6 ms·

What about the fact that X.org itself is unmaintained and falling apart? It's nice that the modesetting driver covers most new hardware, but without active main

What about the fact that X.org itself is unmaintained and falling apart? It's nice that the modesetting driver covers most new hardware, but without active maintenance and governance the writing is on the wall for X.org. Without a Wayland story, the BSDs will really end up dying, at least as desktop systems.

rabbits77 3y ago
The article begins by explaining that it’s a follow-up to an earlier article on Wayland!
- bitwize 3y ago
  Indeed; and if you read that article it says that current Wayland compositors depend heavily on Linux infrastructure, and have not yet accepted patches to support NetBSD. Everything Wayland on the BSDs is in the "one guy faffing about to see if he can get it working" stage. Unless/until the Wayland project starts mainlining BSD support, or the BSD projects have robust parallel maintenance of the core Wayland packages and compositors, BSD as a desktop system is dead in the water.
  - doublerabbit 3y ago
    And that's what Wayland wants. "We will only develop for Linux if you want it do it yourself" is the vibe I get from the Wayland team. Why should FreeBSD be the ones who have to develop? The stubbornness of Linux users.
    - asveikau 3y ago
      I think it's more the detail they lost (or do not agree with) is that working successfully in multiple environments can valide the strength of the design. Some people will look at a slightly different structure underneath and see it as noise and hassle instead, where you or I may see their action as taking unnecessary or questionable dependencies.
      - bandrami 3y ago
        The short version is that the Linux ecosystem has for whatever reason spent a decade or so resolving the already-solved problem of "who is logged in to this TTY?" and came up with a new way to solve that that the BSDs don't in general implement and Wayland relies on.
        vundercind 3y ago
        Red Hat wants it to be really hard to remain compatible with Mainstream Linux (whatever Red Hat does) while also differentiating your distro from theirs in meaningful ways, and wants some good old “fire and motion” against competitor distros. At least, I think everything they’ve been up to and these projects they heavily influence have been doing makes a ton more sense if that’s the plan. It’s that or a lot of weirdly-hostile and disorganized stuff has been happening by chance in a way that achieves that effect by accident. The BSDs are just collateral damage, I reckon.
        llm_trw 3y ago
        Jokes on them, the BSDs are more usable than Linux now if you care about productivity.
  - asveikau 3y ago
    People not having the same priorities as you does not equate to death. You are being rude and overly dramatic.
    - llm_trw 3y ago
      Ah, what a delightful opportunity to delve into the nuances of the English language and its wonderfully intricate idioms! Let's embark on an enlightening exploration of why the phrase "dead in the water" is certainly not the same as simply being "dead." For anyone less familiar with the idiomatic expressions and metaphors of English, this can be a fascinating journey. To begin with, when we hear the word "dead," one's mind might instinctively leap to its most literal and unfortunate meaning—devoid of life. In biology, this means the cessation of all vital functions: no heartbeat, no brain activity, no breath. The ultimate and irreversible state that all living things, sadly, will eventually meet. It's quite final, isn't it? The end of the line. Kaput. There's no ambiguity here; dead means dead. However, the wonders of language allow us to use words in metaphorical or idiomatic expressions to convey more complex or nuanced situations or states. And that's where "dead in the water" swims into the scene. This phrase, you see, has nothing to do with the literal cessation of life. Oh, no. It's far more colorful and applicable in a variety of non-lethal scenarios. Originally, this idiom comes from the nautical world—a domain rich with metaphorical language, given the myriad challenges and adventures faced at sea. Imagine a ship, if you will, its sails billowing as it cuts through the waves. Now, picture it suddenly unable to move; the wind has died down to nothing, the sails slump, and the ship is merely adrift, going nowhere. It is, quite poetically, "dead in the water." The ship isn't literally dead, of course—it's just temporarily incapacitated, unable