7 ms·

No it's not, it barely does any of the things X11 is useful for.

bitwize 4y ago
100% of the developers who know anything about how graphics works under Linux are focusing on Wayland. Development on Xorg is moribund, with only Xwayland getting significant attention. Hint: X was optimized for 1980s graphics, which was 90% simple blits, line draws, and fills mediated by the CPU perhaps with special fixed-function accelerators for those operations. In 2023, graphics is done with the GPU -- period. You post draw commands, geometry, and textures to the GPU via shared memory and let it do the work. Programmable shaders open up vast amounts of capability that X11's graphics primitives just don't get you. So you may be right that Wayland isn't good at what X11 is useful for. But nobody's doing what X11 is useful for today. What people are actually doing, Wayland is excellent at. You will be running a Wayland desktop soon, because toolkit maintainers and distro packagers will simply drop support for X. The Gtk maintainers are already talking about dropping support for X in Gtk+5.
- steponlego 4y ago
  It doesn’t matter to me if the X.org developers have decided not to do their jobs, which is maintaining X.org. This isn’t proof that X.org is bad, it just shows that giggers who really work for big tech firms shouldn’t also be trusted to maintain Free software. I’ve noticed them slowly trying to ruin X.org for a couple years now, deprecating drivers for no reason whatsoever, etc.
  - Cheeeetah 4y ago
    [dead]
- arp242 4y ago
  People have been predicting the death of X for about ten years now, ever since Wayland was declared stable. Here you are 6 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13925468 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13925468 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13922499 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13922499 And for all the talk about GPU, it feels significantly slower on my (admittedly not very fast) laptop. Wayland will be the future, I guess, eventually. But X will be around for a long time. GTK 5 is still years away (most aren't even using GTK 4).
- wkat4242 4y ago
  Sure but GTK and the gnome world is highly politicized by RedHat. KDE and Qt are much further away from cutting X11 off. I see the case for Wayland but similar to X11 it is already showing its age in poorly conceived design decisions. Desktop sharing for example should be a first class citizen in 2023.
  - bitwize 4y ago
    Xorg is maintained... by Red Hat. As steponlego pointed out, they're already binning up chunks of the code base, but that's just preparing for when they shut the lights off entirely. As soon as Red Hat says "Shop's closed, boys, we won't be updating this code anymore" KDE and Qt will happily cut out their X support. Especially since Qt has for years been targeting mobile phones, car displays, and embedded applications as its business model -- markets where Wayland is at its greatest strength.
    - wkat4242 4y ago
      Yeah I know RedHat 'maintains' X11, this is part of the politicizing they do. Embrace, extinguish, they just forgot the extend part :) RedHat and their business focus is a lot of what is wrong with Linux for users today. We don't make money for RedHat so their priorities aren't with us. I'm hoping someone will still take it over for when happens. RedHat doesn't own X11. Wayland has its uses but there's a lot of niche and legacy usecases what will still need X11.
      - bitwize 4y ago
        Probably your best hope is OpenBSD's Xenocara project, a fork of Xorg. If Xorg bitrots away and Red Hat won't touch it, some OpenBSD madlads are likely to step up... at least until Wayland gets running well on OpenBSD. :)
        steponlego 4y ago
        OpenBSD runs on architectures which will never be supported by Wayland, it’s very doubtful they’d switch.

100% of the developers who know anything about how graphics works under Linux are focusing on Wayland. Development on Xorg is moribund, with only Xwayland getting significant attention. Hint: X was optimized for 1980s graphics, which was 90% simple blits, line draws, and fills mediated by the CPU perhaps with special fixed-function accelerators for those operations. In 2023, graphics is done with the GPU -- period. You post draw commands, geometry, and textures to the GPU via shared memory and let it do the work. Programmable shaders open up vast amounts of capability that X11's graphics primitives just don't get you. So you may be right that Wayland isn't good at what X11 is useful for. But nobody's doing what X11 is useful for today. What people are actually doing, Wayland is excellent at. You will be running a Wayland desktop soon, because toolkit maintainers and distro packagers will simply drop support for X. The Gtk maintainers are already talking about dropping support for X in Gtk+5.

steponlego 4y ago
It doesn’t matter to me if the X.org developers have decided not to do their jobs, which is maintaining X.org. This isn’t proof that X.org is bad, it just shows that giggers who really work for big tech firms shouldn’t also be trusted to maintain Free software. I’ve noticed them slowly trying to ruin X.org for a couple years now, deprecating drivers for no reason whatsoever, etc.
- Cheeeetah 4y ago
  [dead]
arp242 4y ago
People have been predicting the death of X for about ten years now, ever since Wayland was declared stable. Here you are 6 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13925468 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13925468 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13922499 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13922499 And for all the talk about GPU, it feels significantly slower on my (admittedly not very fast) laptop. Wayland will be the future, I guess, eventually. But X will be around for a long time. GTK 5 is still years away (most aren't even using GTK 4).
wkat4242 4y ago
Sure but GTK and the gnome world is highly politicized by RedHat. KDE and Qt are much further away from cutting X11 off. I see the case for Wayland but similar to X11 it is already showing its age in poorly conceived design decisions. Desktop sharing for example should be a first class citizen in 2023.
- bitwize 4y ago
  Xorg is maintained... by Red Hat. As steponlego pointed out, they're already binning up chunks of the code base, but that's just preparing for when they shut the lights off entirely. As soon as Red Hat says "Shop's closed, boys, we won't be updating this code anymore" KDE and Qt will happily cut out their X support. Especially since Qt has for years been targeting mobile phones, car displays, and embedded applications as its business model -- markets where Wayland is at its greatest strength.
  - wkat4242 4y ago
    Yeah I know RedHat 'maintains' X11, this is part of the politicizing they do. Embrace, extinguish, they just forgot the extend part :) RedHat and their business focus is a lot of what is wrong with Linux for users today. We don't make money for RedHat so their priorities aren't with us. I'm hoping someone will still take it over for when happens. RedHat doesn't own X11. Wayland has its uses but there's a lot of niche and legacy usecases what will still need X11.
    - bitwize 4y ago
      Probably your best hope is OpenBSD's Xenocara project, a fork of Xorg. If Xorg bitrots away and Red Hat won't touch it, some OpenBSD madlads are likely to step up... at least until Wayland gets running well on OpenBSD. :)
      - steponlego 4y ago
        OpenBSD runs on architectures which will never be supported by Wayland, it’s very doubtful they’d switch.