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Author of article: Honestly, it is pretty easy to configure the X Server these days; very little manual intervention has been required since the mid-2000s if y

Author of article: Honestly, it is pretty easy to configure the X Server these days; very little manual intervention has been required since the mid-2000s if you want to accept the defaults, which largely are correct and good. I am mindful about what families of hardware I buy, though, but that's not too restrictive. The only piece of hardware of mine that needs manual configuration is the Logitech TrackMan Marble, but that's only because I operate the mouse with a right-handed layout with my left hand. Interestingly the TrackMan Marble does not work with its full feature set in Wayland (core example: the buttons to enable horizontal/vertical panning of a wide or tall document), and this is not exotic hardware. How configuration is being handled in the X to Wayland conversion is a mystery to me. Some of it is happening in libinput (I think), but other parts aren't. This is one of the reasons I am deferring the Wayland migration for as long as I can. Configuring software stack that runs (think: what the ~/.xsession file manages) is the place I've invested most of my effort, and that's purely about aesthetics and behavior: DPI, font rendering settings, window manager, etc. And this is pretty easy to do these days, because most of these things can prototyped and altered in an existing X session (keeping a tight edit-run loop). And both of these situations can be alleviated by storing critical configuration files (e.g., ~/.xsession or the X Server configuration) under version control. There's no point in having to invest in reconfiguration of the same hardware these days when there's cheap version control and storage.

ssl-3 2y ago
Oh, for sure. I've been using X in various capacities for ~3 decades. I remember how it was. I'm impressed with how it is. I recently switched back to X as a primary desktop after a rather long hiatus of doing [mostly!] other things. There was some initial driver discourse (standard nVidia vs. OSS necessary nonsense), but it wasn't really so bad once I sorted out what I needed and most "regular" Linux users can skip by a lot of this by default. So far, I've done zero manual configuration of X itself outside of using XFCE4's GUI tools to arrange the three monitors in front of me in the right order -- and I don't presently see any reason to change anything else. It's been very pleasant, all said, even though I got here on Medium-Hard Mode with an a rather barebones base install of Void on an existing ZFS pool for root. X really was one of the easier parts of the whole operation. (I have no interest in Wayland. It offers no clear advantage to me as a user that I can identify; even the games I like to play run splendidly in X. I've also always adored the concept of remotely displaying GUI applications. It's convenient -- I ran remote X apps for years immediately prior to this recent switch, and it worked well. Remote X apps have saved my bacon a few times by allowing me to quickly get a thing done in a familiar way instead of learning how to do it using something else entirely and maybe stuffing it up in some unforeseen fashion.)

ssl-3 2y ago

Oh, for sure. I've been using X in various capacities for ~3 decades. I remember how it was. I'm impressed with how it is. I recently switched back to X as a primary desktop after a rather long hiatus of doing [mostly!] other things. There was some initial driver discourse (standard nVidia vs. OSS necessary nonsense), but it wasn't really so bad once I sorted out what I needed and most "regular" Linux users can skip by a lot of this by default. So far, I've done zero manual configuration of X itself outside of using XFCE4's GUI tools to arrange the three monitors in front of me in the right order -- and I don't presently see any reason to change anything else. It's been very pleasant, all said, even though I got here on Medium-Hard Mode with an a rather barebones base install of Void on an existing ZFS pool for root. X really was one of the easier parts of the whole operation. (I have no interest in Wayland. It offers no clear advantage to me as a user that I can identify; even the games I like to play run splendidly in X. I've also always adored the concept of remotely displaying GUI applications. It's convenient -- I ran remote X apps for years immediately prior to this recent switch, and it worked well. Remote X apps have saved my bacon a few times by allowing me to quickly get a thing done in a familiar way instead of learning how to do it using something else entirely and maybe stuffing it up in some unforeseen fashion.)