4 ms·

Is the author stepping up to take over X.org? X.org is a small step away from abandonware.

Alupis 3y ago
It's systemd all over again. Scream and holler about how terrible it is, yet nobody provides anything better. Either the things continue to rot and get worse over time, or we get something modern like Wayland and deal with integration issues. Fast forward a few years, and the noise will mostly be gone, just like with systemd. It turns out... most people just don't like change.
- oliwarner 3y ago
  > yet nobody provides anything better No, we got systemd because it was better. Both theoretically and in practice. We can quibble about complexity and configuration quirks until the cows come home, but it is objectively better than InitV and the things like Upstart that were bumbling around trying to solve the same problems. It won on merit, not apathy. And I think the same is true for Wayland. It's far more complex than just starting every system and user service so the teething issues are that much bigger, but when it works and you get a VRR desktop, it's just feels breathtakingly light and responsive. I don't miss X. It wasn't just rotting, it was objectively worse. And all this is from a Nvidia users who's still battling XWayland sync issues.
- marcosdumay 3y ago
  Did you see all the noise and fight within Debian when it moved into wayland? I'm certain you didn't, because it's completely different from systemd.
  - Alupis 3y ago
    Why don't you enlighten us?
    - marcosdumay 3y ago
      Well, have you seen any community infighting about it? There isn't any, because for wayland, as you said, nobody is providing any alternative, while that's false for systemd; there's no discussion about the capacity of the developers to work in a community, while that's still not clear at all about systemd; the change is being made for this piece of software alone, without interference of widely popular software pushing their dominance around and without redesigning the entire OS, none of what was true for systemd. The situation is so dissimilar that I can't really understand how you one can honestly claim it's the same. It's either a completely naive observation made from somebody that didn't look at anything, or not honest.
      - Alupis 3y ago
        It's similar in that people are complaining without doing anything about it... and in a few year's time people will forget what they were even complaining about. Nothing stops someone from developing something better. There are alternatives to Wayland and X.org. People just don't use them for whatever the reasons may be. Wayland is not new either - Wikipedia says the initial release was 2008. The distro maintainers and DE developers know a lot more about this stuff than random internet users that complain about any change... so much like the systemd fiasco, the professionals like it and the users complain for petty reasons. Oh no, your GUI app has some new bug, what will you do? Tell the developer to update their stuff... pretty simple. X.org was far from perfect when it was first widely adopted, and it's had 20+ years (well, ~40 years if you want to be pedantic) of patches and work-arounds applied while being "mainstream". Now, Wayland will enjoy the same treatment since all of the major distros are poised to adopt it. An awful lot of what was relevant when the X spec was being dreamt up (in the 80's) is completely different today. Even the maintainers of X.org openly talk about it largely being abandoned and full or issues that are un-fixable without major protocol and implementation changes. Which means... a v2 would be just as disruptive as moving to Wayland, but Wayland has decades of a head start. People enjoy complaining about change. It's pretty simple.
        Vilian 3y ago
        People enjoy complaining, never step up to help, and when someone step up, they discover the shit show that is trying to fix xorg, that's why the development is so much more focused on wayland, the developers know, that why xorg is dead and the only improvements are for xwayland
- AshamedCaptain 3y ago
  > Scream and holler about how terrible it is, yet nobody provides anything better. Or rather, no one can to provide anything "better" because no one agrees on what exactly is better. It's obvious that sometimes, in order to advance the status quo, you really need to exploit the free manpower that comes from the "chasing change for the sake of trying shiny new things" group. Every developer has been there once or twice: it's well known we prefer to write shiny new things rather than maintain old things, _even_ when the later is frequently the better option. But it also obviously comes with negative consequences. In a couple weeks there is going to be yet another inevitable rant in HN about how Linux breaks the ABI for desktop applications every other week, which prevents Linux from taking over the desktop, and this type of unbridled shiny new thing chasing _is_ almost 100% to blame. Certainly, you are not paying for it, so the inevitable cycle of useless rewrites just to keep (volunteer) developer interest is necessary. But at least one ought to also empathize with the people for whom their entire platform keeps moving under their feet for little apparent benefit.
