[HN Gopher] X12: Requirements for a successor to the X11 protoco... ___________________________________________________________________ X12: Requirements for a successor to the X11 protocol (2013) Author : pabs3 Score : 156 points Date : 2023-02-28 06:59 UTC (16 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.x.org) (TXT) w3m dump (www.x.org) | [deleted] | cpach wrote: | Hugged to death. Mirrors here: https://archive.is/PCsav | https://web.archive.org/web/20230213175550/https://www.x.org... | oleg_antonyan wrote: | X is almost 40yo, stable, reliable, difficult to maintain. | Wayland is 15yo, barely usable. Any old timers remember 1999 when | X was 15? Wayland is like IPv6 of desktops | doctor_eval wrote: | I don't identify as an old timer but I was using NCD | X-Terminals connected to Data General Aviion back in the mid | 90s and they were solid as a rock. | | XF86 also worked quite well in the late 90s but it did require | a lot of work and there were warnings that certain settings | could blow the monitor. | | Fun times. | lizknope wrote: | I remember creating a new modeline and adding it to the list. | Then using ctrl+alt and +/- to cycle through the modes. I | would get to the new mode and the monitor would start buzzing | and clicking and the image would flicker. I would quickly | toggle to the next mode that was "safe" then go back and edit | the modeline and try again. | | I did manage to get my monitor to run at 1280x1024 @72Hz but | couldn't make it go 75Hz | bitwize wrote: | More like the R6RS of desktops. | mnd999 wrote: | I think you're being unfair to IPv6 | oleg_antonyan wrote: | In terms of usability - definitely. But it's built on top of | similar unfulfilled promise: we're running out IPv4 addresses | VS X11 is unmaintainable legacy full of security bugs. 20 | years later IPv4 is still dominant, Wayland is still unusable | and X11 just works. | trissylegs wrote: | > YMMV. When it reaches the level of X11 that "just works | for everyone without preconditions" it will become usable | in my coordinate system | | I don't think X11 ever "just worked" for me. Every computer | I installed Linux on had X11 problems. | | The XKCD about Xorg.conf was very relatable back then: | https://xkcd.com/963/ | minitech wrote: | > Wayland is still unusable | | Wait, what have I been doing my work on then? Someone | should inform Ubuntu and Fedora, too. Who knew it hasn't | been possible to use the most popular Linux distro out of | the box for two years? | oleg_antonyan wrote: | YMMV. When it reaches the level of X11 that "just works | for everyone without preconditions" it will become usable | in my coordinate system | saturn_vk wrote: | I remember in the early 2000s still needing to write to a | config file to get X to work on my desktops at the time. | Was it 30 years old at that time? I've been running | Wayland crash free for a few years already, without the | need to touch a single config file. Does that mean it | reached better usability at least twice as fast compared | to X? | throwawaylinux wrote: | X11 is not usable for everybody without preconditions | though. | rekoil wrote: | Exactly, there's hundreds of lines of illegible X | configuration for every such "just works" setup. | | There's a difference between "the community has learned | to deal with it" and "just works". | kaba0 wrote: | I honestly don't get people, like were these people just | extremely lucky and never had to tweak anything? Like, I | remember times when I had to blindly log into my user and | try to fix my setup from there, purely by muscle memory. | yjftsjthsd-h wrote: | > I honestly don't get people, like were these people | just extremely lucky and never had to tweak anything? | | Yeah, that's about how I feel about Wayland. I'm not sure | quite why there are two groups of people with such wildly | different experiences talking past each other, but I | suspect it comes down to what each user wants the | software to do and what hardware they're running on. | sgjohnson wrote: | > But it's built on top of similar unfulfilled promise: | we're running out IPv4 addresses. | | It's not an unfulfilled promise. We're out of IPv4 | addresses and have been for almost a decade. | | NAT444444444444444444444 is not the solution. | ddtaylor wrote: | Sure, but the end result is that nobody can host a | service with an ipv4 address only. You would be missing | out on the majority of your audience. | sgjohnson wrote: | You absolutely can. I'm single stacking IPv6 on my fresh | hetzner box. | | Cloudflare in front of web services and it just | works(tm). | | For everything else - Argo can do arbitrary TCP (requires | cloudflared though) and then you can start bugging your | ISP about the very real need for IPv6. | yjftsjthsd-h wrote: | > Cloudflare in front of web services and it just | works(tm). | | Well... yeah? That's adding support for both stacks; just | because you farmed it out to a middle-man doesn't mean | that it's not there. | oleg_antonyan wrote: | Well, most providers worldwide still use IPv4 which means | that cost of switching to IPv6 is higher than cost of | maintaining workarounds for 10 years, and who knows, | maybe it will be the same for another 10 years | rekoil wrote: | No it's higher because they've started charging for IPv4 | addresses, they don't want to lose their cash cow... | sgjohnson wrote: | But it's really not. About 85% of the entire public IPv4 | range is currently announced. | | Transfering IPv4 prefixes comes with a 2 year transfer | restriction period. | | IPv4 addresses currently cost about $50, and you have to | buy an entire subnet at once, minimum /24. | | It makes perfect sense to start charging for them if | you're running out of them and don't want to buy | additional prefixes. | | Not to mention that there's also additional cost involved | in case someone was using that particular address (or | even worse multiple addresses from the same /24) for spam | or malicious purposes, because that means that the entire | prefix is currently trashed and there's some effort | involved for it to be removed from all the independently | maintained blacklists etc. | sgjohnson wrote: | Yes, having everyone involved learn IPv6 is more | expensive than burying your head in the sand and adding | another 4 at the end of NAT444444444444444444444, but at | some point it'll just be too ridiculous. | eknkc wrote: | It has been Good Enough(tm) unfortunately. At this point | I feel like we will never see IPv6 fully deployed. | fsh wrote: | X11 cannot handle the average user connecting an average | laptop to an average external monitor (no usable per-screen | scaling). Maybe this was good enough in the 80s, but today | it is seriously