On Abandoning the X Server

https://ajaxnwnk.blogspot.com/2020/10/on-abandoning-x-server.html

by cheshire_cat • 6 years ago

400 403 6 years ago

ajaxnwnk.blogspot.com

pmoriarty9• 6 years ago

It's a couple of years old, but this post on "Why I'm not going to switch to Wayland yet."[1] summarizes some of the concerns I have about switching to Wayland:

"at the moment there are several types of applications that not only don't work in wayland, but would be very difficult, or impossible to work natively in all major wayland compositors.

Examples (in order of importance to me):

  * Programmatic output configuration (xrandr, arandr, etc.)
  * CLI clipboard access (xsel, xclip)
  * Third party app launcher/window switcher (rofi, dmenu, albert, docky).
  * Clipboard managers (parcellite, klipper, Gpaste, clipman, etc.)
  * Third party screen shot/capture/share (shutter, OBS, ffmpeg, import, peek, scrot, VNC, etc.)
  * Color picker (gpick, gcolor3, kcolorchooser)
  * xdotool

Until Wayland has all these (and more) and they are as stable and feature-rich as the existing apps on X, I will not willingly switch to Wayland.

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/wayland/comments/85q78y/why_im_not_...

emersion18• 6 years ago

I can find Wayland equivalents for my compositor for all of these tools:

https://github.com/swaywm/sway/wiki/i3-Migration-Guide#commo...

magicalhippo• 6 years ago

Ok so I've mainly used Windows, but I got a secondary machine with Linux, which for the last few years has been running KDE Neon which I rather enjoy.

This whole "desktop stack" on Linux always makes my head hurt, so these might be really dumb questions:

If I install some distro, Arch say, and I wanted to use Sway, and I then want to run Kile, will Kile then run through XWayland? Will it work just as well as Kile on KDE Neon?

I understand KWin has some Wayland support but it also seems not quite ready for prime time the times I've tried it. So was curious about alternatives, just for curiosities sake.

pmoriarty9• 6 years ago

Just to take a couple of examples from that list:

ydotool is listed there as an equivalent of xdotool, but ydotool has only a tiny fraction of the features of xdotool.

And it's unlikely that it'll get much better any time soon, as its README says:

"Since Jun, 2019, I have little time to maintain this project"

wtype is listed as another equivalent to xdotool, but it has even less features than ydotool.

If the rest of the X equivalents on that list are as feature poor as these, I don't hold out much hope for Wayland in the near future.

anonunivgrad3• 6 years ago

on my compositor

Yikes! So just more fragmentation and half-baked alternatives.

jancsika• 6 years ago

And I can develop on an ancient Thinkpad if I want. But I'm not going to claim that's the best UX.

From the article, about X:

But using it to drive your display hardware and multiplex your input devices is choosing to make your life worse.

This is a weird conflation of this developer's experience after being burned out on development, and the user's experience running a modern distro.

If as I user I confuse those two things, then I'm going to click the button to choose Wayland when I log in. And I guarantee you my experience as a user will be worse on Ubuntu, Debian, and probably any other modern distro by making that choice.

I can work around that worse user experience by choosing alternative to what doesn't work, but that's a separate issue from the default UX under Wayland making my life easier.

CarelessExpert10• 6 years ago

Hell, I'd be happy if there was just fewer bugs.

Case in point: Gnome + Wayland + guake. If you configure guake to use anything less than 100% of the width of the screen, then it suddenly appears in the wrong position.

But wait, maybe that's a guake bug, right?

Wrong. I tried a couple of other options for similar functionality and they demonstrated the same issue. So odds are it's actually a bug in the compositor.

And that's ignoring that basic things like global keybinding don't work (edit: ya ya, the Wayland proponents will tell you that's by design, but it's a) user hateful b) totally different than literally any other desktop OS out there today, and c) breaks apps, right now, in ways that will require major code changes to fix) so I have to put a hack in place to allow F12 to open guake up in the first place.

Meanwhile, we only just got the "official" solution for screensharing (what Zoom does is an incredible hack: they just take lots of screenshots! No, I'm not kidding, that's actually how it works, which is why the framerate is so bad) and it involves yet more new stuff (pipewire, et al) that I'm sure will be a source of its own raft of bugs.

I'd say "maybe in a year or two", but we've been saying that for a long time, now...

djsumdog4• 6 years ago

The trouble with your guake bug is it might be Gnome + Wayland specific. With the separation between the server and composer, bugs might need to be fixed in multiple places. Some window managers use wlroots, so maybe some bugs can be fixed there, but others have their own forks and implementations.

The hotkey thing is big and it's annoying because it's another thing that might need to be implemented/fixed in each and every composer and environment (and it could be different in every environment).

I've seen the X11/Wayland talks and I agree Xorg has tons of old crufty garbage in it, and screen locking in Xorg is not very secure. But the Wayland team seems to have made little effort in addressing even the most basic things like hotkeys, screenshots, etc.

I'm not sure if "user hateful" is the right term, but they don't seem to be prioritizing the most basic things people are asking for.

d4rti• 6 years ago

I think pipewire broke my audio when I upgraded to Kubuntu 20.10. Removing it fixed it and seems to have had no ill effects.

roenxi• 6 years ago

Hell, I'd be happy if there was just fewer bugs.

There are strategic and tactical issues here.

Tactical issues are obvious. Wayland's problem with screenshots and all the bugs from not having a decades long lineage.

Strategic issues are less obvious. As this blog pos alludes to the standard X server is reaching a maintainability crisis where long term devs don't think the project is a good idea.

I think Wayland is a tactical mis-step myself for reasons you and GP mention, but I think now that the bad has been covered someone needs to mention the good:

The reference X server cannot practically be replaced. The reference Wayland compositor quite possibly isn't ever going to get established before being replaced. This is an excellent thing - it beings evolutionary pressure to the display system.

Wayland has problems, but unlike the current X ecosystem the problems can be fixed by replacing bits of software. The Wayland protocol seems light enough that Wayland+1 can implement it as a compatibility layer. When the dust settles, leaving X will have been a good idea.

Asooka• 6 years ago

Yeah, I'm not sure why the entire X protocol had to be thrown away. I suspect for a while the shiny new desktop stack will just be X on Wayland until someone writes a Wayland compositor that is also an X server just without the bits that can't work. One of the reasons for Wayland was fast compositor updates, but I still don't see why the compositor and window manager have to be one and the same, you could delegate management to a wm and present the full window. Heck, you could also replace Xlib and xcb with versions that know when they're running locally and skip the network protocol for most operations.

Sadly I don't have time to work on that, which really sounds like a full time job for a team of at least 3 developers, and from the looks of it, the people in charge don't share my vision for integrated coexistence of old and new.

creese• 6 years ago

I switched to Sway recently. I couldn't believe how snappy it is.

Some of your issues are solved:

CLI clipboard access: wl-clipboard: https://github.com/bugaevc/wl-clipboard

App launcher: bemenu: https://github.com/Cloudef/bemenu

djsumdog4• 6 years ago

Wayland is only supported by compositors that implement the wlr-layer-shell protocol. Typically wlroots-based compositors.

I'm really concerned about Wayland fragmentation. Will some tools work on only wlroot implementations and not others? X11 apps generally work across window managers, although the weird ones (tiling window managers like i3) may have some interesting things you have to work around.

If wlroots became the standard for all window managers on Wayland and everyone used it, I guess it would be fine. But if not, we're going to see a lot of apps that have to be adapted for each and every composer.

horsawlarway9• 6 years ago

I switched to Sway recently. I couldn't believe how snappy it is.

This is the common refrain I tend to see. I know I was certainly in the "Can't believe it" category, since I'd tried wayland about 4 years ago and ended up moving back to X.

That said, I had exactly the same reaction 2 years ago when I gave it a shot on my new machine.

It was fast, didn't show any tearing or flickering, handled automatic configuration of most monitors correctly, and made my touchpad genuinely nice to use.

Just the touchpad support alone won me over pretty much immediately.