to proceed along its intended course until the wind decides to grace it with its presence once again. Transposed into everyday usage beyond the high seas, "dead in the water" is a vivid metaphor for projects, plans, or initiatives that have come to a halt—stymied, unable to progress, much like that becalmed ship. It's used to describe something that has little hope of success or revival in its current state. For instance, if a business venture runs out of funding or a new policy is halted by regulatory issues, they might be described as "dead in the water." Not literally deceased, but stuck, with no forward momentum. In essence, while "dead" is the cessation of life, "dead in the water" is about cessation of progress or movement—figuratively speaking, of course. The latter suggests a temporary state, a problem potentially fixable, perhaps with effort, change in strategy, or a shift in external conditions, unlike the permanence and finality of being literally dead. Isn't it simply marvelous how language lets us draw such specific shades of meaning with just a tweak of phraseology? Through this exploration, we can appreciate not only the richness of English idioms but also the joy of explaining something so deceptively simple yet profoundly different. Here we stand—or float, if you will—at the junction of literal and metaphorical, grasping the beauty of expression. And isn't that what language is all about?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
chungy 3y ago
> Without a Wayland story, the BSDs will really end up dying, at least as desktop systems. Good news then, FreeBSD already has working Wayland and NetBSD is working on it. Granted, I think OpenBSD stands out without a Wayland plan, but maybe I'm wrong there.
- alpn 3y ago
  > I think OpenBSD stands out without a Wayland plan, but maybe I'm wrong there. check this out - https://www.openbsd.org/papers/eurobsdcon2023-matthieu-wayland-openbsd.pdf https://www.openbsd.org/papers/eurobsdcon2023-matthieu-wayla...
  - johnny22 3y ago
    I found this a bit more enlightening than that slide deck, although it's a bit old https://xenocara.org/Wayland_on_OpenBSD.html https://xenocara.org/Wayland_on_OpenBSD.html
- wkat4242 3y ago
  FreeBSD's Wayland technically works but you can't start a KDE session on it. So it's not all that useful. Not sure about other desktop environments as I don't use them.
simoncion 3y ago
> What about the fact that X.org itself is ... falling apart Works for me, and has for literal decades. > ...without active maintenance... This update to xorg-server was stabilized on April 14th, and it looks like library changes required me to rebuild and reinstall it like two days ago: $ eix -I xorg-server [I] x11-base/xorg-server Available versions: 21.1.13(0/21.1.13)^t **9999(0/9999)*l^t {debug +elogind minimal selinux suid systemd test +udev unwind xcsecurity xephyr xnest xorg xvfb} Installed versions: 21.1.13(0/21.1.13)^t(03:15:55 PM 05/03/2024)(elogind udev xorg -debug -minimal -selinux -suid -systemd -test -unwind -xcsecurity -xephyr -xnest -xvfb) Homepage: https://www.x.org/wiki/ https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/xorg-server Description: X.Org X servers > ...and governance the writing is on the wall for X.org. Weird. Looks like they're running Board of Directors elections. [0] [0] <https://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-devel/2024-March/thread.html https://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-devel/2024-March/thread.ht...>
- NekkoDroid 3y ago
  > Weird. Looks like they're running Board of Directors elections. [0] Just so you know: The X.Org Foundation also oversees Wayland.
- bitwize 3y ago
  There's X.org the software and X.org the foundation. X.org the foundation is electing a board of directors. They're also all-in on Wayland.
  - ori_b 3y ago
    And regularly releasing new x server versions. It seems like there's a new release every couple of months. For example, in January this year, xrandr got code to allow for multiple virtual monitors on a physical display. In April, there were 2 bugfix releases.
    - simoncion 3y ago
      Yep. If they were all-in on Wayland, they wouldn't be making regular xorg-server releases, and definitely wouldn't be adding new features to xorg components. (Because, yanno, they wouldn't have any staff available to do those things.)
bandrami 3y ago
What an odd comment to make on a story that was literally about NetBSD's maintenance work on X.org
armitron 3y ago
I predict Wayland will be dead long before we stop using X.