holding back the platform. | goosedragons wrote: | Sigh. X11 actually can. Even in its original release it | supported different PPIs for different displays. But a | lot of Linux programs (especially GTK ones) will flat out | assume the specified monitor PPIs are just wrong and will | use 96 PPI. Plus with the way modern multi-monitor usage | works with X11 by faking one giant single screen that | doesn't work anymore. But when it works, it works. | | But even with that it's STILL possible with the right | setup using xrandr where you essentially render at a | higher res and then downscale. Ubuntu's X11 version of | Gnome has had this out of the box since I think 20.04 and | it works very well. IIRC upstream Gnome refused it | because that's what Wayland is supposed to do... | destructionator wrote: | > But even with that it's STILL possible with the right | setup using xrandr where you essentially render at a | higher res and then downscale. | | You actually don't even have to do this for updated | programs - hidpi aware applications scale themselves, | vector graphics style, so there's no up then down scaling | going on. And applications can easily read the xrandr | config and adjust their factor when moved to a different | monitor. However, xrandr's ppi factor is not the scale | factor you likely want, so this isn't really | standardized; each toolkit might do it a bit differently. | But all the pieces are there. | | Non-aware applications might be bitmap scaled if needed | though. (Of course, wayland just breaks all legacy | applications anyway so that sets the compatibility bar | low regardless) | vetinari wrote: | > Even in its original release it supported different | PPIs for different displays | | Yes and no. | | X11 screens could have different resolutions, color modes | and pixel density, but windows could not span over | multiple screens, or moved from one screen to another. | The only way the user/the application could move window | to a different screen would be to open a new connection | to the screen (denoted by that familiar DISPLAY:0.x | environment variable) and recreate all the resources | there. | | There was exactly one application that was capable of | doing that at runtime (XEmacs). For all the others it | meant restarting the application with a new DISPLAY env | var. | | Hence Xinerama. It joined all the different physical | displays into a single screen, which allowed to move | windows around, but came with limitations, like the same | color modes or DPI for all displays -- since it was | single screen logically. | mnd999 wrote: | This is my situation. I use sway for this reason and it's | just about okay if you're not on Nvidia. | | Screen sharing is the main gripe, it's a pain to | configure, involves a lot of different bits of software | which have to be orchestrated and none of them are mature | enough not to break occasionally in an unexpected | fashion. | kstenerud wrote: | Wayland is the default on RHEL since 2019. | | Wayland is the default on Centos since 2019. | | Wayland is the default on Ubuntu and Debian since 2022. | | In Arch, Wayland is the default for GNOME installs. | | Wayland is far from "barely usable" | | And yes, I remember 1999. X was a pain to get working properly | with many graphics cards. Some things never change... | ravishi wrote: | Have you ever tried sharing your screen? Do your organization | uses Microsoft Teams? It is barely usable for quite some | people. | vetinari wrote: | Wayland screen sharing works fine (in Chrome, Webex...). It | doesn't work in Teams, but that's Microsoft's issue, since | they didn't bother with implementing it. | tutuca wrote: | If it's preventing your users to switch to your platform, | it's your problem too... | vetinari wrote: | Microsoft releasing worse implementation for competing | system? How surprising. /s | | The linux team client seems to be completely unmaintained | and might be thrown away soon. If you need to use teams, | use it in a browser. | chmod775 wrote: | > Do your organization uses Microsoft Teams? It is barely | usable for quite some people. | | That describes Teams on any platform. | sprash wrote: | X11 is actually not really difficult to maintain. There is just | no corporate funding anymore. Wayland is designed to be used in | car entertainment systems. At least this is where most of the | funding is coming from. As such it is completely unsuitable for | any desktop use and has had zero community mind share in that | space for a very long time. | gpderetta wrote: | X11 in '99 was stable, reliable and difficult to maintain :). | | Let's see where Wayland is in 25 years. | Jnr wrote: | Wayland is usable. It is simply not fully used. | | Wayland is just a protocol and there are multiple | implementations in different compositors. Instead of focusing | on a single great implementation, there are multiple average | and weak implementations. | | It puts quite a bit of pressure on desktop environment | developers and it seems like they don't really care about many | of the defined protocols. https://wayland.app/protocols/ | | I wonder if Linux desktop would be in a better state now if | Wayland also came with a new and advanced compositor used by | new DE's and not just a reference example one. | Jnr wrote: | I also want to point out that you will likely get a better | Wayland experience on KDE. They are much more active in | implementing Wayland protocols and overall it feels more | solid. | | This makes me sad because I really like how Gnome looks like, | but Gnome developers don't seem to care as much about Wayland | stuff. | est31 wrote: | I have been a KDE user since 2010. I've started this habit | a few years ago that every time I upgrade my desktop | distro's release, which is twice per year (first Kubuntu, | now NixOS), I try out the wayland mode for a while, until I | find the bugs to be too annoying. A few years ago I | switched back after a couple of hours. The last time I | tried I remained there for 3 months. So yes, a lot has | improved, but I'm still back on X11. | BearOso wrote: | I'd also confirm this. Gnome started out ahead by virtue of | being the target or idealization of most of Wayland's | features, but it's stagnated. Nothing is ever improved and | they refuse to fix the technical problems holding them | back, like the lack of I/O being separated from drawing in | Mutter. They claimed to have improved it several times, but | it's just as bad as ever. Either they're hesitant, or they | just don't have the time and resources to break and rebuild | it properly. | | Meanwhile, KDE/Plasma's kwin finally stepped past them. And | there's also the kwinft project that's rebasing kwin | idiomatically as