I went from "Eh, Wayland isn't ready" to "Holy shit, I'm never going back!"

boogies• 6 years ago

Until Wayland has all these (and more) and they are as stable and feature-rich as the existing apps on X, I will not willingly switch to Wayland.

For me it’s some of those, dwm, sxhkd, keynav, xcape, the Compose key, and simple highlight + middle click/Shift+Insert copypasta. I’m a bit confused about the extent to which the Wayland devs have changed their minds about the last one.

tincholio2• 6 years ago

xcape and the compose key are really killer tools. Not having them would really screw with productivity

simias3• 6 years ago

Man reading this thread confirmed that I probably shouldn't even attempt to use Wayland in the near future, I basically use every single of the features you've listed.

So far I basically kept using X11 because it mostly just works for me, but I didn't expect that Wayland was still so far behind.

akvadrako2• 6 years ago

The compose key works just like in X; I use it all the time.

mnd999• 6 years ago

I always get downvoted for saying this but anyway. Wayland needs the Nvidia problem to be solved. I don't see how it's sustainable to have to build everything for GBM and EGLStreams.

jordan_curve2• 6 years ago

Yep. People can complain about Nvidia’s refusal to comply to standards as much as they want, but at the end of the day, there is never going to be widespread adoption of Wayland until Nvidia hardware is fully supported.

sergeykish22• 6 years ago

Probably because it is solved?

EGLStreams (NVIDIA): GNOME, KDE, Weston

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/wayland#Requirements

heinrichhartman• 6 years ago

I would not consider this examples "Applications", but more configuration tools. I would also not expect to be able to port the OSX Clipboard manager to Windows or the "Displays" utility. From a new window server I would expect to have some ways to configure output, switch applications, manage clip-board but I would not expect to have my existing tools continuing to work.

If you are re-architecting a system from the ground-up there is always some fallout expected.

account4210• 6 years ago

I would also not expect to be able to port the OSX Clipboard manager to Windows or the "Displays" utility.

I would also not expect people to suggest deprecation OS X in favor of Windows and then shit on people what want to keep using their OS X Clipboard manager.

This is the real problem with all this forcing to move people to Wayland / Pulse / SystemD crap: They are new platforms instead of compatible improvements to the existing platform, but somehow you still expect everyone to just jump ship.

mkhalil• 6 years ago

Wow.

I was suprised to read that OBS doesn't work with Wayland. I found some articles [0] on how it runs well using XWayland [1] - which I guess let's you run X-Clients under Wayland - but it seems that the amount of work to get this to work is not trivial, considering the official PR for the work, is on part 3 and that has been open since March![2]. Oh, how did it get so bad?

---------------

[0] https://feaneron.com/2019/11/21/screencasting-with-obs-studi... [1]:https://wayland.freedesktop.org/xserver.html#heading_toc_j_3 [2]:https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/pull/2484#issuecomm...

markstos• 6 years ago

I recently switched to Sway on Wayland. Sway has good dynamic output configuration. `wl-clipboard` and `wl-paste` are there for CLI clipboard access. There's a rofi fork that works on Wayland, and can also emulate `dmenu`. `clipman` is Wayland compatible. I use `grimshot` with `rofi` integration for screenshots. I have a HTML Color Picker script for sway that's launched from `rofi` that I should share. `ydotool` and `wtype` emulate the parts of `xdotool` that I care about.

Also, there's no longer tearing when I resize windows!

pkulak• 6 years ago

You kinda just need to use new stuff when it's all so heavily dependent on an X server.

    * swaymsg (no idea what Gnome or KDE do here)
    * wl-clipboad
    * wofi, or a Wayland fork of rofi (https://github.com/lbonn/rofi)
    * I don't use a clipboard manager, so I'm gonna skip this one. :D
    * slurp, grim, wf-recorder, mpv (OBS and ffmpeg work fine, not sure about the others)

I think I was lucky to get back into Linux this year because I didn't have to unlearn anything to use Wayland. You mention a dozen tools I've never heard of! If I had some X flow I'd been using for years with 10s of tools that no longer work on the other side, that would be overwhelming.

mikenew• 6 years ago

clipman, for a clipboard manager.

Also here's a oneliner for color picking:

grim -g "$(slurp -p)" - -t png -o | convert png:- -format '%[pixel:s]\n' info:- | awk -F '[(,)]' '{printf("#%02x%02x%02x\n",$2,$3,$4)}'

account4210• 6 years ago

Yeah no, requiring users to switch applications makes your display server DOA.

DCKing7• 6 years ago

The problem with Wayland is really that people understand it to be a drop-in replacement of X11, or something close to it. But it's not a replacement of X11. You don't "switch to Wayland", despite what that GDM button seems to indicate. Wayland is just a protocol, whereas X11 is a protocol and entire system around it.

So Wayland is not a replacement of X11. Gnome on Wayland should be a replacement for Gnome on X11. KDE on Wayland should be replacement for KDE on X11. Sway on Wayland should be a replacement for i3 and X11. But as you can imagine in this equation, KDE, Gnome and Sway are permitted and required to take on more responsibilities.

You might take issue with the fact that a lot more of the display stack gets tied up in specific desktop environments. It's KDE and Gnome and Sway that are not providing you these command line tools/screen recording/clipboard access. I don't mean to say this as nitpicking or that """Wayland""" (whatever that means) is dropping the ball, but this is really the responsibility of the desktop environment (or WM) in Wayland's design. Wayland is just a protocol.

What you're observing as shortcomings in Wayland is really a lock of pace and direction of development for (e.g. Freedesktop) standards that standardize clipboard access/screen recording use cases, and the adoption of those standards. The Linux community seems to have been hit by 1) not realizing Wayland does not replace X11 and 2) realizing that, not being to coordinate standardization well of the pieces of the X11 stack that should be replaced as well. If you need to replace X11, you need a lot more than just Wayland. But that seems to keep on catching people by surprise.

I think it'd be helpful for the future of the Linux desktop if more people recognized that.

ubercow132• 6 years ago

Deprecating Xorg and providing no replacement standard/protocol for almost everything it does and enables is kind of the whole problem, isn't it?

andyjpb• 6 years ago

No matter how horrible X may be, it has a lot of value for end users. Almost all of this value is in the ecosystem around X.

You can't capture an ecosystem unless you provide that value, plus the activation energy needed to persuade people to change.

systemd (as an example of a large, recent, change to the "whole system") touched end-users far less than X so the pain was felt mainly by distributors and sysadmins.

Time and again, software that's "better" fails in the market because it doesn't provide the things that users need, want or use.

Backwards compatibility is usually key when trying to capture a large, long established user base. ...and that means backwards compatibility even (or especially!) with all the "bad" or "wrong" stuff. This is one of the things that makes software "products" much harder than software "engineering" (which in turn is "harder" than computer science).

Science is how it works. Engineering is getting it to work and productisation is getting people to adopt it.

Wayland has to solve problems that end-users actually care about rather than just being better in technical ways.

mcguire3• 6 years ago

"Wayland is just a protocol, whereas X11 is a protocol and entire system around it."

This statement doesn't make sense to me.

nine_k• 6 years ago

It looks like a ton of common functionality is not ready yet. It is dispersed among DEs, and this is not convenient.

I hope we'll eventually have some "wayland-goodies" package which will implement the common stuff like easy screenshooting, easy hotkey assignment, easy window inspection and control, etc. I suppose this can be implemented based just on the protocol, and not specifics of a compositor.

this_user2• 6 years ago

Maybe the problem is precisely that Wayland is not an X replacement, because that has led to a situation where there is a certain mismatch between the different pieces of the stack. Few people really understand what Wayland actually is, and how it works, and how it all fits together, which means only few people are actively working on the ecosystem.