- vundercind 3y ago
  When you look at how long it’s been around versus where Xf86/x.org were on a similar timeline… yeah, we’re almost halfway through the life of the project, if history repeats itself. Its replacement may be expected to start designating it “legacy” and its boosters sneering at out-of-touch Wayland users well inside a decade. (It fares better compared against x11 instead, but not as much-better as one might guess—either way, it’s been a sloooow moving project)
  - bandrami 3y ago
    "Fractional scaling? Seat management? What is all this cruft? Let's start over from scratch and This Time We'll Get It Right!"
    - sweetjuly 3y ago
      it's good for the economy!
    - p_l 3y ago
      All of that things that weren't truly handler right by wayland anyway, thanks to pushing everyone and their pet hamster into implementing complete display servers :P I find especially funny how Wayland attempted to have "tear free done right"... and the expected display path (GPU accelerated) turned out to either involve 1 or more frame delay, or tearing because Wayland protocol didn't support explicit sync on render finish.
HumanProtractor 3y ago
[dead]
arp242 3y ago
You've been ranting about this for about 9 years now. bitwize on Aug 31, 2015 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10149015 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10149015 > It's written against an obsolete windowing model for a deprecated window system. bitwize on Jan 9, 2016 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10869618 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10869618 > Since X is now deprecated tech And tons more: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=3&prefix=true&query=by%3Abitwize%20%22wayland%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=3&prefix=true&que... Maybe give it a rest and let others have their toys without flying off the handle with comments that say or contribute nothing. And it's not even applicable here; there's literally a linked post about how Wayland is being worked on in this article's first sentence. But I guess the volunteers of NetBSD aren't working hard enough or something.
hapless 3y ago
X11 has been unmaintained not once, not twice, but THREE times and it's still the dominant system on UNIX-type things. Xorg is, itself, the thrice-disowned descendant of the o.g. X project. That is what it is! It's fine! if Wayland is the future, so be it, but it won't be because X11 got deprecated again. X11 has been deprecated plenty of times before! Wayland may very well take over the unix and most especially linux desktop story, but that is not a done deal, yet. My last two? three? jobs all explicitly required X11 as a thing, so if giant enterprises are not picking up wayland, the deal ain't done, yet, you read me?
- nrabulinski 3y ago
  If we’re going by giant enterprise standards then Windows XP is the latest version of windows
  - exe34 3y ago
    That's a really good comparison actually - windows after xp has been a shit show.
- mst 3y ago
  Eventually somebody will find X11's phylactery. As an fvwm2 addict, I do not relish that day.
dmitrygr 3y ago
> What about the fact that X.org itself is unmaintained and falling apart? Is it? Seems to work just fine. Not all that is new is good. Not all that is old is bad.
noirscape 3y ago
It won't be replacing XOrg anytime soon, because XOrg is a walking example of "worse is better". Yes, it's ancient, bizarre in some ways, cluttered with feature bloat and a security nightmare. Nobody denies that. The problem is that said feature bloat is also exactly what makes it attractive to desktop users. I'm not saying that Wayland has no use; it can reliably cover ~90% of all computer tasks and if you're just setting up some sort of kiosk/server with one application, I think it's hard to not pick Wayland since you can just grab a thin renderer and avoid all the extra crap that comes with XOrg. But for desktop, the weird/random things XOrg allows you to do are what makes it the undisputed king to this date. It's not what's best that wins. It's that what covers the widest amount of usecases that does, regardless of any amount of bizarre rituals that you need to do to get it working (and only if you have feature parity does less weird rituals take over in priority). Wayland already lost that race before it even started since feature parity with XOrg is a non-goal. Other examples of this concept in action: Any old-school Microsoft project (really, just all of MS Office), the entire HTTP frontend stack, SQL, PDF.