  - Alupis 3y ago
    There's core issues with the X11 protocol from my understanding, which means if anyone decided to take up the task of modernizing X.org there would be a big dust-up anyway. X11 and X.org are ancient, and we certainly seem like we can do better. Maybe Wayland isn't the best, but if it's better than X.org then that is indeed progress - temporary pain or not. There's a saying military folks use often - "suck it up buttercup". Since nobody seems willing to actually defend the merits of continuing to use X.org/X11, then we do need something better. People seem to forget X.org is about 20 years old - and wasn't perfect when it was first released either.
    - AshamedCaptain 3y ago
      Sorry but this is precisely the example of shiny chasing I was thinking of. If you think that a "core issue" that is so important (sarcasm) that apparently you don't even know what it is or what usecase it breaks then this is hardly a reason for claiming that "it's ancient and we can do better". "It's ancient" is also not generally something that can be used as a criticism. You could just put yet another patch on top of it. Everyone does it. Practically no one uses the core X API anymore, but you need to implement it if you want _your_ older programs to work. Win32/the windows API is practically the same age, has a million more "core issues", it's a clusterfuck of patches at this point (see Wine), and yet it's going to become the de-facto ABI for Linux games in the near future, if it already isn't, just because at least it tries to be minimally stable. See the multiple HN articles about it....
- rnhmjoj 3y ago
  No, that's a really bad analogy: systemd offeres comparable features to SysV init and much more useful functionality outside of pid 0. It even had a program[1] to automatically convert old SysV init scripts to systemd unit. In fact the main criticism is that systemd tries to do too much by trying to replace a lot of traditional UNIX software cron -> timers, sudo -> polkit, udev -> systemd-udev, consolekit -> systemd-logind, etc. I've never seen a complaint that systemd breaks existing setups. Wayland, on the other hand... [1]: https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/systemd-sysv-generator.html https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/syst...
- joshspankit 3y ago
  “People don’t change their mind, they just die” A quote from Musk about why he doesn’t work on immortality, but I think the same principle applies here: those who made the noise will continue to be upset while the user group adds new users who are happy with the “way things are” until the noisy ones are replaced entirely.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > It turns out... most people just don't like change. Is this a surprise? Change almost always comes with some pain and loss. But people will accept it if the benefit of the change outweighs that cost. The problem is really when change is forced on people, but it brings no benefit to them in excess of the cost of it. That's just a loss to people. And it's something that our industry rarely understands. Often, in our industry, we just see "oooh, shiny new!" and don't see that the change isn't really improving anything for ordinary people using the software in the big picture.
_ea1k 3y ago
Yeah, and this list looks very out of date too. The push to wayland was really hard, but a lot of issues have been fixed. I don't doubt that it is already better than x.org in most common cases.
- favorited 3y ago
  This should honestly have a (2020) in the title, which is when this was first written.
- josephg 3y ago
  Does anyone know how good the HiDPI support is in wayland? I have a secondary display that has a different pixel density from my primary display. Will it just work? Does anyone know?
  - chromakode 3y ago
    Different density per monitor is something Wayland handles better than X11. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25970690#25972514 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25970690#25972514
  - stilldavid 3y ago
    I run Sway and I can set a 2x scale per output easily. Not sure about other WMs.
  - bootsmann 3y ago
    It works without issues for me with gnome fedora 38
  - bryanlarsen 3y ago
    I'm currently running 2 different screens at two different scaling resolutions, one at 125% and the other at 150%. Works fine. KDE Plasma 5.27.5.