Love it or hate it, but systemd has been around since 2010, and is almost ubiquitous by now. Wayland has been around since 2008, and it still seems more like a tech demo for most use cases rather than something that is production ready. There is clearly an issue with this project.

djur2• 6 years ago

This was so predictable, though, considering how slow and painful it was to get to even the current level of standardization and interoperability in the Xorg+Freedesktop world. I have to assume that part of the reason is that solving the problems Wayland solves is exciting and fun (and addresses the most obvious pain points with Xorg/X11), but building the rest of the ecosystem is less exciting and doesn't draw as much focus and engineering effort.

shmerl• 6 years ago

There are few replacements:

* https://github.com/bugaevc/wl-clipboard

* https://github.com/ReimuNotMoe/ydotool

OBS / ffmpeg and etc. should get integrated with Pipewire I think for screen capture and the like? But I'm not sure how far that progressed.

vidarh2• 6 years ago

For me the only reason is that my window manager would need to change (bspwm) and I have no compelling reason to switch unless it's 100% painless.

This is the biggest problem. I accept Wayland brings benefits for some people, but I couldn't care less. Since I don't care about the benefits it brings, it needs to be entirely painless.

Until the switch is more painless than holding on to Xorg, there will be a good chunk of users with no incentive to make the move.

EDIT: I'd also say that the fact that so many of the tools need to change, rather than e.g. get support added to them to support Wayland compositors is a huge indictment of the whole thing. It seems like no thought was put into planning for transition.

CountSessine6• 6 years ago

This is the biggest problem. I accept Wayland brings benefits for some people, but I couldn't care less. Since I don't care about the benefits it brings, it needs to be entirely painless. Until the switch is more painless than holding on to Xorg, there will be a good chunk of users with no incentive to make the move.

That depends a lot on how difficult it is to keep Xorg working with modern distros. You might get forced into Wayland when your favourite distro and all acceptable alternatives don’t want to put the work into integrating and patching an aging Xorg.

Whether it’s with a carrot or a stick, you’re going to Wayland sooner or later.

phkahler2• 6 years ago

> Until Wayland has all these (and more) and they are as stable and feature-rich as the existing apps on X, I will not willingly switch to Wayland.

Every time this topic comes up, a bunch of people bring up the things X has that Wayland doesnt yet have, or have in the form they think it should.

I'm not sure if it's just me but these comments come across as some combination of defiant, demanding, or I dont know what. It's like they don't understand that the world is moving on and doesnt really give a $h!t about them and their love of X. I mean here is a post from "the guy" whose been keeping X going for a long time saying "this shit is done" and people keep complaining about that as if they have some say in it without actually contributing to the code. It reads like entitlement - some kind of expectation that other people exist just to make things the way they want them to be.

clusterfish• 6 years ago

The comment you're responding to lists very concrete issues. Try accepting constructive criticism instead of accusing people of entitlement just because they dare to disagree with you.

Entitled developers who think their work is above criticism just because it's open source are just as annoying as entitled users who think they are owed something.

chaorace• 6 years ago

Features drive adoption. I might be more inclined to believe in Wayland if other secured platforms adopted similar constraints. Unfortunately for Wayland, other comparable platforms have consistently found security-conscious solutions that don't compromise on added value.

yyyk2• 6 years ago

Every time this topic comes up, a bunch of people bring up the things X has that Wayland doesnt yet have, or have in the form they think it should.

Every time this topic comes up, a bunch of people remind that Wayland doesn't yet have an accepted standard for basic features. Wayland is very good at some niche features like HiDPI or fractional scaling* , but more people (at least two orders of magnitude more) need screensharing these days when companies move to WFH.

* Yes, these are relatively niche features right now. e.g. Look at the Steam hardware survey: more people run resolutions below 1080p than above it - and that's in a biased sample, since gamers are more likely to have high resolution monitors! Now, it's nice to be future proof, but these features should not be prioritized over basic features.

app4soft• 6 years ago

Examples (in order of importance to me):

  * Image editor, with own modern looking GUI-toolkit built on top of X11 (AzPainter)[0]

> Until Wayland has all these (and more) and they are as stable and feature-rich as the existing apps on X, I will not willingly switch to Wayland.

Same thing actually decided by AzPainter developer: they already tried to add Wayland support to its GUI-toolkit (additionally to already supported X11), but postponed it due to Wayland still is not fully usable.[1,2]

[0] https://github.com/Symbian9/azpainter

[1] https://aznote.jakou.com/prog/wayland/index.html

[2] http://azsky2.html.xdomain.jp/memo/index.html

nsajko4• 6 years ago

I agree those features are essential for an Xorg replacement, but you're missing the fact that the Wayland designers excluded them intentionally, so Wayland is intrinsically hostile to the features and the power-users that use them. See my comment at the top level of this thread.

mFixman• 6 years ago

This is a good time to ask a question I wondered for a long time: why is does the clipboard depend on the window manager at all?

Wouldn't it be easier to make it a separate service instead of having X or Wayland deal with it?

account4210• 6 years ago

There is no technical reason why it needs to be in the window system (well in X the clipboard goes away if you if the client that set it exits, but that is unwanted anyway) but from a user perspective it is very close to keyboard input so it makes sense to have it be handled by the same system.

xvilka2• 6 years ago

For me it's XMonad - there was an attempt to write Wayland alternative Waymonad[1][2] but it is now dead.

[1] https://github.com/waymonad/waymonad

[2] https://github.com/xmonad/xmonad/issues/193

hacknat4• 6 years ago

When the last discussion of X being abandon-ware came up one of the things I wanted to say, being the creator of a highly used open source project myself, is that people are ultimately responsible for software. I was going to speculate that the maintainer of X might be burnt out and that none of us have any right to his free labour, and that the people whining should probably step up or shut up.

Open source software is also free (as in beer) software.

There's a word for people who complain about free things.

yjftsjthsd-h• 6 years ago

There's a word for people who complain about free things.

The post and comments are free, yet here you are complaining. Consider why you think that's okay, and you'll understand.

johncolanduoni2• 6 years ago

A post and comment today is by necessity an active effort; judging the quality of an ongoing effort on a project and judging why there isn’t an ongoing effort on the project are two very different things.

stonogo2• 6 years ago

Most (almost all) of the X.org and Wayland developers are paid for their work.

emersion18• 6 years ago

Not really. There are hundreds of contributors not paid by anyone. Until 1 year ago I wasn't paid for my Wayland-related work. I'm now very lucky to have a company sponsor my contributions, but that's far from being the case of everybody.

Even if all developers were paid, they wouldn't be paid _by users_. It means the developers don't owe the users anything.

znpy• 6 years ago

You miss the point.

The problem is not wayland. I root for wayland and I hope it'll progress steadily to maturity.

The problem is getting pushed to drop my well-working Xorg-based setup for some wayland-based setup that can't run the application I use daily and that I've been running for years.

I'm okay with wayland, but I have a problem with people telling me "oh just drop that".

osobo• 6 years ago

I'm fairly sure you missed his point. Entirely.

stjohnswarts• 6 years ago

I think we're all rooting for Wayland, but we also like to get work done and like the stability of xorg. I hope someone can pick it up and keep it going until Wayland is 100%

bigbubba2• 6 years ago

Trying to shaming critics into silence might suppress their criticism, but it won't make them like you.

hacknat4• 6 years ago

I'm not trying to shame anyone into silence. I'm not trying to shame anyone. However, I would like to see people complain less and act more. Being on the other side of open source software is eye-opening. It can be very disheartening to get mostly negative feedback for something done out of passion (even if you might make a bit of money for it).

romanoderoma• 6 years ago

There's a word for people who complain about free things.

You don't complain about the weather?

hacknat4• 6 years ago

I don't think I do (I'm generally not easily put out by weather), but I would argue that the weather isn't free. I have to survive and deal with weather (clothes, shelter, etc) no matter where I live or what I do.

sergeykish22• 6 years ago

Do you complain about people building new shelter (for free)? The one (also free) we are using is impossible to fix though some people still maintain it.

nullc2• 6 years ago

I don't see anyone complaining that X isn't being maintained.

