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Legitimate concerns of people that have a severely degraded user experience are not flamewar. Xorg lost most of its corporate support which moved mostly to Wayl

by sprash 4y ago

Legitimate concerns of people that have a severely degraded user experience are not flamewar. Xorg lost most of its corporate support which moved mostly to Wayland, that is true. Despite this Wayland has very poor adoption rate. The main reason for this is that Wayland has many unfixable flaws at the concept level that have been discussed here many times.

kaba0 4y ago
Actually caring a tiny bit about security and not letting everything be a keylogger is not an “unfixable flaw”, there is working screen sharing for basically every mainstream desktop app, what exactly is that flaw then?
- icedchai 4y ago
  How true this is. In the 90's, at least one commercial Unix vendor shipped their systems with X11 open to the world (equivalent of "xhost +", full remote access, no security.) In the days of no firewalls, that was a fun time.
- sprash 4y ago
  Wayland does not care about security. In fact it does not even offer standardized access control protocols. The flaw here (among many others) is that the protocol that is responsible for negotiating display output for multiple processes (which is what Wayland tries to be) should also contain standardized interfaces to exchange that output among processes, but Wayland doesn't.
  - tadfisher 4y ago
    No. Wayland is a display protocol, not a general-purpose IPC, no matter how allergic to DBus you are.
    - sprash 4y ago
      Yes. Wayland is a display protocol, not a general-purpose IPC. Hence it must contain access control interfaces for buffers. Only the compositor has access to the composited image therefore is the only program able to make screenshots and full screen sharing. Furthermore, efficient sharing of single application windows is only possible with direct memory access to the buffer which also is something the compositor does/has. The Display protocol is the only sensible place to negotiate access to GPU resources.
      - QUrprUd1nCeicw 4y ago
        >The Display protocol is the only sensible place to negotiate access to GPU resources. No, GPU resources can come from any number of other places. That's literally the purpose of direct rendering. Any applications using GPU compute can produce them without requiring a connection to the display server. There's no reason to put that in Wayland or restrict it to the compositor. There's already a much better protocol for sharing GPU buffers: Pipewire. Dbus is only there to act as the glue between a Wayland compositor and Pipewire.
        sprash 4y ago
        [flagged]
        QUrprUd1nCeicw 4y ago
        No, with direct rendering the display server uses the same API as any other process that uses the GPU. The way to fix stuttering is to fix scheduling in the kernel. XGetImage is comparing apples to oranges. That doesn't use the GPU at all, that does a copy into main memory. Pipewire is complicated because it has to handle format negotiation and conversion and audio support and a lot of other things that make sense for generically transferring video between processes but are outside the scope of the display server. Can you please knock off the conspiracy theories and flames? What are you hoping to accomplish by hurting people like this on the internet?
        4y ago
wahern 4y ago
Gripes are unconstructive, though. I'm just as disenchanted as the next person, but in the FOSS world the ethos is rightly, put up or shut up. Personally, I suspect that if the Wayland developers simply dropped maintenance of Xorg completely--no more patches, no more XWayland or at least completely disassociate XWayland from Xorg--that a community would step up and carry Xorg forward. As it is, that erstwhile community remains largely hidden, maintaining out-of-tree patches. But if that community faced the prospect of 1) being able to take back the reigns of Xorg, and 2) if not, Xorg vanishes today, then it would likely become much more motivated, organized, and proactive. (Whether it would be capable of carrying Xorg forward is a different question.) Alternatively, it might create the environment for projects like Arcan to shine.
- QUrprUd1nCeicw 4y ago
  >I suspect that if the Wayland developers simply dropped maintenance of Xorg completely that a community would step up and carry Xorg forward I don't. That community was sorely needed several years ago, but failed to show up.
- AnonymousPlanet 4y ago
  Gripes are the reasons why most open source software exists in the first place. First comes the itch, then comes the scratch.

by sprash 4y ago

kaba0 4y ago

Actually caring a tiny bit about security and not letting everything be a keylogger is not an “unfixable flaw”, there is working screen sharing for basically every mainstream desktop app, what exactly is that flaw then?

icedchai 4y ago
How true this is. In the 90's, at least one commercial Unix vendor shipped their systems with X11 open to the world (equivalent of "xhost +", full remote access, no security.) In the days of no firewalls, that was a fun time.
sprash 4y ago
Wayland does not care about security. In fact it does not even offer standardized access control protocols. The flaw here (among many others) is that the protocol that is responsible for negotiating display output for multiple processes (which is what Wayland tries to be) should also contain standardized interfaces to exchange that output among processes, but Wayland doesn't.
- tadfisher 4y ago
  No. Wayland is a display protocol, not a general-purpose IPC, no matter how allergic to DBus you are.
  - sprash 4y ago
    Yes. Wayland is a display protocol, not a general-purpose IPC. Hence it must contain access control interfaces for buffers. Only the compositor has access to the composited image therefore is the only program able to make screenshots and full screen sharing. Furthermore, efficient sharing of single application windows is only possible with direct memory access to the buffer which also is something the compositor does/has. The Display protocol is the only sensible place to negotiate access to GPU resources.
    - QUrprUd1nCeicw 4y ago
      >The Display protocol is the only sensible place to negotiate access to GPU resources. No, GPU resources can come from any number of other places. That's literally the purpose of direct rendering. Any applications using GPU compute can produce them without requiring a connection to the display server. There's no reason to put that in Wayland or restrict it to the compositor. There's already a much better protocol for sharing GPU buffers: Pipewire. Dbus is only there to act as the glue between a Wayland compositor and Pipewire.
      - sprash 4y ago
        [flagged]
        QUrprUd1nCeicw 4y ago
        No, with direct rendering the display server uses the same API as any other process that uses the GPU. The way to fix stuttering is to fix scheduling in the kernel. XGetImage is comparing apples to oranges. That doesn't use the GPU at all, that does a copy into main memory. Pipewire is complicated because it has to handle format negotiation and conversion and audio support and a lot of other things that make sense for generically transferring video between processes but are outside the scope of the display server. Can you please knock off the conspiracy theories and flames? What are you hoping to accomplish by hurting people like this on the internet?
        4y ago

wahern 4y ago

Gripes are unconstructive, though. I'm just as disenchanted as the next person, but in the FOSS world the ethos is rightly, put up or shut up. Personally, I suspect that if the Wayland developers simply dropped maintenance of Xorg completely--no more patches, no more XWayland or at least completely disassociate XWayland from Xorg--that a community would step up and carry Xorg forward. As it is, that erstwhile community remains largely hidden, maintaining out-of-tree patches. But if that community faced the prospect of 1) being able to take back the reigns of Xorg, and 2) if not, Xorg vanishes today, then it would likely become much more motivated, organized, and proactive. (Whether it would be capable of carrying Xorg forward is a different question.) Alternatively, it might create the environment for projects like Arcan to shine.

QUrprUd1nCeicw 4y ago
>I suspect that if the Wayland developers simply dropped maintenance of Xorg completely that a community would step up and carry Xorg forward I don't. That community was sorely needed several years ago, but failed to show up.
AnonymousPlanet 4y ago
Gripes are the reasons why most open source software exists in the first place. First comes the itch, then comes the scratch.