rabbits77 3y ago

The article begins by explaining that it’s a follow-up to an earlier article on Wayland!

bitwize 3y ago
Indeed; and if you read that article it says that current Wayland compositors depend heavily on Linux infrastructure, and have not yet accepted patches to support NetBSD. Everything Wayland on the BSDs is in the "one guy faffing about to see if he can get it working" stage. Unless/until the Wayland project starts mainlining BSD support, or the BSD projects have robust parallel maintenance of the core Wayland packages and compositors, BSD as a desktop system is dead in the water.
- doublerabbit 3y ago
  And that's what Wayland wants. "We will only develop for Linux if you want it do it yourself" is the vibe I get from the Wayland team. Why should FreeBSD be the ones who have to develop? The stubbornness of Linux users.
  - asveikau 3y ago
    I think it's more the detail they lost (or do not agree with) is that working successfully in multiple environments can valide the strength of the design. Some people will look at a slightly different structure underneath and see it as noise and hassle instead, where you or I may see their action as taking unnecessary or questionable dependencies.
    - bandrami 3y ago
      The short version is that the Linux ecosystem has for whatever reason spent a decade or so resolving the already-solved problem of "who is logged in to this TTY?" and came up with a new way to solve that that the BSDs don't in general implement and Wayland relies on.
      - vundercind 3y ago
        Red Hat wants it to be really hard to remain compatible with Mainstream Linux (whatever Red Hat does) while also differentiating your distro from theirs in meaningful ways, and wants some good old “fire and motion” against competitor distros. At least, I think everything they’ve been up to and these projects they heavily influence have been doing makes a ton more sense if that’s the plan. It’s that or a lot of weirdly-hostile and disorganized stuff has been happening by chance in a way that achieves that effect by accident. The BSDs are just collateral damage, I reckon.
        llm_trw 3y ago
        Jokes on them, the BSDs are more usable than Linux now if you care about productivity.
- asveikau 3y ago
  People not having the same priorities as you does not equate to death. You are being rude and overly dramatic.
  - llm_trw 3y ago
    Ah, what a delightful opportunity to delve into the nuances of the English language and its wonderfully intricate idioms! Let's embark on an enlightening exploration of why the phrase "dead in the water" is certainly not the same as simply being "dead." For anyone less familiar with the idiomatic expressions and metaphors of English, this can be a fascinating journey. To begin with, when we hear the word "dead," one's mind might instinctively leap to its most literal and unfortunate meaning—devoid of life. In biology, this means the cessation of all vital functions: no heartbeat, no brain activity, no breath. The ultimate and irreversible state that all living things, sadly, will eventually meet. It's quite final, isn't it? The end of the line. Kaput. There's no ambiguity here; dead means dead. However, the wonders of language allow us to use words in metaphorical or idiomatic expressions to convey more complex or nuanced situations or states. And that's where "dead in the water" swims into the scene. This phrase, you see, has nothing to do with the literal cessation of life. Oh, no. It's far more colorful and applicable in a variety of non-lethal scenarios. Originally, this idiom comes from the nautical world—a domain rich with metaphorical language, given the myriad challenges and adventures faced at sea. Imagine a ship, if you will, its sails billowing as it cuts through the waves. Now, picture it suddenly unable to move; the wind has died down to nothing, the sails slump, and the ship is merely adrift, going nowhere. It is, quite poetically, "dead in the water." The ship isn't literally dead, of course—it's just temporarily incapacitated, unable to proceed along its intended course until the wind decides to grace it with its presence once again. Transposed into everyday usage beyond the high seas, "dead in the water" is a vivid metaphor for projects, plans, or initiatives that have come to a halt—stymied, unable to progress, much like that becalmed ship. It's used to describe something that has little hope of success or revival in its current state. For instance, if a business venture runs out of funding or a new policy is halted by regulatory issues, they might be described as "dead in the water." Not literally deceased, but stuck, with no forward momentum. In essence, while "dead" is the cessation of life, "dead in the water" is about cessation of progress or movement—figuratively speaking, of course. The latter suggests a temporary state, a problem potentially fixable, perhaps with effort, change in strategy, or a shift in external conditions, unlike the permanence and finality of being literally dead. Isn't it simply marvelous how language lets us draw such specific shades of meaning with just a tweak of phraseology? Through this exploration, we can appreciate not only the richness of English idioms but also the joy of explaining something so deceptively simple yet profoundly different. Here we stand—or float, if you will—at the junction of literal and metaphorical, grasping the beauty of expression. And isn't that what language is all about?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

chungy 3y ago

> Without a Wayland story, the BSDs will really end up dying, at least as desktop systems. Good news then, FreeBSD already has working Wayland and NetBSD is working on it. Granted, I think OpenBSD stands out without a Wayland plan, but maybe I'm wrong there.

alpn 3y ago
> I think OpenBSD stands out without a Wayland plan, but maybe I'm wrong there. check this out - https://www.openbsd.org/papers/eurobsdcon2023-matthieu-wayland-openbsd.pdf https://www.openbsd.org/papers/eurobsdcon2023-matthieu-wayla...
- johnny22 3y ago
  I found this a bit more enlightening than that slide deck, although it's a bit old https://xenocara.org/Wayland_on_OpenBSD.html https://xenocara.org/Wayland_on_OpenBSD.html
wkat4242 3y ago
FreeBSD's Wayland technically works but you can't start a KDE session on it. So it's not all that useful. Not sure about other desktop environments as I don't use them.

simoncion 3y ago

> What about the fact that X.org itself is ... falling apart Works for me, and has for literal decades. > ...without active maintenance... This update to xorg-server was stabilized on April 14th, and it looks like library changes required me to rebuild and reinstall it like two days ago: $ eix -I xorg-server [I] x11-base/xorg-server Available versions: 21.1.13(0/21.1.13)^t **9999(0/9999)*l^t {debug +elogind minimal selinux suid systemd test +udev unwind xcsecurity xephyr xnest xorg xvfb} Installed versions: 21.1.13(0/21.1.13)^t(03:15:55 PM 05/03/2024)(elogind udev xorg -debug -minimal -selinux -suid -systemd -test -unwind -xcsecurity -xephyr -xnest -xvfb) Homepage: https://www.x.org/wiki/ https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/xorg-server Description: X.Org X servers > ...and governance the writing is on the wall for X.org. Weird. Looks like they're running Board of Directors elections. [0] [0] <https://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-devel/2024-March/thread.html https://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-devel/2024-March/thread.ht...>

