6 ms·

I am glad Xorg is development is continuing. However I don't understand the status of the project, I was under the impression it was simply just being maintaine

I am glad Xorg is development is continuing. However I don't understand the status of the project, I was under the impression it was simply just being maintained rather than actively developed. Personally I have been unimpressed with Wayland. Configuration, Stability and the ability to easily record my screen makes me stick with Xorg over Wayland (I am using an AMD GPU with Debian 11).

mmcdermott 5y ago
That matches my experience as well. I'll do a fresh distro install and not notice at first if it defaults to Wayland, then I'll run into something. It might be crashe or app compatibility (I had a game on Wine once that crashed on Wayland but not X11), but it drives me to switch things over to X11.
- ugjka 5y ago
  Wine doesn't work on Wayland period. You need wine-wayland and that only does games not regular windows programs
- nextos 5y ago
  Also all tiling window managers will need to be rewritten from scratch basically as Wayland's architecture is very different, which sucks.
  - CyberShadow 5y ago
    It's worse than that. Window managers simply cannot exist in Wayland, because the compositor is the only actor which can also do window management. This coupling is one of the biggest design faults of Wayland. The platform-specific functionality is no longer encapsulated in a stand-alone piece of software - the compositor now must do everything, because Wayland trusts only it to do anything privileged. This leads to less choice and more restrictions. If you wanted to get X11 running on e.g. your phone, you would get the Xorg server Android app, then run the window manager you want, then run the applications you want. This is not possible in Wayland: there would need to be one per-platform app per compositor / window manager, so you would need e.g. Weston for Linux, Weston for Android, Weston for iOS, sway for Linux, sway for Android, sway for iOS, ...
    - porkloin 5y ago
      For this exact reason I think we're going to see a lot more development of DE-specific tiling window management solutions, like Pop Shell, PaperWM, Material Shell, etc., are doing for Gnome. They all just leverage the Gnome Shell extension system, but are inextricably dependent on Gnome.
zepto 5y ago
Did Xorg ever claim it was no longer being developed, or was that just something someone said in a blog post?
- lolinder 5y ago
  I found this: https://ajaxnwnk.blogspot.com/2020/10/on-abandoning-x-server.html https://ajaxnwnk.blogspot.com/2020/10/on-abandoning-x-server... > So here's the thing: X works extremely well for what it is, but what it is is deeply flawed. There's no shame in that, it's 33 years old and still relevant, I wish more software worked so well on that kind of timeframe. But using it to drive your display hardware and multiplex your input devices is choosing to make your life worse. > ... > So, is Xorg abandoned? To the extent that that means using it to actually control the display, and not just keep X apps running, I'd say yes. But xserver is more than xfree86. Xwayland, Xwin, Xephyr, Xvnc, Xvfb: these are projects with real value that we should not give up. A better way to say it is that we can finally abandon xfree86. --- I think that to the extent there's confusion, it's because a lot of people (myself included) don't understand the project structure of Xorg. I honestly still don't know what the distinction is between these projects, I just know that around this time people started saying that it was time to switch to Wayland.
  - asveikau 5y ago
    > So, is Xorg abandoned? To the extent that that means using it to actually control the display, and not just keep X apps running, I'd say yes This seems a bit like developer hubris to me, a bit like when commercial developers are overconfident in deprecating things without understanding usage in the field. It's somewhat blind to actual usage. It isn't dead in that sense. Now, the maintainer might not want to do it, and that's within their rights. But it's possible that somebody will step up to do any maintenance work. Which would probably be minimal but not zero.
irthomasthomas 5y ago
The rumor is that it was abandoned 3 years ago due to resistance from upstream developers that are focused on Wayland. This could be true, since apparently, most of these changes had been done already, but not rolled out. So an independent developer, Povilas Kanapickas took up the challenge of releasing it. Well done, that man. https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/merge_requests/709 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/merge_requests...
- ncmncm 5y ago
  Note, if you welcome this development, donations are equally welcome, and will probably lead directly to more such development.
  - CyberShadow 5y ago
    Here is the author's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/p12tic https://www.patreon.com/p12tic
- TheChaplain 5y ago
  Huh, there seem to be some activity in the repo over the last year from several people. Not an amazing amount but it's going forward it seems
boudin 5y ago
Debian is definitely not a good distribution to test Wayland in its current state. A lot of packages are quite a few stable version behind, and the whole Wayland ecosystem is moving really quickly (for example, Gnome 3.38 instead of Gnome 41) Staying on x11 makes more sense unless using Debian unstable or testing.
- rmrfchik 5y ago
  I'm on Debian unstable. Giving wayland a chance once per month on intel and nvidia cards. It seems usable on Intel although many minor X11 habits are broken (like selection), but totally unusable on nvidia (black screen). X11 is still way to go, as 13 year in development is not enough for Wayland.
  - boudin 5y ago
    Nvidia just fixed its driver this year, and it's still not in great shape. You can only blame Nvidia for that. We have quite different experiences I guess. On my side I just see that the recurring graphical issues that I had with X11 are fixed. Everything is super smooth, no tearing and really stable. Bonus points some of the side initiatives also improved a lot the ecosystem, like Pipewire.
  - myownfriend 5y ago
    Currently running Gnome from a Wayland session with Nvidia's 510.39.01 drivers without issue. It's not Wayland that's not ready yet, it's the ecosystem around it. While the first commit on the Wayland git was in 2008, it's client and server APIs weren't considered stable until 2013 and then DE support for it only really picked up in 2016 since they were built around X11 from the beginning. If you were an Nvidia user then your options for DEs were limited to the ones that supported EGLStreams and you didn't get XWayland hardware acceleration or support for Webrender in Firefox until Nvidia started support DMA-buf in June of last year. Nvidia didn't support GBM until October of this year but it had an annoying memory leak which caused issues with programs not wanting to launch of launching as black squares. On top of that, the code that compositors and XWayland used to detect whether to use GBM or EGLStreams didn't work at first and XWayland windows launched as transparent so they needed to be updated. It wasn't until these beta drivers, which came out this month, that I'm able to do everything I'm supposed to be able to do in a Wayland session and the major hurdles in Wayland adoption on Nvidia have been removed. Kwin already removed it's EGLStreams backend because it never worked well to begin with and the drivers will only improve from now on.
kunagi7 5y ago
As someone who uses a graphics tablet (Wacom) I'm glad Xorg is somehow actively developed again or I would just switch to Mac/Windows. I tried Wayland for around four years (GNOME, sway, KDE), almost daily. I have a multiple monitor setup. I always had to switch back to Xorg for several reasons, like: - iBus CJK support was horrible. Languages like English, Russian or Spanish don't need that but Japanese/Chinese needs it. Things like the suggestions window was completely broken (misplaced and disappeared randomly). I used several tricks to work around it but it was quite uncomfortable. - Wine refusing to work half of the time (even with the Virtual Desktop) - VSync not working with games (making my GPU go 100%) - Applications crashing for no apparent reason. - XWayland crashing completely... Even the whole compositor would crash randomly making me lose all my work. - But the worst thing was the drawing tablet. It was completely broken. Things like pen sensibility (quite important to get details right), screen locking (it's useless to draw with less than half of the tablet!) and top buttons. I used Wayland since it was really smooth with an old Intel GPU. The Xorg experience was quite unstable (I couldn't find the right compositor configuration). One day I was quite fed up, got a new rig with an AMD GPU and removed Wayland completely. Compared with Wayland, even with its quirks, Xorg just works.