Only that they'd rather use (unmaintained) X over Wayland due to numerous shortcomings in wayland that are practically unfixable (because they're intentional design choices, or because they're a result of the fragmentation resulting from wayland's design choices).

bee_rider• 6 years ago

What new features have even been added to X lately?

It is fine. It is done. Maybe something better will come along at some point, but we could just keep using it like this indefinitely.

lallysingh• 6 years ago

I don't have any real desire to get there while still pretending that the xfree86 hardware-backed server code is a real thing

What does he mean by that? That there isn't really a hardware-accelerated Xorg server?

If that's true, is the post indicating that Adam sees the Xorg code as an interface layer to some other rendering system that had hardware acceleration?

Is that XWayland? I'm guessing at all this.

wmf3• 6 years ago

He means that running Xorg "normally" without Wayland is abandoned and will begin to bitrot. He's planning to support XWayland indefinitely.

bitwize7• 6 years ago

If the only X driver left were the modesetting driver, I could probably live with that.

Xwayland can lick my sack.

dyingkneepad5• 6 years ago

The xserver code base is huge and supports a lot of stuff. It supports drawing through hardware-backed drivers (e.g., xf86-video-radeon on Xorg), through generic drivers (e.g., xf86-video-modesetting on Xorg) and even through weirder drivers (e.g., xf86-video-nested). It also supports servers other than Xorg (e.g., Xephyr, Xvfb) and many other things.

In an ideal world where everything uses KMS or everybody uses something like Xwayland we would be able to kill million of lines of code from the Xserver. While this doesn't happen, those millions of lines not exercised by these paths remain unmaintand.

Remember, Ajax works for Red Hat, which is trying to push really hard for Wayland on Gnome. They don't seem to care about anything graphics-related that's not Wayland+Gnome. Red Hat has much more decision power on the Linux community than people imagine it has.

A huge problem here is that a lot of efforts that were previously redirected at X11 are now being done on the Gnome compositor, due to Red Hat. We just won't get to see a solution to the fragmentation power unless someone with a lot of money decides to play Linux Graphics.

nerdponx3• 6 years ago

What do game devs have to say about all this? Or do games bypass X11/Wayland and do some kind of lower-level rendering?

ajaxnwnk3• 6 years ago

So. Couple of things.

sloccount says xserver is around 370kloc. This isn't counting the drivers outside of the generic KMS support (which, practically speaking, is what you're probably running on anything remotely modern), but ati+amdgpu+nouveau are another 102k, and intel is another 186k (partly because it embeds a copy of the software renderer for dumb reasons), so you're still not quite at two-thirds of an MLOC. The size isn't so much the issue, it's the design. The xfree86 ddx seriously believes that you have one video card driving one monitor with one keyboard and one mouse, and anything beyond that only works well because we sank a ton of effort into it. (It used to have code to disable interrupts! From userspace! What could go right.)

It sounds a little like you think I'm being given these priorities as marching orders from above. That's maybe a bit insulting? I suspect I'd have the same opinion at this point regardless of my employment history, namely, that X is a tremendously successful project whose core design and reference implementation do not reflect how computers work anymore, in ways that make it painful to develop and maintain as the system display server. Frankly that was probably true in 2005 when I started on it, but at that point it was also the only thing that had credible video drivers at all.

It's not that Red Hat is trying to lock anybody into a particular desktop out of some nefarious political agenda, it's that we don't have the resources to do things twice. If we want to deliver the best desktop experience we can then choose your own adventure among Gnome and KDE and XFCE and twm and i3 and whatever else simply is not going to be an efficient use of our headcount. And we're reaching that point with display services too, trying to support both X and Wayland increasingly means writing the same feature twice, sometimes with radically different approaches, and trying to implement them _at_ _all_ under X11 is more and more intractable. What would you have us do? What we're trying to build now is an Xwayland that keeps your X apps working as well as they ever did, under a hardware display server model that makes things like high-dpi and HDR and AirPlay and RDP and GPU offload straightforward, or at least feasible, instead of excruciating. You can like that or not, I guess.

In all seriousness, if someone wants to take the reigns of stewardship over the xfree86 code then please, by all means, come forward and claim your prize. But I can't justify spending my time on that anymore, and given the interval since the last major release, apparently nobody else can either.

ajaxnwnk3• 6 years ago

Terminology is something X has always gotten a little wrong.

The organization is called X.Org. The project is called xserver. It contains several display backends. The one based on the model inherited from XFree86 is called xfree86 in the code, but the executable is named Xorg (to avoid stepping on the XFree86 trademark, if memory serves). Its other backends you might encounter include Xvfb for an in-memory virtual framebuffer; Xwin and Xquartz, for running nested under some commercial OS' display servers; Xephyr and Xnest, for two different approaches to running nested under another X server; and Xwayland, for running nested under a wayland display server.

So when I say Xorg is abandoned I'm very specifically referring to the xfree86 code, to running xserver as _the_ display server.

smabie• 6 years ago

So, I need nvidia proprietary drivers, use a window manager that doesn't support wayland (cwm), do I have any options besides using Xorg? I think the answer is no, but I'm not super well versed in these things. Xorg seems to work just great for me, not sure what all the fuss is about. But then again, I'm not an expert, so I'm happy to adopt any other solution, assuming I can get fast graphics/cuda at 144hz and use my favorite window manager, cwm.

johncolanduoni2• 6 years ago

Compositors are starting to implement Wayland EGLStreams support, but it’s very shaky at the moment. As always, X works fine in some setups but is hopelessly broken in others (e.g. multiple NVidia GPUs connected to multiple monitors).

dreamer_2• 6 years ago

AFAIK Gnome and KDE already have EGLStreams support in place, but it does not work for XWayland because incompatibilities in NVIDIA-maintained libraries.

babypuncher• 6 years ago

Kwin supposedly got it over a year ago, but trying to boot into a Plasma Wayland session on Nvidia still kicks me back to a TTY.

I'm not convinced it will ever actually happen.

numpad0• 6 years ago

I wonder what this “only what is current may exist” culture is, whether it’s manifestation of survival of the fittest, a baby step towards the machine uprising of 2037; whether it acknowledges a notion, that an environment, where what without a change may sustain, cannot host a life.

politician• 6 years ago

It's a solution to the trust problem. Without consensus on what good, stable software looks like -- there are zero trustworthy review sites anymore (cf Amazon reviews) -- the only metrics we really have left are (a) backed by large corporation, and (b) is newer than the alternatives.

The other problems like environment drift and maintainer interest are secondary to the trust problem.

https4434• 6 years ago

For someone not familiar with this world, what is X Server and xfree86? What problem does it solve?

billsmithaustin• 6 years ago

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System.

waynecochran• 6 years ago

It provides an implementation for the X Window System (aka X11) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System

It has a long a storied history. The concept of running an app remotely and use a local display server is probably the thing that sets X11 apart from the rest of the pack. This is still really useful in my humble opinion -- I can run X11 apps (e.g. xv) on a headless EC2 server running Linux in the cloud and have the UI/display on my Mac (using Xquartz).

This story runs in parallel with the history of Unix itself.

https4434• 6 years ago

Thanks!

Wowfunhappy• 6 years ago

The fact that there is an implementation of X on Mac speaks to the power of this system, IMO.

However, regarding remote setups, is X forwarding significantly superior to using something like VNC? I've never done a side-by-side myself, but most of what I've read indicates that VNC is usually faster.

As a semi-experiment, a few months ago I decided to try running Firefox in a Linux VM, and render it in XQuartz on my Mac host. The experience was not pleasant, to say the least. And that's what I'd think to be the best-case-scenario for latency. Hard for me to imagine using it over WAN.

throwaways885• 6 years ago

It started a long time ago, back in the days of mainframes and thin clients. Mainframe boxes would run the sever side part of "X Server" while clients (ambiguous term in this context, I'll admit) would send commands (e.g. keyboard strokes) and receive graphics back.

XFree86 is a free software implementation of the X Window System.

