4 ms·

The problem is: * The people who make XFree86/Xorg, GNOME and KDE are all part of the same FreeDesktop.Org club. They have a (not so) secret plan to completely

by amiga386 11mo ago

The problem is: * The people who make XFree86/Xorg, GNOME and KDE are all part of the same FreeDesktop.Org club. They have a (not so) secret plan to completely ditch X11 and replace it with the thing they've been dicking about with for 17 years: Wayland. * Wayland's still nowhere near X11 replacement quality, and in several cases, they actually think they've done you a solid by taking away useful things X11 can do, like the ability to reliably take screenshots with third-party software, or get a reliable list of screens and pick the one you'll open on. They exhibit worrying levels of phone-brain or "platform"-brain. My computer, my rules, you dipshits. * To ensure they achieve their goal of killing X11, the developers of Xorg are _intentionally_ going to stop supporting it, to scare you over to Wayland. "Who'll support your precious X11 if we, its own developers, abandon it? Muhahahahahaha!" they might ask. * What they didn't count on was the batshit conspiracy theorist who'd been submitting hundreds of patches to Xorg that they'd just been ignoring. He's escaped the asylum, he's anti-woke, and he's the saviour of X11. God help us all. And if you dare take him up on his offer to keep using X11, the X11-haters club (FreeDesktop) will call you a Nazi to delegitimise you so they can move forward with their plan to kill X11. It's a side-issue that the FreeDesktop/KDE/GNOME folks have gotten more divisive and confrontational in their politics and have no problem milking their tech projects to further their political goals. If you want someone to blame for this, blame the general increase in divisiveness that came from social media weaponising disagreement to the point the orange shitbag got elected and all the tech corps kow-towed to him. The GNOME developers have always been officious pricks who seem completely deaf to user feedback and actively fight you in the bug reports, but they haven't previously been banging on about "Nazi bars"; that's a recent development.

mort96 11mo ago
> What they didn't count on was the batshit conspiracy theorist who'd been submitting hundreds of patches to XFree86 that they'd just been ignoring It's worth noting that a bunch of those patches are just straight up broken and seemingly untested.
- amiga386 11mo ago
  Thus your choices for who will maintain Xorg: * The people who made it who also want to murder it * The crazy guy, who knows enough to be useful, but dangerous * Yourself None of these choices are good, and the Xorg developers know that. They're super-stoked about how much compelled Wayland adoption they're going to get.
  - mort96 11mo ago
    What I see in freedesktop is a loose association of people trying to make the best libre display server ecosystem they know how to make, and they've collectively come to the conclusion that they're able to make better software by starting from scratch than by patching away at the X11 code base from the 80s. And otherwise it's just a boring standardization committee for protocols. It sounds like you're seeing something much more sinister for some reason, and I don't understand why.
    - amiga386 11mo ago
      I think, rather, they've collectively come to the conclusion that brownfield development sucks and greenfield development rules. Which is true, if you're a voluntary developer. It's so much fun to play in new developments, and be involved in making history (that some other sucker will maintain in future) rather than maintaining someone else's past glories. Unfortunately, this means for third-party developers and users that the ecosystem they've built on top of is going to get thrown away, because the first-party developers have prioritised their own fun, over the utility and effectiveness of what they built. It did not have to be like this. The early freedesktop initiative managed to massively improve XFree86/Xorg without fundamentally throwing out X11. They threw out X11 so they do stuff like this: argue with developers that wanting to know the "primary" screen so they can open on it, is fundamentally, non-negotiably, not allowed, and fuck you for even asking for it (BTW it's standard on Windows, macOS and X11): https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/issues/179#note_2965661 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/i... This is what they live for. This is why X11 has to die. GNOME has form for this. In describing the "Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers" (CADT) development model in 2003, JWZ says: > I report bugs; they go unread for a year, sometimes two; and then (surprise!) that module is rewritten from scratch -- and the new maintainer can't be bothered to check whether his new version has actually solved any of the known problems that existed in the previous version. > It hardly seems worth even having a bug system if the frequency of from-scratch rewrites always outstrips the pace of bug fixing. Why not be honest and resign yourself to the fact that version 0.8 is followed by version 0.8, which is then followed by version 0.8? > But that's what happens when there is no incentive for people to do the parts of programming that aren't fun. Fixing bugs isn't fun; going through the bug list isn't fun; but rewriting everything from scratch is fun (because "this time it will be done right", ha ha) and so that's what happens, over and over again. He managed to predict Wayland, or at least the causes of Wayland, back in 2003.
kasabali 11mo ago
Small but a crucial correction: By XFree86, you meant X.org. XFree86 was the first X11 implementation used by linux distributions from 90's and 00's. Then, in mid 2000's FreeDesktop guys forked it as X.org and convinced all linux distributions to switch to it. ...(now comes the rant part)... ...only to declare X11 as old and unmaintainable and announce Wayland just a few years later. Also note that they twisted the situation very well to their benefit as part of Wayland's PR campaign saying "X11 developers are the ones who's developing Wayland", making people believe as if they've been developing it for decades even though they've been only working on X.org for the last few years. Unfortunately this myth still persists to this day. Whole Wayland thing was actually a textbook case of CADT [0] looked retrospectively but they fooled us all masterfully at the time. [0] https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html
- amiga386 11mo ago
  Thanks, I've changed my comments to say Xorg. However, in that potted history, let's not forget a lot of progress and advancement that Keith Packard and the FreeDesktop.org initiative did make. Standardising on autotools/make rather than the obnoxious imake, creating fontconfig rather than requiring arcane settings and conversion software to add fonts, creating the RandR extension and supporting hotplugging monitors and autodetection; I can't remember the last time I had to add a modeline manually to a config file! But the problem is the current Xorg developers want to kill X11, however short their tenure on it was. If they choose to leave, there aren't other Xorg developers waiting in the wings, apart from the crazy guy.
  - kasabali 11mo ago
    Good point on Keith Packard. He was never seemed keen on Wayland and was still suggesting improvement ideas on X11 'till 6-7 years ago.
whatevaa 11mo ago
Had nothing but problems with xorg every time I tried linux desktop. Screen tearing by default on every install was a given. x11 is nowhere near replacement for wayland. It's great that people will maintain it themselves instead of relying on others.

