4 ms·

X11 did nothing wrong. You hear me? Nothing.

by lagniappe 2y ago

speed_spread 2y ago
It's true except no one wants to maintain it anymore because the code is a mess. This is how software dies.
- immibis 2y ago
  You're confusing X11 with Xorg. There were X servers before Xorg and there will be X servers after. (Xwayland is one!)
talldayo 2y ago
x11 doesn't do much of anything to begin with, these days. It will still exist for the people that want to use it, but distros are right to not default to it anymore.
- bee_rider 2y ago
  Did they ever fix the accessibility situation on Wayland? Non-accessible defaults are not great IMO.
  - spookie 2y ago
    The issue is still open for GNOME, so I would assume it still is very much a problem: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/9 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/9
  - johnny22 2y ago
    gnome and cosmic are both using accesskit for some of the parts that aren't completed yet.
indrora 2y ago
X11 did a lot of things. None of them "wrong", just "badly conjoined at the spinal cord". An X server is a fantastic example of how building drivers for deep hardware components should never have been written in userspace. (If anyone wants: There's a fantastic talk at LCA a few years ago from Keith Packard about X's history: https://youtu.be/cj02_UeUnGQ https://youtu.be/cj02_UeUnGQ )
- immibis 2y ago
  X11's architecture, on the other hand, is arguably better than Wayland's. Server-side rendering is a great way to It also has lots of flaws. "Mechanism, not policy" has to go, because you are trying to make a desktop environment, not draw arbitrary rectangles to the screen. It is already a given that there is one special client called the window manager; it would serve the architecture well to know that's the window manager instead of treating every client as if it could potentially be a window manager. But Wayland goes even further in this direction, eschewing things like icons, title bars and resize borders, which are basic expectations of a desktop environment. While X11's way of doing these things is esoteric, at least it has one. (If it were up to me, standardized window properties would be promoted to requests, so you'd just call xcb_set_window_title instead of fussing with atoms and window properties). Another anecdote is HDR: Wayland seems to still have not standardized how it should work; meanwhile on X11, there is already protocol support for multiple pixel formats (1-bit, 4-bit, 8-bit, 16-bit, 24-bit displays) and you could just add 48-bit color to that list. That would be one of the things Wayland stripped out while striving for simplicity (since everyone had 24-bit colour at the time) that turned out to actually be important. --- At some time before the heat death of the universe, I will get around to trying to fork Xorg and remove all the cruft and see where that goes. (Server-side rendering is not cruft. User-mode SVGA drivers are.) I did minimal work on this already - as in, I downloaded Xorg's source code and had a look through. The whole configuration system has to go. The XFree86 driver code and driver abstraction has to go, and the DRM driver hard-wired in place. Using dlsym to locate compiled-in modules makes tracking dependencies impossible. I suspect this has something to do with the state of Xorg: Nobody knows what it should and shouldn't do, and the module API for Xorg is the entirety of Xorg, so changing anything is liable to break someone's external module that wasn't on the "it should do this" list. It wouldn't be the first time the X server was forked with the intention of cleaning it up: Xorg is a fork of XFree86, which was a fork of X386, which was based on something I don't remember.
barryrandall 2y ago
The problem is what X11 didn't do: attract and retain maintainers.
- hulitu 2y ago
  The majority of SW developers want to make shiny new things, not fix old bugs.
0xbadcafebee 2y ago
It did have some of the worst code in open source. We didn't need to abandon the protocol, ABI & backwards compatibility (fuck Wayland sideways a broom) but a rewrite was sorely needed
DonHopkins 2y ago
Wrong. https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-x-windows-disaster-128d398ebd47 https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-x-windows-disaster-128d398...

X11 did nothing wrong. You hear me? Nothing.

speed_spread 2y ago

It's true except no one wants to maintain it anymore because the code is a mess. This is how software dies.

immibis 2y ago
You're confusing X11 with Xorg. There were X servers before Xorg and there will be X servers after. (Xwayland is one!)

talldayo 2y ago

x11 doesn't do much of anything to begin with, these days. It will still exist for the people that want to use it, but distros are right to not default to it anymore.

bee_rider 2y ago
Did they ever fix the accessibility situation on Wayland? Non-accessible defaults are not great IMO.
- spookie 2y ago
  The issue is still open for GNOME, so I would assume it still is very much a problem: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/9 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/9
- johnny22 2y ago
  gnome and cosmic are both using accesskit for some of the parts that aren't completed yet.

indrora 2y ago

X11 did a lot of things. None of them "wrong", just "badly conjoined at the spinal cord". An X server is a fantastic example of how building drivers for deep hardware components should never have been written in userspace. (If anyone wants: There's a fantastic talk at LCA a few years ago from Keith Packard about X's history: https://youtu.be/cj02_UeUnGQ https://youtu.be/cj02_UeUnGQ )

immibis 2y ago
X11's architecture, on the other hand, is arguably better than Wayland's. Server-side rendering is a great way to It also has lots of flaws. "Mechanism, not policy" has to go, because you are trying to make a desktop environment, not draw arbitrary rectangles to the screen. It is already a given that there is one special client called the window manager; it would serve the architecture well to know that's the window manager instead of treating every client as if it could potentially be a window manager. But Wayland goes even further in this direction, eschewing things like icons, title bars and resize borders, which are basic expectations of a desktop environment. While X11's way of doing these things is esoteric, at least it has one. (If it were up to me, standardized window properties would be promoted to requests, so you'd just call xcb_set_window_title instead of fussing with atoms and window properties). Another anecdote is HDR: Wayland seems to still have not standardized how it should work; meanwhile on X11, there is already protocol support for multiple pixel formats (1-bit, 4-bit, 8-bit, 16-bit, 24-bit displays) and you could just add 48-bit color to that list. That would be one of the things Wayland stripped out while striving for simplicity (since everyone had 24-bit colour at the time) that turned out to actually be important. --- At some time before the heat death of the universe, I will get around to trying to fork Xorg and remove all the cruft and see where that goes. (Server-side rendering is not cruft. User-mode SVGA drivers are.) I did minimal work on this already - as in, I downloaded Xorg's source code and had a look through. The whole configuration system has to go. The XFree86 driver code and driver abstraction has to go, and the DRM driver hard-wired in place. Using dlsym to locate compiled-in modules makes tracking dependencies impossible. I suspect this has something to do with the state of Xorg: Nobody knows what it should and shouldn't do, and the module API for Xorg is the entirety of Xorg, so changing anything is liable to break someone's external module that wasn't on the "it should do this" list. It wouldn't be the first time the X server was forked with the intention of cleaning it up: Xorg is a fork of XFree86, which was a fork of X386, which was based on something I don't remember.

barryrandall 2y ago

The problem is what X11 didn't do: attract and retain maintainers.

hulitu 2y ago
The majority of SW developers want to make shiny new things, not fix old bugs.

0xbadcafebee 2y ago

It did have some of the worst code in open source. We didn't need to abandon the protocol, ABI & backwards compatibility (fuck Wayland sideways a broom) but a rewrite was sorely needed

DonHopkins 2y ago

Wrong. https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-x-windows-disaster-128d398ebd47 https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-x-windows-disaster-128d398...