The whole server/client thing is a bit outdated now, since almost nobody uses actual thin clients anymore. X forwarding is useful, but it's not a mainstream way to do your computing.

pjmlp• 6 years ago

We do use them, it is called browser nowadays.

https4434• 6 years ago

Thanks!

bitwize7• 6 years ago

Not quite. The X server ran on the client only. The "mainframe" (usually a Unix server) had client programs that would connect to your X server, send it display commands, and receive pointer and keyboard events. The client-server relationship was reversed from the usual way, because the server was sitting in front of the user. The end-user computer was providing a service -- access to the user -- to the big machine in the server room.

StillBored2• 6 years ago

In the linux world I work on, a very large percentage of the developers are frequently unknowingly running X via ssh tunnels. Its just to convenient to be able to run the graphical version of tools on the remote dev/test machine than to live all day long restricted only to the GUI tools on your local machine and a terminal session.

The one place that X could use some updating is all the sync method calls, that unlike RDP become quite slow if the network connection has any real latency.

sergeykish22• 6 years ago

Almost there, you login to the server and run application, that application connects to the X Server on your client:

    +----------------+     +----------------+
    | Client         +---->+ Server         |
    |                |     |                |
    | +-----------+  |     | +-----------+  |
    | |X Server   +<---------+Application|  |
    | +-----------+  |     | +-----------+  |
    |                |     |                |
    +----------------+     +----------------+

"X device" would be better name — as you connect to the server application draws on your X device.

linguae2• 6 years ago

X11 is a window system. An X client is an application that uses the X protocol (e.g., Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice) while an X server is an implementation of the X protocol that handles the rendering. Note that an X server and an X client don't have to run on the same machine; if I log into a remote server and execute LibreOffice, LibreOffice is still the X client and my machine's X implementation is still the X server, despite the fact that LibreOffice is running remotely.

XFree86 is a specific X server implementation, though it has been superseded by X.org sometime around 2004 due to a license change from the MIT license to the 4-clause BSD license, which is incompatible with the GPL. X.org is by far the most dominant X server implementation in the free open source software community, but it is not the only implementation; off the top of my head there were proprietary X server implementations for SunOS and NeXT.

asveikau3• 6 years ago

though it has been superseded by X.org sometime around 2004 due to a license change from the MIT license to the 4-clause BSD license,

My understanding is that the scene for the fork had already been set by the time of the relatively late license change. I seem to recall reading at the time that the XFree86 core team was unhappy that a sole contributor was attempting to modernize the system by introducing extensions, without building consensus around them to their satisfaction.

So the license change was meant to prevent forks from merging in further work on XFree86.

Of course the fork was adding functionality everybody wanted. So the fork survived and upstream languished.

https4434• 6 years ago

Thanks!

ATsch3• 6 years ago

While it's true that originally X was network transparent, this hasn't truly been the case for a long time now. All modern applications (including the ones you've listed) render the whole window locally for performance reasons. This does not work over the network. Instead, xorg will transmit a picture of the window, giving you an in many ways worse version of VNC. The only difference is the level of integration with other programs like SSH.

adobecs3• 6 years ago

This is what happens when the losing player is humble enough to say GG because this was just a game. Nice RE at the end there.

That said- Wayland might be the only future but I'm not convinced it is the present. It still misses a specified way to handle shortcut keys and screenshots.

emersion18• 6 years ago

Shortcut keys are configured in the compositor, and screenshots/screencasts work in a cross-compositor fashion via xdg-desktop-portal.

acomjean2• 6 years ago

As a user of desktop linux (PopOS), I wonder what is going on here and how this effects me.

I know enough about X, but. What the heck is wayland?

wikipedia says (display server using the Wayland protocol is called a Wayland compositor, because it additionally performs the task of a compositing window manager.) Whats the compositor doing? Does this effect local linux or only trying to run windows remotely? Xwayland?

I've used X (Xwindows) to run windowing apps remotely (ssh -X) occasionally. It works, excepting that now that I WFH it doesn't.

Linux moves very slowly, but shouldn't replacing X be a great thing?

edent• 6 years ago

I use Wayland on Pop_OS. It works flawlessly. Much better than X for rotated displays and fractional scaling.

I guess it would be nice to have Wobbly Windows - but there's nothing about it that is missing for me.

vially• 6 years ago

I guess it would be nice to have Wobbly Windows

Wayfire got you covered: https://wayfire.org/

young_unixer2• 6 years ago

X11 (X version 11) is the protocol that controls most the graphics stuff in traditional Linux systems. It employs a client-server architecture.

The windows (clients) send their local framebuffers to the X server, X sends them to a compositor, the compositor joins them together into a big framebuffer that has the different windows in their respective positions and sends them to the X server. The X server then displays them on your screen.

There's a relatively new (~10 years old) protocol, called Wayland, which will replace X. The architecture is better and it has some other constraints (vsync is always on, so there's no screen tearing). Some distributions are using it by default (Fedora), but most are still sticking to X, since Wayland is not completely ready yet (in practice) and other projects are still transitioning into Wayland.

Maybe I got some technical details wrong, but that's the basic idea.

acomjean2• 6 years ago

Thanks!

So basically Wayland replaces the X protocol. (I had to run some things with ssh -X, and windowing on remote machines came back to me..)

And Xserver is replaced by another Compositor which is not specified, but poking around Weston seems like the reference one (towns in metro west Boston?)

No tearing would be nice (I watch someone weekly on a Manjaro install, tearing linux screen share, it can be unpleasant).

I'm assuming a lot this gets abstracted away by QT/KDE , Gnome/GTK so developers can just Develop. (probably at the expense of alternative desktops..)

hapless3• 6 years ago

It's worth noting this is not the first time that X has become abandonware.

It's not even the second time.

This is the third time X development has been abandoned. And yet, millions of us use X11 every day.

Don't hold your breath for Wayland to replace X11.

iso8859-1• 6 years ago

I am curious, what are the others?

When XFree86 was forked to X.org, is that what you call the first?

rjsw2• 6 years ago

XFree86 was itself a fork.

jdub2• 6 years ago

If you're talking about forks, they're pretty much the complete opposite of abandonment. Forks exist because people want to work on the code.

hapless3• 6 years ago

In these cases, forks were deeply interconnected with project abandonment

X11 gave us XFree86, because changes to the X386 server weren't being merged. There wasn't much of an alternative to forking.

Xorg was forked from XFree86 over a license change, but after the fork, XFree86 died -- its maintainers were unable or unwilling to merge changes or do releases.

djsumdog4• 6 years ago

Have any of the BSD (FreeBSD/OpenBSD/NetBSD) started the transition to Wayland yet? X is more than just Linux? There are a lot of other operating systems out there and many have their own X11 forks they maintain.

wahern• 6 years ago

https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/wayland_on_netbsd_trials_a...

trasz• 6 years ago

FreeBSD certainly has: https://www.freebsd.org/news/status/report-2020-07-2020-09.h...

emersion18• 6 years ago

The compositor I maintain (Sway) has continuous integration for FreeBSD.

merqurio• 6 years ago

Thanks for sway!! It's my favorite compositor by far

joshklein4• 6 years ago

OpenBSD uses and actively supports a customized (not forked) X called Xenocara, which takes the opposite philosophical route from Wayland by putting a wider part of the ecosystem of X features into one coherent project so it can be maintained, improved, and culled (simultaneously, and without committees). You can learn about it on the Xenocara project pages and in its robust manual pages.

If you read other comments in separate parts of the threads here, you’ll see people describing re-scoping certain elements “out” of Wayland and “into” other layers to fix “broken” parts of X. Those “widely agreed upon” solutions for other layers exclude considerations for the way OpenBSD works in fairly fundamental ways that make it seem (to me, at least) there is no practical purpose in exploring Wayland on OpenBSD beyond the point it has already been explored.

I’m speaking about the coherent and supported OpenBSD operating system, not what can be found in packages.

If there ever become features fundamental to the current user-developers of OpenBSD that are enabled by Wayland, I would expect them to further modify Xenocara to support those use cases, but it is hard to even imagine what those could be. Most of Wayland’s promised future features are anti-features to the OpenBSD approach.

