[HN Gopher] X12: Requirements for a successor to the X11 protoco...
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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.
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