firefox and Chrome which took a year or so to adapt
  - perth 5y ago
    Try to set two different DPIs in that.
    - AshamedCaptain 5y ago
      You certainly can, but the problem is that there is no agreed standard from the toolkits to do it. E.g. Qt has its own way.

sprash 5y ago

> right as the replacemeant for Xorg starts to take off though It has been "taking off" for 13 years at this point. It seems like it doesn't have much thrust behind it.

Seirdy 5y ago
Fedora, Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, RHEL/Rocky, and Debian all have their default desktops on Wayland. Both GNOME and KDE have already switched and will keep legacy X around for compatibility purposes for another few years. On the more minimal side to compete with X-based window managers: Sway is very mature and River is turning out nicely. All that's left is an Openbox alternative. I believe there are a few, but I'm not familiar. Wayland has already taken off; once we get XFCE to switch we should be able to move on.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- sprash 5y ago
  This is not an organic transition. Major organizations seems to "push" it but there is not much "pull". Compare this to the "transition" from CVS/SVN to git. There was no need to even advertise git. People saw it and wanted it. The X11 ecosystem is more than just GNOME, KDE and i3 and porting XFCE will not be enough to "move on" (For me it is the small things like Xdotool, Xsel, Xcalib, etc. that are holding me back). Maybe X11 needs to be replaced but Wayland is not the answer. It's just not good enough and because of fundamental flaws of its philosophical concepts it will never be.
  - Seirdy 5y ago
    Xdotool and xsel have had Wayland equivalents for years: see ydotool/wtype and wl-clipboard. The reason why major orgs have had to push for Wayland is the same as the reasons they had to push for HTTPS and TLSv1.2, unique passwords, keeping software up to date, etc: using outdated and insecure software with significant attack surface has real costs even if it's convenient.

upofadown 5y ago

It is relatively easy to write an X based window manager that is actually usable. So the article could not exist in a Wayland context ... and it is not at all clear what framework will make Wayland usable in such a simple and straightforward way or if one is even possible.

kaba0 5y ago
Wlroots would like a word with you.
- upofadown 5y ago
  Here is a discussion of what that involves from someone who used wlroots to write a window manager other than Sway: * http://inclem.net/2021/04/17/wayland/writing_a_wayland_compositor_with_wlroots/ http://inclem.net/2021/04/17/wayland/writing_a_wayland_compo...