I expect that in 5-10 years, many user applications will be Linux-only, and there will be many conversations about how stubborn BSD (and Windows/Mac) designers are for not aligning to earlier decisions made on their behalf.

These are just my personal opinions with no inside knowledge from any part of this intellectual territory, and I do not accuse or blame ANY developer on ANY project for working on what they are interested in, but I expect this unified Linux (and Linux-only) outcome is the unstated but express purpose behind promoting Wayland for some of the commercial interests that support it.

I want to doubly emphasize that I am talking about the motivations of executives determining the allocation of capital and human resources, not about the motivations of the developers, which are clearly to facilitate cool or useful new things.

grandinj• 6 years ago

I so glad to see there are still people practicing sound engineering in this world.

The driving force behind Wayland appears to be commercial interests that have no interest in the desktop use-case per-se.

The linux-only outcome is purely an unintended side-effect.

kllrnohj4• 6 years ago

and there will be many conversations about how stubborn BSD (and Windows/Mac) designers are for not aligning to earlier decisions made on their behalf.

Windows & Mac are already on exclusively Wayland-style compositors, they made that transition years & years ago (Vista was Microsoft's transition, for example, which was 13 years ago now). Why would they have any issues here?

entropy1111• 6 years ago

Where can I find a list of protocols and standards, and what compositors have implemented them? I don't want to dig between issues and thousands of repos or docs. I imagine commercial software have even less patience, maybe that's why Zoom used the proprietary GNOME thing instead of the open standard.

Wayland works really well, I think people who can't use it yet because of features they miss should just use x.org and stop complaining and harassing open source developers. I'm using sway and wayfire but I have no clue how they work behind the scenes or wayland itself.

dyingkneepad5• 6 years ago

The X11 protocol is highly documented. There are many decent books about it. The Xlib and XCB are small wrappers around the protocol. Once you learn one, jumping to the protocol bits is easy.

Wayland is also a protocol and also documented, somewhere. I heard it has support for extensions and they are also in some repo. Search: https://cgit.freedesktop.org/

A big difference between the Wayland and X11 protocols is that X11 covers a lot more things, like drawing. Also, X11 has the concept of a client that is also a compositor and tons of interfaces for clients and compositors and the Xserver to interact. Wayland has none of those things, because the entity that implements the protocol is the compositor, unlike X.

Everything that's not covered by the Wayland protocol or extensions has to be defined/implemented by the Compositor, and that's where Fragmentation is killing us. Each compositor is allowed to implement whatever it wants to deal with those things. I am not aware of any standards here, although I would recommend trying to look if any XDG standards exist for those.

ywei3410• 6 years ago

Here's a link with a (partial) [1] answer.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24889703

Santosh83• 6 years ago

This ship has sailed for better or worse. The people who take these decisions don't hang out in forums to listen to every complaint and gripe. They work for the main corporations and foundations steering Linux development and they have decided that Wayland is the future, even if the transition is going to be ugly. Linux is no longer the "community" OS that it once was. In a way it has gone more mainstream than even MacOS or Windows, and that means it will cater to the larger market forces than the "community's" wants.

diegocg• 6 years ago

Wayland is not corporate policy. It was developed as a side project by some guy from Red Hat, people liked it. Corporations would have likely pressured to keep using X11 to avoid breaking compatibility with applications.

emersion18• 6 years ago

The people who take decisions can take decisions because they contributed a lot to the project. If you want to take decisions too, there's no need to be part of a big company, all you need is getting involved.

The ecosystem is still powered by the community. I see a lot of patches coming from hobbyists in many related projects.

ATsch3• 6 years ago

This makes no sense. The community of people working on Xorg aren't gone, they're just working on wayland now. Wayland was designed by long time Xorg maintainers. This "hostile takeover" narrative is complete FUD.

djhaskin987• 6 years ago

I'd love to hear more about Xwayland, a project the OP talks about. It sounds like a way to run X on wayland, or maybe the other way around. It sounds like a really nice way to bridge the gap while wayland is still working out some of its kinks and providing backwards compatibility for X apps.

emersion18• 6 years ago

Yes, Xwayland lets users run X11 applications inside Wayland compositors.

sprash3• 6 years ago

Xwayland is more of a hack if anything. Half of the programs don't work because the security model of Wayland is fundamentally different than that of X11. E.g. Xeyes won't follow the mouse cursor because Wayland developers decided it is a security risk to read out mouse coordinates when the mouse is not positioned above the window. More severe in the age of home office work is the lack of support for XGetImage() that makes using X11 videoconferencing software almost impossible to run on XWayland.

ATsch3• 6 years ago

This has been working by default in all compositors for a while now, it is not a new feature or project.

sprash3• 6 years ago

Good! Xorg needs to become a community project again. The current maintainers are almost without exception full time paid employees and act solely in the interest of their employers and NOT in the interest of the FOSS community. Their employers have decided to sabotage the ecosystem by breaking established community standards. Maintaining backwards compatibility is the most important thing to keep any ecosystem alive. This means the community should abandon their software (e.g. Wayland) and put people in charge of X11 that start acting in their interest.

dyingkneepad5• 6 years ago

Just because Red Hat is moving resources away it doesn't really mean it is sabotaging the project, just that it's realigning the priorities. Instead of blaming them for not caring anymore, we should blame ourselves for empowering them so much?

Ajax seems pretty open in his invitation for people to come and help maintain the things RH doesn't care about anymore...

sprash3• 6 years ago

I'm blaming nobody. I'm just saying that there is a chance for X11 to become a real community project again. Never waste a good crisis.

nsajko4• 6 years ago

Just because Red Hat is moving resources away it doesn't really mean it is sabotaging the project

I think you may have misunderstood the commenter you replied to: they were probably referring to the careless breaking of backwards compatibility that was being done while Xorg was still nominally being maintained. I think a good example is refactoring the Server while silently breaking extensions they don't care about.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xorg-server/+bug/3...

cmrdporcupine• 6 years ago

My problem with switching from X to Wayland is not that Wayland doesn't do enough of the things that X does. It's that at it's not different enough. I've been waiting for a really good Linux desktop experience and windowing system since I first started using Linux in 1991. I've always found X hacky and awkward in the entire almost-30 years I've been using it -- it's definitely improved from the era of manual modeline and input device configuration, but it's still ... yuck. Especially things like clipboard. But I don't feel like Wayland is the thing that's going to move us towards any world of consistency and usability. It's just another way for very heterogeneous and mismatched applications to draw arbitrary stuff on the screen.

nullc2• 6 years ago

I like the X11 clipboard behaviour a lot better than windows/mac. Having the additional clipboard is well worth the occasional weirdness where a non-natively-x11-thing uses the wrong one.

pmoriarty9• 6 years ago

What specifically do you want to see?

busterarm• 6 years ago

How well do fcitx & ibus work in Wayland yet? I need good l10n support.

Who is using Wayland without X in Asia right now and isn't using English?

Arnavion2• 6 years ago

fcitx works fine for me under sway. I couldn't get ibus to work, but I used to use fcitx under X as well so I didn't try too hard to get ibus to work.

That said, the way fcitx works is to use toolkit integration directly, rather than work with the compositor via the input-methods protocol. So it only works for programs using those toolkits. Thus gtk2, gtk3, qt programs will work, but not something like alacritty. (This is good enough for my use case.)

Ericson23142• 6 years ago

I like the sentiment....but I don't know a single person who actually uses Wayland. This concerns me.

Ericson23142• 6 years ago

Why the downvotes? I generally try to run the latest stuff I can get away with on my laptop in solidarity of the devs who rather not be backporting fixes or putting up with technical debt.

But I'm not even sure what to do about Wayland, other than switch to Fedora and meet that people that use it. I'm in a complete we-all-wish-we-were-using-wayland-but-aren't bubble. It's unfortunate.

nightfly• 6 years ago

If Canonical hadn't wasted a few years developing and trying to push Mir I feel like Wayland could be a lot further along now than it is.

jandrese• 6 years ago

Reading this post, it strikes me that there could have been standalone monitors with an Ethernet port that had just enough compute power to run an X server.