mmcdermott 5y ago

That matches my experience as well. I'll do a fresh distro install and not notice at first if it defaults to Wayland, then I'll run into something. It might be crashe or app compatibility (I had a game on Wine once that crashed on Wayland but not X11), but it drives me to switch things over to X11.

ugjka 5y ago
Wine doesn't work on Wayland period. You need wine-wayland and that only does games not regular windows programs
nextos 5y ago
Also all tiling window managers will need to be rewritten from scratch basically as Wayland's architecture is very different, which sucks.
- CyberShadow 5y ago
  It's worse than that. Window managers simply cannot exist in Wayland, because the compositor is the only actor which can also do window management. This coupling is one of the biggest design faults of Wayland. The platform-specific functionality is no longer encapsulated in a stand-alone piece of software - the compositor now must do everything, because Wayland trusts only it to do anything privileged. This leads to less choice and more restrictions. If you wanted to get X11 running on e.g. your phone, you would get the Xorg server Android app, then run the window manager you want, then run the applications you want. This is not possible in Wayland: there would need to be one per-platform app per compositor / window manager, so you would need e.g. Weston for Linux, Weston for Android, Weston for iOS, sway for Linux, sway for Android, sway for iOS, ...
  - porkloin 5y ago
    For this exact reason I think we're going to see a lot more development of DE-specific tiling window management solutions, like Pop Shell, PaperWM, Material Shell, etc., are doing for Gnome. They all just leverage the Gnome Shell extension system, but are inextricably dependent on Gnome.

zepto 5y ago

Did Xorg ever claim it was no longer being developed, or was that just something someone said in a blog post?