It's systemd all over again. Scream and holler about how terrible it is, yet nobody provides anything better. Either the things continue to rot and get worse over time, or we get something modern like Wayland and deal with integration issues. Fast forward a few years, and the noise will mostly be gone, just like with systemd. It turns out... most people just don't like change.

oliwarner 3y ago
> yet nobody provides anything better No, we got systemd because it was better. Both theoretically and in practice. We can quibble about complexity and configuration quirks until the cows come home, but it is objectively better than InitV and the things like Upstart that were bumbling around trying to solve the same problems. It won on merit, not apathy. And I think the same is true for Wayland. It's far more complex than just starting every system and user service so the teething issues are that much bigger, but when it works and you get a VRR desktop, it's just feels breathtakingly light and responsive. I don't miss X. It wasn't just rotting, it was objectively worse. And all this is from a Nvidia users who's still battling XWayland sync issues.
marcosdumay 3y ago
Did you see all the noise and fight within Debian when it moved into wayland? I'm certain you didn't, because it's completely different from systemd.
- Alupis 3y ago
  Why don't you enlighten us?
  - marcosdumay 3y ago
    Well, have you seen any community infighting about it? There isn't any, because for wayland, as you said, nobody is providing any alternative, while that's false for systemd; there's no discussion about the capacity of the developers to work in a community, while that's still not clear at all about systemd; the change is being made for this piece of software alone, without interference of widely popular software pushing their dominance around and without redesigning the entire OS, none of what was true for systemd. The situation is so dissimilar that I can't really understand how you one can honestly claim it's the same. It's either a completely naive observation made from somebody that didn't look at anything, or not honest.
    - Alupis 3y ago
      It's similar in that people are complaining without doing anything about it... and in a few year's time people will forget what they were even complaining about. Nothing stops someone from developing something better. There are alternatives to Wayland and X.org. People just don't use them for whatever the reasons may be. Wayland is not new either - Wikipedia says the initial release was 2008. The distro maintainers and DE developers know a lot more about this stuff than random internet users that complain about any change... so much like the systemd fiasco, the professionals like it and the users complain for petty reasons. Oh no, your GUI app has some new bug, what will you do? Tell the developer to update their stuff... pretty simple. X.org was far from perfect when it was first widely adopted, and it's had 20+ years (well, ~40 years if you want to be pedantic) of patches and work-arounds applied while being "mainstream". Now, Wayland will enjoy the same treatment since all of the major distros are poised to adopt it. An awful lot of what was relevant when the X spec was being dreamt up (in the 80's) is completely different today. Even the maintainers of X.org openly talk about it largely being abandoned and full or issues that are un-fixable without major protocol and implementation changes. Which means... a v2 would be just as disruptive as moving to Wayland, but Wayland has decades of a head start. People enjoy complaining about change. It's pretty simple.
      - Vilian 3y ago
        People enjoy complaining, never step up to help, and when someone step up, they discover the shit show that is trying to fix xorg, that's why the development is so much more focused on wayland, the developers know, that why xorg is dead and the only improvements are for xwayland
AshamedCaptain 3y ago
> Scream and holler about how terrible it is, yet nobody provides anything better. Or rather, no one can to provide anything "better" because no one agrees on what exactly is better. It's obvious that sometimes, in order to advance the status quo, you really need to exploit the free manpower that comes from the "chasing change for the sake of trying shiny new things" group. Every developer has been there once or twice: it's well known we prefer to write shiny new things rather than maintain old things, _even_ when the later is frequently the better option. But it also obviously comes with negative consequences. In a couple weeks there is going to be yet another inevitable rant in HN about how Linux breaks the ABI for desktop applications every other week, which prevents Linux from taking over the desktop, and this type of unbridled shiny new thing chasing _is_ almost 100% to blame. Certainly, you are not paying for it, so the inevitable cycle of useless rewrites just to keep (volunteer) developer interest is necessary. But at least one ought to also empathize with the people for whom their entire platform keeps moving under their feet for little apparent benefit.
- Alupis 3y ago
  There's core issues with the X11 protocol from my understanding, which means if anyone decided to take up the task of modernizing X.org there would be a big dust-up anyway. X11 and X.org are ancient, and we certainly seem like we can do better. Maybe Wayland isn't the best, but if it's better than X.org then that is indeed progress - temporary pain or not. There's a saying military folks use often - "suck it up buttercup". Since nobody seems willing to actually defend the merits of continuing to use X.org/X11, then we do need something better. People seem to forget X.org is about 20 years old - and wasn't perfect when it was first released either.
  - AshamedCaptain 3y ago
    Sorry but this is precisely the example of shiny chasing I was thinking of. If you think that a "core issue" that is so important (sarcasm) that apparently you don't even know what it is or what usecase it breaks then this is hardly a reason for claiming that "it's ancient and we can do better". "It's ancient" is also not generally something that can be used as a criticism. You could just put yet another patch on top of it. Everyone does it. Practically no one uses the core X API anymore, but you need to implement it if you want _your_ older programs to work. Win32/the windows API is practically the same age, has a million more "core issues", it's a clusterfuck of patches at this point (see Wine), and yet it's going to become the de-facto ABI for Linux games in the near future, if it already isn't, just because at least it tries to be minimally stable. See the multiple HN articles about it....
rnhmjoj 3y ago
No, that's a really bad analogy: systemd offeres comparable features to SysV init and much more useful functionality outside of pid 0. It even had a program[1] to automatically convert old SysV init scripts to systemd unit. In fact the main criticism is that systemd tries to do too much by trying to replace a lot of traditional UNIX software cron -> timers, sudo -> polkit, udev -> systemd-udev, consolekit -> systemd-logind, etc. I've never seen a complaint that systemd breaks existing setups. Wayland, on the other hand... [1]: https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/systemd-sysv-generator.html https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/syst...
joshspankit 3y ago
“People don’t change their mind, they just die” A quote from Musk about why he doesn’t work on immortality, but I think the same principle applies here: those who made the noise will continue to be upset while the user group adds new users who are happy with the “way things are” until the noisy ones are replaced entirely.
JohnFen 3y ago
> It turns out... most people just don't like change. Is this a surprise? Change almost always comes with some pain and loss. But people will accept it if the benefit of the change outweighs that cost. The problem is really when change is forced on people, but it brings no benefit to them in excess of the cost of it. That's just a loss to people. And it's something that our industry rarely understands. Often, in our industry, we just see "oooh, shiny new!" and don't see that the change isn't really improving anything for ordinary people using the software in the big picture.

_ea1k 3y ago

Yeah, and this list looks very out of date too. The push to wayland was really hard, but a lot of issues have been fixed. I don't doubt that it is already better than x.org in most common cases.

favorited 3y ago
This should honestly have a (2020) in the title, which is when this was first written.
josephg 3y ago
Does anyone know how good the HiDPI support is in wayland? I have a secondary display that has a different pixel density from my primary display. Will it just work? Does anyone know?
- chromakode 3y ago
  Different density per monitor is something Wayland handles better than X11. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25970690#25972514 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25970690#25972514
- stilldavid 3y ago
  I run Sway and I can set a 2x scale per output easily. Not sure about other WMs.
- bootsmann 3y ago
  It works without issues for me with gnome fedora 38
- bryanlarsen 3y ago
  I'm currently running 2 different screens at two different scaling resolutions, one at 125% and the other at 150%. Works fine. KDE Plasma 5.27.5.