a wlroots compositor. | | We may finally get full Wayland adoption, but I don't think | Gnome is going to be prominent in it anymore. | messe wrote: | > Wayland is 15yo, barely usable | | It's the default on several distros. I regularly play AAA games | on my gentoo gaming PC, using proprietary NVIDIA drivers, on | KDE Plasma, with little or no performance differences compared | to X11. | | Even the Steam Deck, arguably the most popular linux PC, runs | its default UI on Wayland. | ThatMedicIsASpy wrote: | Gamescope is wayland while the desktop is x11 | fsh wrote: | Wayland is the default on Fedora, Ubuntu, Red Hat, and Debian. | The majority of desktop linux users is probably on Wayland by | now. | ravishi wrote: | Until they have to share screen in a meeting and give up | tweaking flags in different places, login using X and never | look back again. | | Seriously for anyone who works remotely sharing screen is | essential, but it still doesn't work flawlessly in Wayland. | JoshTriplett wrote: | > Until they have to share screen in a meeting | | This was absolutely true, until I switched to pipewire. | Once I did, this started to just work, with no issues | whatsoever. (No configuration required, just followed | Debian's package dependencies switching to pipewire and it | started working in Firefox.) | 3836293648 wrote: | Screensharing works perfectly in firefox and given how | awful linux versions of zoom, teams, etc are, that's all | that matters | pelorat wrote: | Just do real time video encoding of the screen and forget | about X. | IceWreck wrote: | Conditionally default. Except the latest version of Fedora, | all the others fallback to X on nvidia hardware. | ddtaylor wrote: | The majority of graphics cards are Nvidia which don't play | nicely at all with Wayland. | [deleted] | messe wrote: | This isn't nearly as true as it used to be. I regularly | game on KDE Plasma on Wayland on a 3080 Ti with the | proprietary NVIDIA drivers, and it works fine. | fsh wrote: | The average user has a laptop with an Intel or AMD iGPU. | Gaming machine are niche. | [deleted] | pauby wrote: | The average user isn't running a Linux desktop. | lproven wrote: | That may not be true any more. | | ChromeBooks were outselling Macs from 2017-2021, although | the pandemic meant hundreds of millions of people | suddenly needed new computers for remote working and the | kids to use for remote schooling, so sales spiked and | have since collapsed. | | But they sold ITRO 100 million units per year for several | years. | | China's 5-3-2 program is also nearing its end: | | https://medium.com/technicity/chinese-3-5-2-policy-is-a- | majo... | | That means hundreds of millions more Linux PCs in the | PRoC. | | As such, that's somewhere around quarter to half a | billion Linux desktops in the last few years, and maybe | twice that. | | Windows PC sales are struggling: | | https://www.computerworld.com/article/3675895/pc-sales- | fall-... | | Still hundreds of millions of units, but they're falling. | | More people are staring at Linux all day than you might | think. | pjmlp wrote: | Chrome OS isn't Linux desktop. | | Even if you mention Linux sandbox environment, it is only | available in selected models. | lproven wrote: | I disagree. | | It's a relatively standard distro up until the GUI layer, | based on Gentoo. | | I'd agree that Android is something else, but ChromeOS is | mostly the usual GNU + Linux stuff, and a weird display | server which is Chrome rendering direct to the screen. | pjmlp wrote: | Then have fun running GNU stuff on ChromeOS, specially | the devices that don't support the GNU/Linux sandox | (crostini). | | Maybe take advantage of WASM for it. | | And even if Crostini is available, the usual stuff | | https://support.google.com/chromebook/answer/9145439 | | -- Cameras aren't yet supported. | | -- Android devices are supported over USB, but other | devices aren't yet supported. | | -- Android Emulators aren't yet supported. | | -- Hardware acceleration isn't yet supported, including | GPU and video decode. | | -- ChromeVox is supported for the default Terminal app, | but not yet for other Linux apps. | topaz0 wrote: | I have been running linux on various hardware since about | 2003. Zero of those computers had discrete gpus. | pabs3 wrote: | The average user isn't running a desktop. | vetinari wrote: | > The majority of graphics cards are Nvidia | | The majority of graphics cards are Intel. | [deleted] | yyyk wrote: | I recall none of these distros change existing installs, also | plasma (KDE) is often still on X11. So it depends on | proportions of new users+new installs+selected DE+video | card... | earlyam wrote: | As a user(!), Wayland is much more usable at 15 than X was at | 25. | pjmlp wrote: | Old timers remember when xmodconfig could be used to burn | monitors. | actionfromafar wrote: | Not exactly burn them, just gently char the innards until the | finest magic smoke was released. | kzrdude wrote: | It's basically imperceptible that I'm using wayland on ubuntu | (from default config on install). It works, no problems. | mjg59 wrote: | Anyone who believes that XFree86 was stable in 1999 was | apparently running a different XFree86 to me. The sysrq key was | mostly useful at the time for using the SAK shortcut to kill | all processes on the current terminal, which with luck included | your wedged XFree86 which would then get respawned by xdm. I | don't miss those times. | peoplefromibiza wrote: | > Anyone who believes that XFree86 was stable in 1999 was | apparently running a different XFree86 to me | | XFree86 on Linux wasn't very stable in 1999 (although it was | more than usable, more than Wayland is today). | | X11 on IRIX in 1999 was pretty stable. | | Parent said X, not specifically XFree86. | | also something to consider: how many people were working on | Xfree86 in 1999 and how many people are working on Wayland in | 2023? | | What was the state of the technology, tools, documentation, | availability of specs, reverse engineering etc. back then? | | AFAIK nobody was being paid by major tech companies (RH, just | to name one) to work on free software in 1999. | lizknope wrote: | XFree86 worked fine for me since 1994. I sometimes had | problems when exiting a video game like Doom or Quake. | SVGAlib would give problems but that wasn't X. | bonzini wrote: | Parts of X have always been free. Sun and DEC among others | contributed to the development of X11. | adrianmsmith wrote: | XFree86 in 1999 might not have been, but in 1994 when I went | to university in the UK and was using Sun computers which | were solely X servers to display programs running on the | "main" shared computer in the corner of the room, X and all | the associated software was all stable and worked fine. | vetinari wrote: | At our uni, we used DEC and had vxt2000 terminals. It | worked fine, just like wayland does today. But it wasn't | rock stable, or even remotely secure. | pjmlp wrote: | Solaris X Server wasn't the same. | sprash wrote: | X11 became really stable in the late 00s. And since the | introduction of DRI3 it is at the same technological level of | Wayland concerning the efficient buffer swap mechanism. X11 | is however still miles ahead on the architectural level. | Parts of the system like window managers or compositors can | fail or be replaced at runtime without affecting running | clients. Wayland lacks the appropriate standardized | interfaces for that and there are not plans if not outright | refusal to actually implement them. | throwawaylinux wrote: | The choices of architecture seem to reflect different | priorities, there are things that the Wayland architecture | does better than X and vice versa, aren't there? Hard to | say X11 is ahead architecturally if you pick features that | Wayland may not consider important. I've seen commentary | from people who have worked intimately on both protocols | and implementations of both who consider Wayland to have | the better architecture. | vetinari wrote: | > I've seen commentary from people who have worked | intimately on both protocols and implementations of both | who consider Wayland to have the better architecture. | | For those interested in details: | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWQh_DmDLKQ | sprash wrote: | Most of the criticisms in this talk are solved with DRI3. | Also this guy makes money with a consultant agency that | mainly works on Wayland and indirectly profits from | shitting on X11. This is not a neutral source. | vetinari wrote: | > Most of the criticisms in this talk are solved with | DRI3 | | Not true. | | > Also this guy makes money with a consultant agency that | mainly works an Wayland and indirectly profits from | shitting on X11. | | Maybe his employer works on Wayland because there are no | X11 jobs? | | > This is not a neutral source. | | He has experience with both, and he presents his | arguments. | destructionator wrote: | This link comes up in literally every Wayland thread and | it is even more bullshit now than it was in 2013 when it | was first posted (and it was bullshit then too). It is | titled "the real story" but it is quite the opposite. | | A few key points: | | 1) he laughs at how X has a bunch of extensions. | https://wayland.app/protocols/ hypocrites much. In 2013, | since it was completely unusable, it probably didn't have | many. But turns out real world use leads to "useless" | features being reimplemented. | | 2) he complains about how X.org has broad hardware | compatibility. As if that's a bad thing. Meanwhile | wayland, even now it still doesn't work reliably on half | the graphics chips on the market. | | 3) It complains that certain X features are not fully | network transparent. True, but most are and you can | detect at runtime and gracefully degrade. Wayland "fixes" | this by just dropping the whole feature. | | 4) it flat-out lies saying the X server does nothing yet | it is so much hard to maintain code. The core X protocol | provides backward compatibility and is rock solid (and | really easy to impelment from scratch btw, someone did it | in Javascript for a tutorial for crying out loud). | Meanwhile the Wayland compositor keeps accumulating | everything because of point 1. Need a screenshot? Add it | it the compositor. Need a hotkey? Add it to the | compositor. Need drag and drop? Add it to the compositor. | Need a notification icon? Add it to the compositor. In X, | all those are peer to peer. Graphics are actually a | relatively small part of a graphical user interface, | something Wayland is still slow to learn. | | 5) He complains that certain applications are written | inefficiently with blocking calls which is inefficient | over a network connection. Wayland's calls are ALL | blocking and just has no network connection. | | 6) Complains that X may draw things unnecessarily. | Indeed... but there's an extension to disable that. Easy | fix. Wayland even uses the same drivers! | vetinari wrote: | 1) no, he complains that X11 has a big core and then | extensions. Extensions are fine, but they were unable to | kick out parts of the core, because it is the core and | something somewhere assumes it is there. So they had to | maintain it, despite not being used in practice, except | by that little something that nobody can point their | fingers at. | | 2) he talks about obsolete hardware. There's no really a | point to support s3 trio, at the expense of support for | modern hardware, which works ink wastly different way. | | 3) That graceful degradation is in practice the same, as | just using Wayland. Ever tried to use modern X11 app over | network? RDP is vastly better experience, (and RDP | support is wip in wayland). | | 4) This is so wrong so I won't even react to it. | | 5) Wayland calls do not wait for reply. You rapid fire | requests and then collect responses as they come. Heck, | you can even get a response you didn't ask for ;) | raydiatian wrote: | > "barely usable" | | I run Hyprland just fine with Wayland, I seriously doubt it is | barely usable. | | > IPv6 of desktops | | Dunno if you've looked at your ip link lately but you probably | have an ipv6 address! | csdvrx wrote: | > I run Hyprland just fine with Wayland, I seriously doubt it | is barely usable. | | Same. I wasn't convinced about Wayland until I tried | Hyprland. It's just great! | | The design of X11 meant many windows managers, which mostly | were average. But that was ok, as the issues could be | addressed by separate tools | | Wayland had 3 issues 1) not many tools (now there's wev, | ydotools...) 