NekkoDroid 3y ago
> Weird. Looks like they're running Board of Directors elections. [0] Just so you know: The X.Org Foundation also oversees Wayland.
bitwize 3y ago
There's X.org the software and X.org the foundation. X.org the foundation is electing a board of directors. They're also all-in on Wayland.
- ori_b 3y ago
  And regularly releasing new x server versions. It seems like there's a new release every couple of months. For example, in January this year, xrandr got code to allow for multiple virtual monitors on a physical display. In April, there were 2 bugfix releases.
  - simoncion 3y ago
    Yep. If they were all-in on Wayland, they wouldn't be making regular xorg-server releases, and definitely wouldn't be adding new features to xorg components. (Because, yanno, they wouldn't have any staff available to do those things.)

bandrami 3y ago

What an odd comment to make on a story that was literally about NetBSD's maintenance work on X.org

armitron 3y ago

I predict Wayland will be dead long before we stop using X.

vundercind 3y ago
When you look at how long it’s been around versus where Xf86/x.org were on a similar timeline… yeah, we’re almost halfway through the life of the project, if history repeats itself. Its replacement may be expected to start designating it “legacy” and its boosters sneering at out-of-touch Wayland users well inside a decade. (It fares better compared against x11 instead, but not as much-better as one might guess—either way, it’s been a sloooow moving project)
- bandrami 3y ago
  "Fractional scaling? Seat management? What is all this cruft? Let's start over from scratch and This Time We'll Get It Right!"
  - sweetjuly 3y ago
    it's good for the economy!
  - p_l 3y ago
    All of that things that weren't truly handler right by wayland anyway, thanks to pushing everyone and their pet hamster into implementing complete display servers :P I find especially funny how Wayland attempted to have "tear free done right"... and the expected display path (GPU accelerated) turned out to either involve 1 or more frame delay, or tearing because Wayland protocol didn't support explicit sync on render finish.

HumanProtractor 3y ago

[dead]

arp242 3y ago

You've been ranting about this for about 9 years now. bitwize on Aug 31, 2015 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10149015 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10149015 > It's written against an obsolete windowing model for a deprecated window system. bitwize on Jan 9, 2016 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10869618 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10869618 > Since X is now deprecated tech And tons more: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=3&prefix=true&query=by%3Abitwize%20%22wayland%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=3&prefix=true&que... Maybe give it a rest and let others have their toys without flying off the handle with comments that say or contribute nothing. And it's not even applicable here; there's literally a linked post about how Wayland is being worked on in this article's first sentence. But I guess the volunteers of NetBSD aren't working hard enough or something.

hapless 3y ago

X11 has been unmaintained not once, not twice, but THREE times and it's still the dominant system on UNIX-type things. Xorg is, itself, the thrice-disowned descendant of the o.g. X project. That is what it is! It's fine! if Wayland is the future, so be it, but it won't be because X11 got deprecated again. X11 has been deprecated plenty of times before! Wayland may very well take over the unix and most especially linux desktop story, but that is not a done deal, yet. My last two? three? jobs all explicitly required X11 as a thing, so if giant enterprises are not picking up wayland, the deal ain't done, yet, you read me?

nrabulinski 3y ago
If we’re going by giant enterprise standards then Windows XP is the latest version of windows
- exe34 3y ago
  That's a really good comparison actually - windows after xp has been a shit show.
mst 3y ago
Eventually somebody will find X11's phylactery. As an fvwm2 addict, I do not relish that day.

dmitrygr 3y ago

> What about the fact that X.org itself is unmaintained and falling apart? Is it? Seems to work just fine. Not all that is new is good. Not all that is old is bad.

noirscape 3y ago

It won't be replacing XOrg anytime soon, because XOrg is a walking example of "worse is better". Yes, it's ancient, bizarre in some ways, cluttered with feature bloat and a security nightmare. Nobody denies that. The problem is that said feature bloat is also exactly what makes it attractive to desktop users. I'm not saying that Wayland has no use; it can reliably cover ~90% of all computer tasks and if you're just setting up some sort of kiosk/server with one application, I think it's hard to not pick Wayland since you can just grab a thin renderer and avoid all the extra crap that comes with XOrg. But for desktop, the weird/random things XOrg allows you to do are what makes it the undisputed king to this date. It's not what's best that wins. It's that what covers the widest amount of usecases that does, regardless of any amount of bizarre rituals that you need to do to get it working (and only if you have feature parity does less weird rituals take over in priority). Wayland already lost that race before it even started since feature parity with XOrg is a non-goal. Other examples of this concept in action: Any old-school Microsoft project (really, just all of MS Office), the entire HTTP frontend stack, SQL, PDF.