5 ms·

Apparently the root cause of this hack in the kernel is : "nobody wanting to maintain X11 anymore". Is X11 becoming yet another underfunded cornerstone of the o

by pyb 4y ago

Apparently the root cause of this hack in the kernel is : "nobody wanting to maintain X11 anymore". Is X11 becoming yet another underfunded cornerstone of the open source ecosystem?

Falell 4y ago
This has been discussed in comments of Wayland threads on HN for years. People who want to keep using X complain that they still use it, someone replies "All the X maintainers have moved onto Wayland because they think it's the path forward, if you want X to be maintained step up and do it" and it's not clear if anyone ever did.
- pyb 4y ago
  For whatever reason, it's only in recent years that distros have switched to using Wayland by default. So it's a bit early to completely drop the former display system. But it would be expensive to keep it alive as well !
  - ilyt 4y ago
    It's annoying, X got to the level where it "just works" out of the box for me on my setup and now it's "well, fuck that, we got bored, let's go Wayland!" And some design decisions are.... iffy at best. Like the fact now every DM have to implement its own mouse(trackpad etc.) management coz "well we don't wanna" (basically, I'm sure Wayland developers have better articulated response to why everyone else involved have to duplicate the code). Or how many hoops software have to jump just to record screen (or is that fixed now?)
    - zamadatix 4y ago
      Shared code can (and does) exists outside of the compositor or display server protocol. E.g. for your ending question xdg-desktop-portal is the shared resource in use these days. I think the biggest mistake of Wayland was the rush on early migration for general use before it really had time to soak. The general design and not having everything in the display server itself is perfectly fine.
    - NekkoDroid 4y ago
      1 reason I can think is kinda the same thing with Vulkan. They both are so agnostic to what they run on that they have a minimal set of things that they function with. In the case of Vulkan its: I interact with the graphics processor, and don't care if you have a display so windowing is an extension and has platform implementations if applicable. And in the case of Wayland its: I am a protocol for managing and displaying windows, and I don't care what kinda inputs you have (example: VR doesn't have classical PC inputs).
badsectoracula 4y ago
Note that this was fixed on the X side around that time (it mentioned in this article too) but the kernel hack remained in order to avoid breaking any existing X installations. AFAIK the issue with the X server is that its maintainers at the time (basically Red Hat) didn't want to continue the maintenance, however since then it has been passed to an independent maintainer, Povilas Kanapickas who -if you want to financially support- has a Patreon[0] (also he has posted here on HN occasionally). He is the one who has made the most recent releases. [0] https://www.patreon.com/p12tic https://www.patreon.com/p12tic
- Dylan16807 4y ago
  > Note that this was fixed on the X side around that time (it mentioned in this article too) The article says it was disabled by default. That doesn't sound like a fix to me. Was the broken code actually fixed (or removed) at some point?

by pyb 4y ago

Apparently the root cause of this hack in the kernel is : "nobody wanting to maintain X11 anymore". Is X11 becoming yet another underfunded cornerstone of the open source ecosystem?

Falell 4y ago

This has been discussed in comments of Wayland threads on HN for years. People who want to keep using X complain that they still use it, someone replies "All the X maintainers have moved onto Wayland because they think it's the path forward, if you want X to be maintained step up and do it" and it's not clear if anyone ever did.

pyb 4y ago
For whatever reason, it's only in recent years that distros have switched to using Wayland by default. So it's a bit early to completely drop the former display system. But it would be expensive to keep it alive as well !
- ilyt 4y ago
  It's annoying, X got to the level where it "just works" out of the box for me on my setup and now it's "well, fuck that, we got bored, let's go Wayland!" And some design decisions are.... iffy at best. Like the fact now every DM have to implement its own mouse(trackpad etc.) management coz "well we don't wanna" (basically, I'm sure Wayland developers have better articulated response to why everyone else involved have to duplicate the code). Or how many hoops software have to jump just to record screen (or is that fixed now?)
  - zamadatix 4y ago
    Shared code can (and does) exists outside of the compositor or display server protocol. E.g. for your ending question xdg-desktop-portal is the shared resource in use these days. I think the biggest mistake of Wayland was the rush on early migration for general use before it really had time to soak. The general design and not having everything in the display server itself is perfectly fine.
  - NekkoDroid 4y ago
    1 reason I can think is kinda the same thing with Vulkan. They both are so agnostic to what they run on that they have a minimal set of things that they function with. In the case of Vulkan its: I interact with the graphics processor, and don't care if you have a display so windowing is an extension and has platform implementations if applicable. And in the case of Wayland its: I am a protocol for managing and displaying windows, and I don't care what kinda inputs you have (example: VR doesn't have classical PC inputs).

badsectoracula 4y ago

Note that this was fixed on the X side around that time (it mentioned in this article too) but the kernel hack remained in order to avoid breaking any existing X installations. AFAIK the issue with the X server is that its maintainers at the time (basically Red Hat) didn't want to continue the maintenance, however since then it has been passed to an independent maintainer, Povilas Kanapickas who -if you want to financially support- has a Patreon[0] (also he has posted here on HN occasionally). He is the one who has made the most recent releases. [0] https://www.patreon.com/p12tic https://www.patreon.com/p12tic

Dylan16807 4y ago
> Note that this was fixed on the X side around that time (it mentioned in this article too) The article says it was disabled by default. That doesn't sound like a fix to me. Was the broken code actually fixed (or removed) at some point?