2) they were limited in what they could do, as | the keys to the kingdom are mostly given to the compositor, | and 3) outside sway (with its own issues) the compositors | were not so great. | | So if you didn't have a good one, or if was missing essential | options, you suffered until you went back to X: to prep my | laptop for uni in the late 2010s I evaluated wayland but | returned to X as it was simpler and gave a better experience. | | Now with hyprland, I love wayland: I can script again very | precise behaviors with hyprctl and wlrctl . The foot terminal | emulator is great. Edge works fine with wayland. | | Much has changed since I first discovered Wayland in 2016: | I'd put 50% of that on hyprland (it's seriously wonderful) | and the other half on the availability of more wayland- | compatible tools. | | I'm eagerly waiting for the patches for wine on wayland: not | just because I love office, but because for a long time it | was said to be impossible to have a good wine experience on | wayland. | | Well, these patches prove it wasn't impossible, just a bit | hard, and old people are stuck in their ways and hate change | even for better tools. | | It's like how systemd was so unpopular at first, except it | had most of everything ready. Wayland in comparison was | missing many small tools that are only important for very few | people (ex: for scripting) but about everyone had one things | they couldn't do on Wayland. | cwillu wrote: | Having an ipv6 address is the easy part. Having ping6 | actually able to ping something over ipv6 is another thing | entirely. | DonHopkins wrote: | More like the aptly named "Duke Nukem Forever" of the desktop. | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_Duke_Nukem_Fore... | scrollaway wrote: | Wayland is default on several distributions and has some pain | points, much like X did in 1999 (it had many back then, and in | fact still does today). But it's definitely usable, it's my | daily driver here. | | The main difference is in 1999 X did not have real | alternatives, so if you wanted a graphical desktop, you had to | fix the X bugs period. Here if you don't want to deal with | wayland issues you can fall back to X. It makes for slower | development... | dark-star wrote: | The discussion about "wayland vs X11" is eerily reminiscent of | the discussion of "systemd vs. sysv-init"... | | Some people apparently really do hate it when things change that | they seemingly have no control over | | Edit: I fully expect to be downvoted into oblivion for this post | :-D | Aardwolf wrote: | Simply the fact that systemd turned logs into a binary format | that can't be read with standard tools, and this was not | (easily? at all?) possible ti cgange made me really strongly | dislike it. | | systemd has its own tool to read its binary log format, but | I've already seen it corrupt its own logs and fail to read it. | | And did they do the binary format for efficiency? Get this: | I've never seen anything be inefficient due to logging before | systemd. Shortly after archlinux switched to it, something was | being super slow. Sure enough, it was systemd not being able to | handle the amount of ligs something produced. | | I think systemd is very opinionated, and something that | opinionated should not be such basic piece of the linux | landscape. There should be choices of individual components. | nivenkos wrote: | Wayland has a massive loss in functionality (in the name of | "security" and off-loading implementation details to | compositors/window managers) compared to X11 though. | | Stuff like xdotool, screen sharing, clipboard sharing, etc. is | much harder. | JoshTriplett wrote: | I think in both cases, there's a similar switch of philosophy. | We went from "there are a bunch of components glued together, | and with enough glue you can solve anything (except an excess | of glue)" (shell scripts for sysvinit vs declarative unit files | for systemd; X11 apps that can do almost anything, vs the | privileged compositor for wayland), to a model of "we wanted | things to just work without having to install glue, so we | integrated more functionality people wanted, if you want to | swap it out you have to swap out the whole thing and keep up | enough with all the other features people want" (e.g. you have | to actually get the things you want into unit file directives, | or get the features you want into the compositors people use; | or you have to build a completely separate compositor or a | separate init). | | That's a tradeoff. For my part, I'm thrilled that so many more | things just work out of the box; however, it's discouraging for | people whose features aren't covered yet, since they have to go | work on integration rather than writing a specialized tool and | encouraging people to glue that tool in. But the benefit of | that is that once something _is_ integrated, it just works, | with no glue required. | WhatIsDukkha wrote: | You are presenting this in certain way that I think veers | into inaccurate and misleading in an attempt to smooth things | over and be nice. | | What we had before systemd was - | | 90% glue code, reimplemented quite badly across X | distributions. | | That glue code was, in practice, extremely brittle and very | very unfun to attempt to keep even simple daemons running | "portably" distribution to distribution. | | The other 10% was increasingly aging and ill maintained c | code snippets. | | That was not a nice world for people actually using it. | | For people making stuff up about "the old days" that didn't | actually participate in the misery of making basic systemv | scripts, yeah it was composable and we lost something. | zozbot234 wrote: | The internals of systemd are just as brittle, and the model | of unit file configuration does not really apply cleanly | beyond the simplest cases. So editing unit files becomes an | undocumented dark art. | dijit wrote: | Chiming in here to say that systemd seems to cover the | 80% (or even 90%) case pretty nicely, however that last | 10-20% is now _really_ difficult. | | Anyone who has really delved into systemd knows this but | they get shouted down as halting progress and hugging | bash scripts, which is disingenuous as bash scripts (as | per sysvinit) were painful and had great difficulties in | areas such as determinism and parallel execution. | | If you ever want an example of what I mean: look at how | systemd starts mysql. Someone (not me) spent at least a | man month making that work. | | I do begrudge the all or nothing approach that systemd is | taking (even if it claims to be modular), but I will | admit openly: that 80% case is a lot nicer. | JoshTriplett wrote: | I was attempting to acknowledge, in good faith, that there | are _valid_ tradeoffs between models, even for folks who | prefer one model over the other. | | I'm happy in the current model as well. But I also | acknowledge what it traded off to get there. | yyyk wrote: | X11 offers a lot of functionality on the server - a lot of it | unused, but still. Wayland technically specifies little but | the protocol. So here the philosophy switch is the other way | around. | ranger207 wrote: | Yeah, I'm a big fan of systemd but I can accept that when it | first came out it was probably a lot worse than it is today. | Similarly, Wayland has a bunch of good ideas, along with a | bunch of functionality that isn't there yet. Of course, Wayland | also has the problem that it's intentionally excluding some | useful features that X had, like global hotkeys and | screensharing. I think systemd and