mort96 11mo ago

> What they didn't count on was the batshit conspiracy theorist who'd been submitting hundreds of patches to XFree86 that they'd just been ignoring It's worth noting that a bunch of those patches are just straight up broken and seemingly untested.

amiga386 11mo ago
Thus your choices for who will maintain Xorg: * The people who made it who also want to murder it * The crazy guy, who knows enough to be useful, but dangerous * Yourself None of these choices are good, and the Xorg developers know that. They're super-stoked about how much compelled Wayland adoption they're going to get.
- mort96 11mo ago
  What I see in freedesktop is a loose association of people trying to make the best libre display server ecosystem they know how to make, and they've collectively come to the conclusion that they're able to make better software by starting from scratch than by patching away at the X11 code base from the 80s. And otherwise it's just a boring standardization committee for protocols. It sounds like you're seeing something much more sinister for some reason, and I don't understand why.
  - amiga386 11mo ago
    I think, rather, they've collectively come to the conclusion that brownfield development sucks and greenfield development rules. Which is true, if you're a voluntary developer. It's so much fun to play in new developments, and be involved in making history (that some other sucker will maintain in future) rather than maintaining someone else's past glories. Unfortunately, this means for third-party developers and users that the ecosystem they've built on top of is going to get thrown away, because the first-party developers have prioritised their own fun, over the utility and effectiveness of what they built. It did not have to be like this. The early freedesktop initiative managed to massively improve XFree86/Xorg without fundamentally throwing out X11. They threw out X11 so they do stuff like this: argue with developers that wanting to know the "primary" screen so they can open on it, is fundamentally, non-negotiably, not allowed, and fuck you for even asking for it (BTW it's standard on Windows, macOS and X11): https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/issues/179#note_2965661 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/i... This is what they live for. This is why X11 has to die. GNOME has form for this. In describing the "Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers" (CADT) development model in 2003, JWZ says: > I report bugs; they go unread for a year, sometimes two; and then (surprise!) that module is rewritten from scratch -- and the new maintainer can't be bothered to check whether his new version has actually solved any of the known problems that existed in the previous version. > It hardly seems worth even having a bug system if the frequency of from-scratch rewrites always outstrips the pace of bug fixing. Why not be honest and resign yourself to the fact that version 0.8 is followed by version 0.8, which is then followed by version 0.8? > But that's what happens when there is no incentive for people to do the parts of programming that aren't fun. Fixing bugs isn't fun; going through the bug list isn't fun; but rewriting everything from scratch is fun (because "this time it will be done right", ha ha) and so that's what happens, over and over again. He managed to predict Wayland, or at least the causes of Wayland, back in 2003.

kasabali 11mo ago

Small but a crucial correction: By XFree86, you meant X.org. XFree86 was the first X11 implementation used by linux distributions from 90's and 00's. Then, in mid 2000's FreeDesktop guys forked it as X.org and convinced all linux distributions to switch to it. ...(now comes the rant part)... ...only to declare X11 as old and unmaintainable and announce Wayland just a few years later. Also note that they twisted the situation very well to their benefit as part of Wayland's PR campaign saying "X11 developers are the ones who's developing Wayland", making people believe as if they've been developing it for decades even though they've been only working on X.org for the last few years. Unfortunately this myth still persists to this day. Whole Wayland thing was actually a textbook case of CADT [0] looked retrospectively but they fooled us all masterfully at the time. [0] https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html

amiga386 11mo ago
Thanks, I've changed my comments to say Xorg. However, in that potted history, let's not forget a lot of progress and advancement that Keith Packard and the FreeDesktop.org initiative did make. Standardising on autotools/make rather than the obnoxious imake, creating fontconfig rather than requiring arcane settings and conversion software to add fonts, creating the RandR extension and supporting hotplugging monitors and autodetection; I can't remember the last time I had to add a modeline manually to a config file! But the problem is the current Xorg developers want to kill X11, however short their tenure on it was. If they choose to leave, there aren't other Xorg developers waiting in the wings, apart from the crazy guy.
- kasabali 11mo ago
  Good point on Keith Packard. He was never seemed keen on Wayland and was still suggesting improvement ideas on X11 'till 6-7 years ago.

whatevaa 11mo ago

Had nothing but problems with xorg every time I tried linux desktop. Screen tearing by default on every install was a given. x11 is nowhere near replacement for wayland. It's great that people will maintain it themselves instead of relying on others.