3 ms·

Nothing works perfectly on X11. WTF is this revisionism. There’s a reason nearly everyone in the Linux community has been trying to create an X11 alternative.

Nothing works perfectly on X11. WTF is this revisionism. There’s a reason nearly everyone in the Linux community has been trying to create an X11 alternative. Because X11 is really terrible at doing many things. Sure Wayland doesn’t do everything X11 does. Yet. It’s also decades younger and doesn’t have decades worth of patches and workarounds making things work. Finally Wayland does things that X11 simply cannot do, and unlike Wayland where some of the things it “cannot” (more often chooses not to by design) do can be offloaded to other parts of the system, the same is not true of X11.

denton-scratch 3y ago
> There’s a reason nearly everyone in the Linux community has been trying to create an X11 alternative. Maybe because the developers themselves have deprecated it? That would be freedesktop.org. I think an X11 alternative would be a Good Thing. In the future, that might well be Wayland, I suppose. But I don't trust freedesktop.org; I have learned to expect them to play compatibility games in order to achieve hegemony. The main reason I use Linux is to avoid hegemonic overlords.
jovial_cavalier 3y ago
>Nothing works perfectly on X11 Agreed. "Perfect" is a stretch. What I'm saying, though, is that on an NVidia card, I can actually run a graphical system with X11. It has screen tearing and freaks out when my monitors aren't framerate matched, but it runs. Wayland crashes on startup. Every time. I've tried every setting, every environment variable, every kernel parameter, and it doesn't work at all. And when I roll up my sleeves and dig deep on forums/github issues, the answer I get is basically "Yeah, this is broken. Blame NVidia." X11 isn't under active development. That's not a good situation. However, I don't think the alternative is very compelling when their response to a super common system configuration being totally broken is "not my problem. shoulda bought AMD." >Sure Wayland doesn’t do everything X11 does. Yet. It’s also decades younger and doesn’t have decades worth of patches and workarounds making things work. It's over a decade old. The remaining blindspots as far as X11 backwards compatibility should be super niche things. Not "using NVidia."

denton-scratch 3y ago

> There’s a reason nearly everyone in the Linux community has been trying to create an X11 alternative. Maybe because the developers themselves have deprecated it? That would be freedesktop.org. I think an X11 alternative would be a Good Thing. In the future, that might well be Wayland, I suppose. But I don't trust freedesktop.org; I have learned to expect them to play compatibility games in order to achieve hegemony. The main reason I use Linux is to avoid hegemonic overlords.

jovial_cavalier 3y ago

>Nothing works perfectly on X11 Agreed. "Perfect" is a stretch. What I'm saying, though, is that on an NVidia card, I can actually run a graphical system with X11. It has screen tearing and freaks out when my monitors aren't framerate matched, but it runs. Wayland crashes on startup. Every time. I've tried every setting, every environment variable, every kernel parameter, and it doesn't work at all. And when I roll up my sleeves and dig deep on forums/github issues, the answer I get is basically "Yeah, this is broken. Blame NVidia." X11 isn't under active development. That's not a good situation. However, I don't think the alternative is very compelling when their response to a super common system configuration being totally broken is "not my problem. shoulda bought AMD." >Sure Wayland doesn’t do everything X11 does. Yet. It’s also decades younger and doesn’t have decades worth of patches and workarounds making things work. It's over a decade old. The remaining blindspots as far as X11 backwards compatibility should be super niche things. Not "using NVidia."