Wayland are actually | opposites in this regard, where systemd was disliked at first | and then turned liked, while Wayland was liked at first but is | now turning to disliked | vetinari wrote: | > Of course, Wayland also has the problem that it's | intentionally excluding some useful features that X had, like | global hotkeys and screensharing | | Screensharing has been supported for some time already. Some | apps support it, some don't. It is up to the apps to use the | respective APIs, the times of free reign over framebuffer is | over. | mort96 wrote: | I mean, you can get screen sharing to work. But there are | like 3 different incompatible "standards" for how to do it. | There's no single simple answer to "how to record the | screen in Wayland". This has been the state of screen | sharing on Wayland for at least 7 years. | | I'm also very curious about what's envisioned for global | hotkeys. Surely we don't expect people to manually go to | their system settings and configure some command to run | which talks to Discord over an IPC solution to start | sharing my voice when I press my push to talk button and | stop when I release the push to talk button? But "global | hotkeys should be configured on a system basis, not an | application basis" seems to be the reigning philosophy, | despite being incredibly user and developer hostile. | vetinari wrote: | There is one standard and single simple answer: xdg- | desktop-portal with pipewire. Some compositors might have | implemented their own private APIs, but that is not a | standard by definition. | | Global shortcuts are a bit more thorny, exactly for the | reason you mentioned. You present one POV, the another | is, that application-defined shortcuts are incredibly | hostile, as they allow application to stomp on each other | in the better case, or hijaack global state in the worse | one. Some other operating systems do not allow it either, | for the same reasons. The long-term solution could be | defining api, that allows application to advertise global | actions, and allow the user to configure shortcuts that | might (or might not) call these, in some user-friendly | way. | mort96 wrote: | Isn't xdg-desktop-portal a flatpak thing? It claims to be | so here: https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal | | > A portal frontend service for Flatpak and possibly | other desktop containment frameworks. | | When it comes to global shortcuts, I'm not saying it has | a super easy solution, but it's something that it's | essential to support. Wayland intentionally doesn't, and | I can't see that changing in the short term (as you also | agree) | vetinari wrote: | It is dbus api, and is able to work cross-namespaces | (i.e. flatpak containers too). There no harm in using it | in non-flatpak apps, at least you will be ready if your | app ends up in flatpak. | | Wrt global shortcuts, I see that there is some work done. | The intentional part isn't malice, as in not willing to | implement it at all. It is about not implementing | temporary solution, that will be quick and dirty, and | then being stuck for supporting it for next 50 years. | chimeracoder wrote: | > Yeah, I'm a big fan of systemd but I can accept that when | it first came out it was probably a lot worse than it is | today. | | The first "large" distro to switch from sysvinit to systemd | was Arch, and that switch happened over ten years ago. The | switch itself was quite rocky (the upgrade path was not | particularly seamless, and while Arch users tend to be more | tolerant of that sort of thing, it's worth mentioning). | | That said, even in 2012-2013, the end result once you | completed the upgrade was significantly better than | collectively expected. The original plan was to support both | systemd and sysvinit (at least for a period of time), but | that was quickly abandoned because not enough people wanted | to actually maintain sysvinit packages, so support[0] ended | up getting dropped very quickly. | | [0] Arch is a community project, so "support" is different | from what you'd expect in (e.g.) RHEL, but it still has | separations of what's considered supported and what's not. | Conan_Kudo wrote: | > _The first "large" distro to switch from sysvinit to | systemd was Arch_ | | No. In terms of released to users, the first was Fedora; | the second was Arch; then Mageia; then openSUSE. In terms | of integrated into the distribution, the first was Fedora; | the second was Mageia; then openSUSE; then Arch. | | Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemd#Adoption | jmclnx wrote: | The largest issue with Wayland is it has "Linuxisms". That | means no work was done by the Wayland people to make it | portable to other UN*X. So the BSD folks (and other UNIX | people) have a lot of work to get it going. | | And there still seems to be confusion if or will Wayland | require systemd, from what I have seen, no 100% clear direction | from anyone. | wmf wrote: | Since 99% of users are on Linux anyway, that can't be the | largest issue. | terrorOf wrote: | [dead] | WesolyKubeczek wrote: | I wouldn't say that screens (protocol term) in X11 are totally | useless. In fact, this is how I would implement a more secure | screensaver (this would require cooperation from the server, | though): the screensaver client somehow securely authenticates to | the server so it's entitled to be the screen locking/unlocking | process. It's hosted on a separate X11 screen. When there's a | command to lock the machine, the server switches to that screen. | Upon unlock, the server returns to the default screen. | | Now if you kill the screensaver, or it segfaults because you hit | a lot of keys, or a butterfly causes an EMI disturbance and the | screensaver dies, you are left with an empty screen and not with | your work exposed like in the current scheme of things. | xearl wrote: | (2017) | ognyankulev wrote: | In 2017, a typo was fixed. The content is from 2013: | https://cgit.freedesktop.org/wiki/xorg/log/Development/X12.m... | pfoof wrote: | wanted to see if it was committed on april 1st | avhception wrote: | Yet I'm still running X11, with Wayland still struggling and | no X12 in sight. | bartvk wrote: | I'm not up to date on the Linux desktop ecosystem. In what | sense is Wayland struggling? | aidenn0 wrote: | It doesn't work reliably on any GPU I own, for any stable | version of a linux distro I use. One GPU is too old, the | other is too nvidia. | kaba0 wrote: | Wayland uses linux's gpu abstraction (drm) to work and | that's it. If it fails to work than linux also does, so | your setup has some issues. | aidenn0 wrote: | I have to disable hardware compositing on X11 to get a | reliable desktop (and HW rendering