PAPPPmAc• 6 years ago

There were. They were called X terminals ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_terminal ) and there were quite a few of them on the market around the early 90s, supplanting the traditional terminal protocols. Then there were quite a number of Thin Client ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thin_client ) devices that were a hair more independent than dumb X terminals, from players like Sun (Sun Ray) and Wyse (Now part of Dell).

There was an inversion from "Users per to Computer" to "Computers per User" and that model mostly fell out of favor.

erik_seaberg• 6 years ago

There are third-party X servers for Windows, but almost nobody has heard of them, while everyone has a browser. So we’re abusing Javascript and HTML to replace X as a remote UI protocol for desktops/laptops that barely have any installed software.

GekkePrutser7• 6 years ago

Yes and those X-Terminals were exactly what X was invented for. This is why the net transparency is not great over high-latency connections, it was never designed for that. In those days companies only had a handful of "computers" and people worked on terminals. Usually shared over a 10 megabit shared ethernet bus, which was surprisingly responsive!

However they were more than a simple terminal. Most of them were basically small Unix computers (like the SPARC X-terminal which was just a diskless low-powered SPARCstation, it could actually run full Solaris). HP's EnvizeX stuff was similarly complex though I don't think they could run HP-UX. But they weren't nearly as 'dumb' as the text terminals of the days.

I still have a few Sun Rays here but they used a very different protocol that only worked with their proprietary software.

However I do expect a return of this model. Now with the cloud, a lot of computing is once again shifting to a central model rather than on the endpoint.

Koshkin2• 6 years ago

A Raspberry Pi 1 makes for a good X terminal.

jlokier3• 6 years ago

There were, and they worked very well. I used them for a while.

You could sit down at any of the terminals on campus, select the server you wanted to log into, and log into your own account.

It would bring up a fresh instance of your desktop, much like when you boot up your own computer. Except all the files and configuration were on a shared server.

The experience was almost as good as running applications locally, with the added benefit that the applications ran on a big, shared, beefy computer somewhere else, much more powerful than could be placed at each desk.

And you could sit down wherever was convenient to do your work, and have all your files and familiar configuration available.

Back then, most people didn't have their own laptop to work with so that wasn't an option. Those that did, their laptop would be much slower and have a poorer quality screen.

GekkePrutser7• 6 years ago

You're right, this is how I studied computer science. A laptop was simply unaffordable for a student in those days (mid-90s). I remember one of my friends bought an IBM "Butterfly" laptop really cheaply at an auction. We were all amazed at it. Imagine, your own computer in your backpack! :D

shirro• 6 years ago

Typical X terminals ran xclock and xterm back in the day and not much else. Pretty cool for the time though. I remember lan gaming with friends in the 90s sometimes turned into hacking sessions. I would sometimes have a few Mosaic browsers run remotely off my system over 10Base2. Given how slow the dialup modem was downloading html X wasn't the bottle neck.

Todays modern desktops with compositing and rendering libraries that can target hardware acceleration and run games and visualisation software on opengl or vulkan aren't well served by network transparency and the X extension model.

The sad truth about X network transparency is that it generally worked better to write to a local screen and then send the screen updates over some other protocol like vnc or nx.

jrm42• 6 years ago

As a part outsider/part insider (long time Linux user, not much of a programmer) let me see if I can try to summarize my frustration with this transition process -- it simply seems to be a much different methodology than the one that got Linux to where it is.

As I understand it, Linus' number one deal is "don't break backward compatibility." The Unix Way is "Write programs that talk to one another..." etc. This is the foundation that I believe put Linux where it is today, this is why I love it and use it so much.

Which is why I'm dismayed to see so much comfort with what feels in line with a proprietary top-down control attitude, the thing that Microsoft and Apple et al do, i.e. "This thing is going to change, so get over it."

I appreciate that there is work being done. I'm willing to trust that there is a point to Wayland (I literally don't get it at this stage; trying to use it presently creates FAR more problems than it solves) -- but it seems like it should be axiomatic that the project works harder to preserve the space than it appears to now.

wmf3• 6 years ago

For whatever reason, people who follow the classic Unix/Linux philosophy no longer write much code. The people who are coding the desktop are all using a more Mac-like philosophy.

jrm42• 6 years ago

Right, though I don't think that's quite it -- I think that the "Mac-like" projects/philosophies are more visible because of spaces like Hacker News and Reddit et al, plus perhaps the greater level of PR that bigger projects like Gnome and KDE (and Ubuntu, Mint, PopOs, etc) get.

I have to remind myself to try to dig a bit deeper around to find out about the things I'm more into; what matters more to me than "the desktop" is "applications/programs" -- and that seems to be harder to seek out these days.

sergeykish22• 6 years ago

It never was true, UNIX is bloated, hence Plan 9, `cat -v`.

kllrnohj4• 6 years ago

On the contrary, Wayland is very much in the spirit of Unix & Linux philosophy, while X11 isn't. Wayland is an attempt to do one thing and do it well, hence why it doesn't have solutions for things like clipboard management. Because that's not part of display management & composition. Wayland only does that one thing.

By contrast the common complaint about Wayland is that it doesn't have the vast variety of unrelated features rammed into it like X does.

Part of the problem here then is that there's A) no big pushes for 'does one thing & does it well' for all the other X features (like clipboard or global keyboard shortcuts), and B) fragmented implementations of the wayland protocol. There really should have been a much better, and more singular, reference implementation that Gnome, KDE, etc... all just embedded instead. Which means the "does it well" part is taking a really long time, as developer communities are split up.

zajio1am• 6 years ago

On the contrary, Wayland is very much in the spirit of Unix & Linux philosophy, while X11 isn't.

I have an opposite view. X11 has two key aspects separated to two independent entities: mechanism (in Xserver) and policy (in window manager). This has and advantage as neutral mechanism can be shared by everybody (Xorg), while everyone has different opinion about policies (many WMs).

Wayland assumes integration of compositor (mechanism) and WM (policy) to one entity.

sergeykish22• 6 years ago

You see, we have a lot of interchangeable parts. We have bash/zsh/sh, glibc/musl, apt/pacman/yum, systemd/runit/OpenRC, GNOME/KDE/XFCE, i3/wmii/xmonad, chromium/firefox etc etc. Even kernel is interchangeable - HURD [1], kFreeBSD [2].

Distribution is a collection of such parts, you may think of it as "proprietary top-down control attitude" but it is just a collection that suits someone needs. It may not suit you, you may replace parts, you may create another distribution. For example as Arch Linux user my install does not include graphical system, no one forces me.

The point I see is that Wayland got something useful. So useful that distributions started to switch their default. If anything it conforms that X11 has some problems, that it was harder to achieve same result there. Maybe it does not cover your needs but it covers someone needs better.

[1] https://www.debian.org/ports/hurd/

[1] https://www.debian.org/ports/kfreebsd-gnu/

arexxbifs• 6 years ago

Funny how Wayland is trying to replace one of the few crucial parts of the *nix ecosystem that _isn't_ fragmented. Everyone's got their own take on everything from basic stuff like kernels, shells, userland, and directory structures to bigger stuff like desktop environments.

Except X. X is X and everybody agrees that X is X. It's not perfect, but it's there, and it mostly just works, and all the programs are written for it. Instead of trying to fix the one thing we've all managed to agree upon, we're going to replace it with something completely different.