lolinder 5y ago
I found this: https://ajaxnwnk.blogspot.com/2020/10/on-abandoning-x-server.html https://ajaxnwnk.blogspot.com/2020/10/on-abandoning-x-server... > So here's the thing: X works extremely well for what it is, but what it is is deeply flawed. There's no shame in that, it's 33 years old and still relevant, I wish more software worked so well on that kind of timeframe. But using it to drive your display hardware and multiplex your input devices is choosing to make your life worse. > ... > So, is Xorg abandoned? To the extent that that means using it to actually control the display, and not just keep X apps running, I'd say yes. But xserver is more than xfree86. Xwayland, Xwin, Xephyr, Xvnc, Xvfb: these are projects with real value that we should not give up. A better way to say it is that we can finally abandon xfree86. --- I think that to the extent there's confusion, it's because a lot of people (myself included) don't understand the project structure of Xorg. I honestly still don't know what the distinction is between these projects, I just know that around this time people started saying that it was time to switch to Wayland.
- asveikau 5y ago
  > So, is Xorg abandoned? To the extent that that means using it to actually control the display, and not just keep X apps running, I'd say yes This seems a bit like developer hubris to me, a bit like when commercial developers are overconfident in deprecating things without understanding usage in the field. It's somewhat blind to actual usage. It isn't dead in that sense. Now, the maintainer might not want to do it, and that's within their rights. But it's possible that somebody will step up to do any maintenance work. Which would probably be minimal but not zero.

irthomasthomas 5y ago

The rumor is that it was abandoned 3 years ago due to resistance from upstream developers that are focused on Wayland. This could be true, since apparently, most of these changes had been done already, but not rolled out. So an independent developer, Povilas Kanapickas took up the challenge of releasing it. Well done, that man. https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/merge_requests/709 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/merge_requests...

ncmncm 5y ago
Note, if you welcome this development, donations are equally welcome, and will probably lead directly to more such development.
- CyberShadow 5y ago
  Here is the author's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/p12tic https://www.patreon.com/p12tic
TheChaplain 5y ago
Huh, there seem to be some activity in the repo over the last year from several people. Not an amazing amount but it's going forward it seems

boudin 5y ago

Debian is definitely not a good distribution to test Wayland in its current state. A lot of packages are quite a few stable version behind, and the whole Wayland ecosystem is moving really quickly (for example, Gnome 3.38 instead of Gnome 41) Staying on x11 makes more sense unless using Debian unstable or testing.

rmrfchik 5y ago
I'm on Debian unstable. Giving wayland a chance once per month on intel and nvidia cards. It seems usable on Intel although many minor X11 habits are broken (like selection), but totally unusable on nvidia (black screen). X11 is still way to go, as 13 year in development is not enough for Wayland.
- boudin 5y ago
  Nvidia just fixed its driver this year, and it's still not in great shape. You can only blame Nvidia for that. We have quite different experiences I guess. On my side I just see that the recurring graphical issues that I had with X11 are fixed. Everything is super smooth, no tearing and really stable. Bonus points some of the side initiatives also improved a lot the ecosystem, like Pipewire.
- myownfriend 5y ago
  Currently running Gnome from a Wayland session with Nvidia's 510.39.01 drivers without issue. It's not Wayland that's not ready yet, it's the ecosystem around it. While the first commit on the Wayland git was in 2008, it's client and server APIs weren't considered stable until 2013 and then DE support for it only really picked up in 2016 since they were built around X11 from the beginning. If you were an Nvidia user then your options for DEs were limited to the ones that supported EGLStreams and you didn't get XWayland hardware acceleration or support for Webrender in Firefox until Nvidia started support DMA-buf in June of last year. Nvidia didn't support GBM until October of this year but it had an annoying memory leak which caused issues with programs not wanting to launch of launching as black squares. On top of that, the code that compositors and XWayland used to detect whether to use GBM or EGLStreams didn't work at first and XWayland windows launched as transparent so they needed to be updated. It wasn't until these beta drivers, which came out this month, that I'm able to do everything I'm supposed to be able to do in a Wayland session and the major hurdles in Wayland adoption on Nvidia have been removed. Kwin already removed it's EGLStreams backend because it never worked well to begin with and the drivers will only improve from now on.

kunagi7 5y ago

As someone who uses a graphics tablet (Wacom) I'm glad Xorg is somehow actively developed again or I would just switch to Mac/Windows. I tried Wayland for around four years (GNOME, sway, KDE), almost daily. I have a multiple monitor setup. I always had to switch back to Xorg for several reasons, like: - iBus CJK support was horrible. Languages like English, Russian or Spanish don't need that but Japanese/Chinese needs it. Things like the suggestions window was completely broken (misplaced and disappeared randomly). I used several tricks to work around it but it was quite uncomfortable. - Wine refusing to work half of the time (even with the Virtual Desktop) - VSync not working with games (making my GPU go 100%) - Applications crashing for no apparent reason. - XWayland crashing completely... Even the whole compositor would crash randomly making me lose all my work. - But the worst thing was the drawing tablet. It was completely broken. Things like pen sensibility (quite important to get details right), screen locking (it's useless to draw with less than half of the tablet!) and top buttons. I used Wayland since it was really smooth with an old Intel GPU. The Xorg experience was quite unstable (I couldn't find the right compositor configuration). One day I was quite fed up, got a new rig with an AMD GPU and removed Wayland completely. Compared with Wayland, even with its quirks, Xorg just works.