in individual apps | like firefox). I'm not sure if something similar is | possible on Wayland. | saturn_vk wrote: | It doesn't sound like X11 is running reliably for you | either | aidenn0 wrote: | I restart X11 only when either there's a power failure | longer than the battery on my UPS, or I upgrade my | kernel, so it's reliable enough. | vetinari wrote: | Having to disable compositing doesn't sound very | reliable. | yjftsjthsd-h wrote: | If it works, it works. And some of us never bothered | installing a compositor in the first place, so it's | hardly a high bar. | vetinari wrote: | Obviously it doesn't work if your workaround is disabling | it. It is either bad hardware, or buggy driver. For the | latter, it has to be some obscure hardware; popular | hardware would have it fixed. | yjftsjthsd-h wrote: | Okay, let's enumerate. | | Option 1: Wants to used hardware acceleration, fails, | allows you to disable it and actually use your computer. | | Option 2: Wants to use hardware acceleration, fails, | refuses to allow you to disable anything, literally | cannot display graphics. | | One of these works, even degraded. The other does not. | vetinari wrote: | I don't dispute that. My claim was, that both options you | mention are broken, and for that one "working", "limping" | would be a better term. | | Certainly not something you would architect a display | system around. | kaba0 wrote: | That doesn't depend on the protocol, I think most | implementations can simply choose a so-called "dumb" | backend instead of hardware composition. | vanderZwan wrote: | To be fair, I'm on an five-year old laptop with NVIDIA | and since last year it _almost_ works well enough to be a | daily driver. For some weird reason Chromium doesn 't | render at all, even though Chrome does. That's the only | remaining bug of significance. | | Whereas when I tried a year before I had to bail after an | hour because many applications would just have a black | screen. | | It kind of feels like it will take only one more year for | this to work well enough (except then the laptop might be | so old hardware support ends up lacking) | Nzen wrote: | Dudemanguy wrote about its deficiencies 2022-06-11 [0], | ex lack of feature parity with X11 and self imposed | limitations like only allowing integer scaling (ie to get | 1.5 scaling, it uses x3/x2 scaling). For some | perspective, consider checking other hn reader reactions | to this post [1]. | | [0] https://dudemanguy.github.io/blog/posts/2022-06-10-wa | yland-x... | | [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31752760 | nani8ot wrote: | Fractional scaling was recently merged. | | https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland- | protocols/-/m... | petepete wrote: | Not sure it's fair to call it struggling when it's the | default in just about every distro and has been smooth and | stable for years. | stonogo wrote: | I think it's fair, since every one of those distros ships | an X11 fallback. I desperately want Wayland to succeed | but exaggerating its current wins won't get us there. | | I don't want this post to focus on the negative, though, | so I'll suggest a more positive argument: the people who | would have been responsible for a hypothetical X12 | instead decided to make Wayland. I can't think of a body | of experts more likely to make a correct decision, so I | have confidence in Wayland as the path forward. | saturn_vk wrote: | I mean, before Wayland every distro shipped with a text | console as a fallback to X11 | scrollaway wrote: | Shipping a fallback doesn't mean the alternative is not | in daily use. | petepete wrote: | Fair. I'll admit there are a few rough edges, mainly | caused by some apps (Slack) having older versions of | certain libraries that makes some functionality (like | screen sharing) break. | pabs3 wrote: | I've been running Wayland for years. It does everything X11 | does at this point and is better in some ways. | mkl wrote: | 2013 is when the format was converted to markdown. No idea | when the content is from. | Semaphor wrote: | Looks like it started in 2007 [0], though the content was | pretty different, there were some updates over the years, | and the current version is indeed from 2013 [1] | | [0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20071123130628/https://www | .x.org... | | [1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20131222002042/https://www | .x.org... | DonHopkins wrote: | Haven't we been through this fiasco of trying to replace X11 with | X12 about a dozen times in the last several decades? | | Just go onto Y0. | | https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-x-windows-disaster-128d398... | jmclnx wrote: | Yes, and who remembers "Y" from I think 20 to 25 years ago :) | bokchoi wrote: | I remember that effort! I recall seeing a 3d notepad or | something like that. | | Wow, the website is still up: | http://www.y-windows.org/about.html | chungy wrote: | Mind that the page describes a hypothetical update to X. In | practical terms, Wayland is X12. | return_to_monke wrote: | does Wayland have network transparency tho? | bitwize wrote: | That's what Pipewire and Waypipe are for. | pjmlp wrote: | Yet another audio reboot. | linuxandrew wrote: | Network transparency doesn't offer any tangible benefits for | a lot of apps and desktop environments because they are drawn | with bitmaps and textures rather than vectors. | | This topic has been done to death for the past decade. VNC | and RDP won. X11 was a razor edge case and nothing more. | DonHopkins wrote: | Yet network transparency was the whole point of (and whole | reason for the complex byzantine architecture of) X11. So | you have to pay the full expensive complexity and | asynchronous distributed api tax, and you still have to | reimplement half-assed virtual desktop network transparency | at another layer. | gpderetta wrote: | ssh -X is still easier and lighter weight that running a | VNC server on any machine I need to run a GUI though. | | Incidentally at $CURRENT_JOB this happens very often: when | WFH, I RDP to a windows machine, form which I VNC to a unix | xvnc box form which I ssh -x to my actual dev box. It is | amazing that it works at all and it is quite usable! | LinAGKar wrote: | For running individual applications over the network, | Waypipe might be the way to go, though I haven't tried | it. | cpach wrote: | It is _very_ convenient indeed. No doubt about that part. | But it's not like it's impossible to find viable | alternatives. | lloeki wrote: | That's quite a stretch, Wayland and X (any X, 11 or | hypothetical 12) are so vastly different that calling Wayland | "the new X" is like calling Quartz "X for macOS". | mort96 wrote: | It's not as far fetched as you'd think. My understanding is | that Wayland is a result of X11 developers going together to | design a new protocol based on the thoughts and ideas they've | had for an "X12" throughout the decades. | sshine wrote: | Yes, but the comparison is still valuable. | em-bee wrote: | isn't X11 a full redesign of X10 like Wayland is of X11? | stonogo wrote: | Not a full redesign. It was sufficiently close that you | could compile X10 software and link in -loldX and run it | under X11. | kevin_thibedeau wrote: | Wayland doesn't inherit any architecture from X. XWayland | is just a display server hosted by Wayland same as Exceed | or Xorg on MS Windows. This is why X will never die since | it can always be run on top of other graphical systems. | steponlego wrote: | No it's not, it barely does any of the things X11 is useful | for. | bitwize wrote: | 100% of the developers who know anything about how graphics | works under Linux are focusing on Wayland. Development on | Xorg is moribund, with only Xwayland getting significant | attention. | | Hint: X was optimized for 1980s graphics, which was 90% | simple blits, line draws, and fills mediated by the CPU | perhaps with special fixed-function accelerators for those | operations. | | In 2023, graphics is done with the GPU -- period. You post | draw commands, geometry, and textures to the GPU via shared | memory and let it do the work. Programmable shaders open up | vast amounts of capability that X11's graphics primitives | just don't get you. | | So you may be right that Wayland isn't good at what X11 is | useful for. But nobody's doing what X11 is useful for today. | What people are actually doing, Wayland is excellent at. You | _will_ be running a Wayland desktop soon, because toolkit | maintainers and distro packagers will simply drop support for | X. The Gtk maintainers are already talking about dropping | support for X in Gtk+5. | arp242 wrote: | People have been predicting the death of X for about ten | years now, ever since Wayland was declared stable. Here you | are 6 years ago: | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13925468 | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13922499 | | And for all the talk about GPU, it _feels_ significantly | slower on my (admittedly not very fast) laptop. | | Wayland will be the future, I guess, eventually. But X will | be around for a long time. GTK 5 is still years away (most | aren't even using GTK 4). | steponlego wrote: | It doesn't matter to me if the X.org developers have | decided not to do their jobs, which is maintaining X.org. | This isn't proof that X.org is bad, it just shows that | giggers who really work for big tech firms shouldn't also | be trusted to maintain Free software. | | I've noticed them slowly trying to ruin X.org for a couple | years now, deprecating drivers for no reason whatsoever, | etc. | throwawaylinux wrote: | Right, the name or any kind of lineage does not matter, Wayland | is the X11 successor because it is the current seriously | developed and improved open display protocol. Nothing about | Wayland stole from X11, has any less legitimacy to be the | post-X11 protocol than something called X12, or prevents | anybody else from improving X11 or from working on an | alternative they call X12 or anything else. | | I don't know why people get so hung up about this. People | including its creators may have been over-optimistic about | Wayland, but it was never going to be a case of a weekend | hacking binge producing something useful out of the gate (X11 | had that distinction because it was entering a very small and | very green field). X11 has been used for so long because it is | very well supported, robust, and has been extended and improved | for decades and most of the remaining problems it has are very | hard to solve. And that's exactly why we also didn't see | something called X12 happen overnight either. | | The fact that Wayland has been created and worked on and | blessed by a number of X11 alumni did lend it a good amount of | credence early on, and one might say gives it the right to be | spiritual successor to X11. But really if you censor the names | and look at the practical reality rather than sentimentality, | Wayland creators and developers have been going down the long | difficult road of coming up with something better and nobody | else did, so _that_ is really why it is the next X11. Progress | may seem slow but it does not stop. Features continue to be | added, implementations continue to improve, support continues | to expand and its takeover seems almost inevitable at this | point. | | Someone might mention "network transparency" at this point. As | far as I've seen from the outside looking in that was never the | fundamental requirement of the protocol as far as I can tell. | Non-transparent protocol like DRI were never not considered to | be X11 by the X11 architects and developers who wrote and | merged them, showing they have always been quite willing to | step out of rigid dogma and embrace practical application. The | original X announcement never said the project was a network | transparent window system, it said it was a good-but-not- | perfect window system and if a good windows system today does | not require network transparent protocol (because users don't | care as much as they did back then or because networking can be | achieved at other layers) then there is no reason it couldn't | be X12. The X12 page linked here enumerates some other X11 | features that could be dropped too, I've never seen a | reasonable argument for why a network transparent protocol is | the be-all and end-all of X. | [deleted] | rodgerd wrote: | > I don't know why people get so hung up about this. | | People get hung up on this because they believe that free | software somehow entitles them to dictate that others perform | infinite labour on whatever schedule, projects, or features | that they deem fit, irrespective of whether the people they | are dictating to want to, think that it's a good idea, or | whatever. | cpach wrote: | Good point. And for those who need to connect over the | network there are now FOSS implementations of RDP, for | example. (And VNC, but the performance there is probably not | so good.) Then there's also proprietary solutions such as | BeyondTrust and NoMachine. | | Yeah, I know RDP was developed in Redmond but from my | layman's perspective, it's one of the best protocols for | accessing a graphical desktop environment over a network. If | you worry about the security, just tunnel via WireGuard. | permalac wrote: | Year of Linux desktop is comming. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-02-28 23:00 UTC)