I'm not sure this is a good idea.

jart• 6 years ago

Imagine if Microsoft abandoned the WIN32 API. It feels like only yesterday that GNOME2 was scrapped in favor of Unity despite everyone's wishes. Or the day GNOME unilaterally required all distros switch to Systemd. The GNOME project has a long history of stirring the pot and helping Linux to continually destroy itself. The project itself was actually born from petty drama and unwillingness to cooperate with the Qt developers, who unlike GNOME actually had a decent API and went out of their way to address community concerns, but were ignored.

the_why_of_y• 6 years ago

The GNOME project was started because KDE required the non-free (at the time) Qt library. Probably you forgot this little detail because Qt has been free software for such a long time now.

rhabarba• 6 years ago

I love how these blog entries keep ignoring the non-Linux world.

wmf3• 6 years ago

The non-Linux world isn't paying its way. They're just doing the bare minimum (or less) to port Linux desktop code and hoping that doesn't get too difficult.

nsajko4• 6 years ago

we can finally abandon xfree86

The trouble here for those who use Unix-likes as graphical programming environments is that Wayland is the intended replacement for Xorg, and the quoted statement comes from the perspective of making products for non-technical end-users instead of something power-users (like many of us here) can use efficiently. I will not claim here that it is theoretically impossible for efficient graphical programming environments to be based on a Wayland compositor, but the facts are firstly that currently Wayland based systems are a downgrade compared to Xorg (I think the Wlroots/Sway is currently the only compositor that tries to cater to power users, and the issue with Wayland is also that support from the compositor is necessary and difficult for almost any feature), and secondly that the Wayland design is hostile to features that power users are already accustomed to from X Windows. More broadly, Wayland is actually hostile to features like screenshots that all users of other operating systems are accustomed to, meaning that Wayland is actually causing an unnecessarily ugly image of Linux systems among users of other systems. Causally related to the above is the fact that the Wayland design necessitates great duplication of effort for both compositor implementations and applications that want to be able to use more than one incompatible compositor.

Three days ago there was a discussion here on basically the same topic, and because my comment there[1] is completely relevant, I'm going to mostly just copy it here:

A too common complaint about Wayland (or Wayland compositors, more specifically) is that it is taking a long time to catch up to X11. The elephant in the room is that this situation stems from a deeper issue: Wayland has a horrible design, for an X11 replacement, a design that leads to massive fragmentation issues across the graphical part of the Linux ecosystem. Implementing a Wayland compositor requires much more effort than implementing an X11 window manager and each new compositor implementation reinvents the wheel many times, leaving users with less options for a desktop environment than on X11. Even worse, Wayland does not standardize on or is hostile to some essential features, meaning that users need to rely on compositor specific behavior for those features, if they are even available. E.g., an application that needs to grab the entire screen will need separate code for each compositor it supports screenshots on, or it must use a protocol outside Wayland to get the screenshot. Quoting Red Hat: > Furthermore, there isn’t a standard API for getting screen shots from Wayland. It’s dependent on what compositor (window manager/shell) the user is running, and if they implemented a proprietary API to do so.

An xdotool (an input event automation tool, imagine wanting to inject or intercept input events) replacement is not possible on Wayland (without having separate support for each compositor, of course). These seem to be intentional design decisions (marketed as being necessary for security, but really being power-user hostile), this[0] Reddit comment puts it nicely:

It has been almost a decade, why does Wayland not have a protocol definition for screenshots?" - answer - "Because security, dude! Wayland is designed with the thought that users download random applications from the interwebz which are not trustworthy and run them. Wayland actually makes a lot of sense if you don't think of Linux desktop distributions and desktop systems, but of smartphones. But for some reason we absolutely need this technology on the desktop, like we had not enough pain and lose ends over here without it.

But the lack of these features AFAIK also causes big trouble for users with special accessibility needs. Wayland is also, with its forced composition, hostile to interactive applications requiring low latency, e.g. video games.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/7lb5l7/new_screensho...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24886074

amelius• 6 years ago

I have to disable wayland in gdm3 (on ubuntu), otherwise I end up in a login loop ...

hsbauauvhabzb• 6 years ago

On two occasions I’ve heavily modified WM source (originally ratpoison, now write). Without caring about graphical extensions will I be able to hack similarly under Wayland?

speeder• 6 years ago

Seemly people want badly to abandon X Server (not the protocol, I mean the server).

Assuming they do.

Is there any software that can replace the server part of it?

For example in my current work I SSH -X to another machine, and use X apps installed on that machine, any other software can do that?

jlokier3• 6 years ago

The trend for now is to use remote desktops instead. VNC, RDP, that sort of thing. Use Xvnc or Xrdp on the remote machine, so the apps on that machine have something to connect to.

Although X was remote-capable from early on, it was never especially well designed for remote uses. For example you can't easily detach from a display and move an app to a different display. And it's not very good at latency on a high-latency network. Partly that's because of how it assigned XIDs in the protocol; they should have been client-assigned. It would still be possible to make that change (as an extension) but it hasn't been done.

It would be great if there was a modern remote desktop application protocol, that works well over all kinds of networks and allows application windows be moved between different display clients easily (e.g. from your laptop to your desktop at work). Or even better, let the application move as well, for ideal responsiveness everywhere.

I think we will get that eventually, because it's such a natural evolution of all the distributed things we're building. But I think it will be a long time coming.

GekkePrutser7• 6 years ago

That's not a great trend though. Having actual programs rather than entire desktops run remotely is amazingly handy. A desktop inside a window has never been a great experience.

Indeed it's not great at high-latency, it was invented for rooms full of local X-terminals (that were on constantly so connection loss wasn't an issue either, unless someone messed with the cable terminators :P )

I would love for this to continue being developed though, as there is still a great usecase for it IMO. But the protocol could really be cleaned up removing a lot of round-trips with locally cached variants (basically what NoMachine NX and X2GO are doing).

I do agree it makes sense in this increasingly cloud-centric world.. I hope it will eventually come too!

GekkePrutser7• 6 years ago

Replace, no. But there are many implementations of it. It won't go away.

Windows has Xming and Cygwin. Mac has XQuartz. Linux, well, has Xorh and Xwayland. Even on iOS and Android there's X servers.

jll29• 6 years ago

The X Window System (X11 for short) looks and feels the same on my Intel Ubuntu Linux laptop and on my HP 9000 UNIX workstation running HP-UX 11 on PA-RISC.

X11 is ancient (1987), but it's brilliant. Its designers even anticipated having 16 mouse buttons, and (more importantly) opening a window on a remote system.

The system is flexible, programmable, customizable; I've got all development manual volumes here on my shelf.

While I'm open and sympathetic to any new ideas and improved software systems, including novel windowing concepts, personally, I don't have any unmet window manager needs at present. Any new system shouldn't just replicate a subset of X11, they should go beyond the state of the art to justify the time investment.

GekkePrutser7• 6 years ago

Indeed, this network transparency, I use it every day... It is the #1 feature I couldn't do without on Wayland.

But X11 has been stale so long it would really benefit from a back-to-the-drawing-board approach. From many points of view. Network latency, security etc.

But Wayland isn't it for me... It's too desktop centric IMO.

thespoonbends• 6 years ago

What is your usecase for network transparency? Remote desktop? Is that not supported in a Wayland world?

bluGill2• 6 years ago

Well the people behind Wayland maintained X for a long time, so they know something about it and the real problems. There were several other X replacements that never went anywhere over the years because the people who maintain X looked at it and said it didn't fix any of the real problems.

victor9000• 6 years ago

X Server made my Dell XPS 13 suffer from horizontal tearing. Each Ubuntu release came with its own set of tricks to circumvent the issue until the release of Ubuntu 20.04, when nothing seemed to work. Switched to Wayland and the issue went away without doing anything at all. Never looked back.

ineedasername• 6 years ago

I've never used Wayland. Are there inherent advantages that make it preferable, even if the community could successfully revive X? (And assuming Wayland's deficiencies were addressed-- speed as an example, from other comments I've seen)

DonHopkins• 6 years ago

The whole window system situation on Unix is and has always been like a Rubik's Cube that somebody switched the stickers on so it's impossible to solve.

known• 6 years ago

X consumes 900 MB and Wayland consumer 1 GB RAM in my laptop

anticristi• 6 years ago

GNOME on Wayland allows me to set my FullHD laptop screen at 100% and my 4K display at 200%. I'm sold. :D

On Abandoning the X Server

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