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How difficult would it be for a few hundred of us to just fork X11 and refactor it a good bit, make some breaking changes, and just call that job done? It cant

How difficult would it be for a few hundred of us to just fork X11 and refactor it a good bit, make some breaking changes, and just call that job done? It cant be that bad? Everyone who mentions its bad fails to mention what is bad about it. You're writing an article saying its bad, and you didn't read the code or do whatever is needed to tell me what exactly is wrong with X11? Chestertons fence says hello, I guess?

roenxi 3y ago
Likely impossible in practice. None of the design decisions in X core make sense any more (it is designed for a world where 2D acceleration was important and didn't design for this world we live in where the kernel controls all the hardware). The parts that matter are extensions and hacks on top of that. All the developers (we're verging on literally all of them) who had to work with X fled it like rats on a sinking ship. Signs suggest it is genuinely unmaintainable. The only problem is the replacement was secured against common user tasks being possible and un-securing it has been a long, slow and painful process of community negotiation. Although we're probably most of the way there by now.
- erik_seaberg 3y ago
  Server-side rendering still makes sense, because the server (the user's laptop or phone) has its own dedicated GPU, and the client (racked in a shared datacenter) likely doesn't. So I think we'll keep seeing browser frontends for everything.
  - pjmlp 3y ago
    Yeah, but that kind of workload isn't really X, OpenGL and Vulkan are designed in a way that X isn't necessarily part of the story, and CUDA, SYSCL even less.
tene 3y ago
The way it sounds from reading the article is X11's design fundamentally is that bad for modern hardware, which is why almost all of the active graphics development is focused on reimplementing a designed-for-modern-hardware replacement. The claim from the article is that X11 is basically unsupported abandonware, and is calling for developers to please help with the rest of the work in finishing the migration of use-cases to Wayland in order to help the whole ecosystem be able to abandon the sinking ship and move to a more-modern better-maintained future.

roenxi 3y ago

Likely impossible in practice. None of the design decisions in X core make sense any more (it is designed for a world where 2D acceleration was important and didn't design for this world we live in where the kernel controls all the hardware). The parts that matter are extensions and hacks on top of that. All the developers (we're verging on literally all of them) who had to work with X fled it like rats on a sinking ship. Signs suggest it is genuinely unmaintainable. The only problem is the replacement was secured against common user tasks being possible and un-securing it has been a long, slow and painful process of community negotiation. Although we're probably most of the way there by now.

erik_seaberg 3y ago
Server-side rendering still makes sense, because the server (the user's laptop or phone) has its own dedicated GPU, and the client (racked in a shared datacenter) likely doesn't. So I think we'll keep seeing browser frontends for everything.
- pjmlp 3y ago
  Yeah, but that kind of workload isn't really X, OpenGL and Vulkan are designed in a way that X isn't necessarily part of the story, and CUDA, SYSCL even less.

tene 3y ago

The way it sounds from reading the article is X11's design fundamentally is that bad for modern hardware, which is why almost all of the active graphics development is focused on reimplementing a designed-for-modern-hardware replacement. The claim from the article is that X11 is basically unsupported abandonware, and is calling for developers to please help with the rest of the work in finishing the migration of use-cases to Wayland in order to help the whole ecosystem be able to abandon the sinking ship and move to a more-modern better-maintained future.