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[LINK] X11 Server Development Pace Hits A Two Decade Low

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  [LINK] X11 Server Development Pace Hits A Two Decade Low not@telling.you.invalid (Computer Nerd Kev) - 2023-01-05 07:49 +1000
    Re: [LINK] X11 Server Development Pace Hits A Two Decade Low Andy Burns <usenet@andyburns.uk> - 2023-01-04 22:48 +0000
      Re: [LINK] X11 Server Development Pace Hits A Two Decade Low Dan Espen <dan1espen@gmail.com> - 2023-01-04 19:35 -0500
        Re: [LINK] X11 Server Development Pace Hits A Two Decade Low Mike Spencer <mds@bogus.nodomain.nowhere> - 2023-01-05 01:14 -0400
        Re: [LINK] X11 Server Development Pace Hits A Two Decade Low Andy Burns <usenet@andyburns.uk> - 2023-01-05 11:33 +0000
          Re: [LINK] X11 Server Development Pace Hits A Two Decade Low Spiros Bousbouras <spibou@gmail.com> - 2023-01-05 18:11 +0000
            Re: [LINK] X11 Server Development Pace Hits A Two Decade Low Andy Burns <usenet@andyburns.uk> - 2023-01-05 19:33 +0000
              Re: [LINK] X11 Server Development Pace Hits A Two Decade Low Spiros Bousbouras <spibou@gmail.com> - 2023-01-05 20:32 +0000
              Re: [LINK] X11 Server Development Pace Hits A Two Decade Low Javier <invalid@invalid.invalid> - 2023-01-08 03:00 +0000
                Re: [LINK] X11 Server Development Pace Hits A Two Decade Low not@telling.you.invalid (Computer Nerd Kev) - 2023-01-09 06:57 +1000
            Re: [LINK] X11 Server Development Pace Hits A Two Decade Low Marco Moock <mo01@posteo.de> - 2023-01-09 08:16 +0100
              Re: [LINK] X11 Server Development Pace Hits A Two Decade Low Computer Nerd Kev <not@telling.you.invalid> - 2023-01-09 19:32 +1000
          Re: [LINK] X11 Server Development Pace Hits A Two Decade Low Marco Moock <mo01@posteo.de> - 2023-01-09 08:15 +0100
            Re: [LINK] X11 Server Development Pace Hits A Two Decade Low kludge@panix.com (Scott Dorsey) - 2023-01-10 20:28 +0000
      Re: [LINK] X11 Server Development Pace Hits A Two Decade Low Marco Moock <nn263@uni-heidelberg.de> - 2023-01-05 08:44 +0100
        Re: [LINK] X11 Server Development Pace Hits A Two Decade Low Andy Burns <usenet@andyburns.uk> - 2023-01-05 11:40 +0000
          Re: [LINK] X11 Server Development Pace Hits A Two Decade Low Marco Moock <mo01@posteo.de> - 2023-01-05 12:56 +0100
            Re: [LINK] X11 Server Development Pace Hits A Two Decade Low Dan Espen <dan1espen@gmail.com> - 2023-01-05 11:11 -0500
              Re: [LINK] X11 Server Development Pace Hits A Two Decade Low not@telling.you.invalid (Computer Nerd Kev) - 2023-01-06 08:37 +1000
                Re: [LINK] X11 Server Development Pace Hits A Two Decade Low ant <ant@anthive.com> - 2023-01-05 21:15 -0500
                  Re: [LINK] X11 Server Development Pace Hits A Two Decade Low Computer Nerd Kev <not@telling.you.invalid> - 2023-01-06 17:00 +1000
                Re: [LINK] X11 Server Development Pace Hits A Two Decade Low Javier <invalid@invalid.invalid> - 2023-01-08 03:11 +0000
        Re: [LINK] X11 Server Development Pace Hits A Two Decade Low Mike Spencer <mds@bogus.nodomain.nowhere> - 2023-01-05 17:26 -0400
      Re: [LINK] X11 Server Development Pace Hits A Two Decade Low Eric Pozharski <whynot@pozharski.name> - 2023-01-05 09:29 +0000
      Re: [LINK] X11 Server Development Pace Hits A Two Decade Low Nicholas Outre <nothing@nowhere.net> - 2023-01-05 10:33 -0500
      Re: [LINK] X11 Server Development Pace Hits A Two Decade Low Spiros Bousbouras <spibou@gmail.com> - 2023-01-05 18:31 +0000
        Re: [LINK] X11 Server Development Pace Hits A Two Decade Low Andy Burns <usenet@andyburns.uk> - 2023-01-05 19:29 +0000
          Re: [LINK] X11 Server Development Pace Hits A Two Decade Low Spiros Bousbouras <spibou@gmail.com> - 2023-01-05 20:25 +0000
        Re: [LINK] X11 Server Development Pace Hits A Two Decade Low not@telling.you.invalid (Computer Nerd Kev) - 2023-01-06 08:50 +1000
        Re: [LINK] X11 Server Development Pace Hits A Two Decade Low Joe Beanfish <joebeanfish@nospam.duh> - 2023-01-06 15:30 +0000
    Re: [LINK] X11 Server Development Pace Hits A Two Decade Low Oregonian Haruspex <no_email@invalid.invalid> - 2023-01-09 05:46 +0000
      Re: [LINK] X11 Server Development Pace Hits A Two Decade Low Javier <invalid@invalid.invalid> - 2023-01-20 23:13 +0000

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#22527 — [LINK] X11 Server Development Pace Hits A Two Decade Low

X11 Server Development Pace Hits A Two Decade Low
 By Michael Larabel, 30 December 2022
 - https/www.phoronix.com/news/XServer-2022-Development-Pace

"It shouldn't be news to you that most of the corporate-backed 
 developers working on the Linux desktop are no longer investing in 
 new feature work around the X.Org Server and have shifted their 
 efforts to a Wayland-focused environment moving forward. In looking 
 at the Git statistics for the X.Org Server over the course of 2022 
 it shows how the development has pulled back dramatically and now 
 at a two decade low for the commits and code changes. 
 
 While Mesa's development has been very vibrant this year, the X.Org 
 Server development pace has continued pulling back greatly from its 
 late 00's and early 10's highs. 
 
 This year saw just 156 commits to the xserver Git master branch, 
 down from 331 last year and well off the highs of 2,114 as the most 
 ever back in 2008. This jives with the downward pace over the past 
 decade of the number of new commits continuing to slide. But it's 
 not just on a commit basis but in overall code churn, 2022 was 
 another low for the X.Org Server. With the 156 commits this year, 
 there were just 3,618 lines of new code added and 888 lines 
 removed.... Compared to last year with its 331 commits seeing 31.4k 
 new lines and 179k lines removed." ...

-- 
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#22528

Computer Nerd Kev quoted:

> "It shouldn't be news to you that most of the corporate-backed
>   developers working on the Linux desktop are no longer investing in
>   new feature work around the X.Org Server and have shifted their
>   efforts to a Wayland-focused environment moving forward."

I think that's a good thing ... right?  Provided the efforts to waylandize 
everything doesn't fizzle out ...

<https://arewewaylandyet.com>

I mean, running Xeyes on a colleague's VAXstation was fun once or twice, and 
firing up a gnome session to your own windows desktop using cygwinand  XDMCP was 
so horribly insecure you'd only do it with the confines of your own four walls, 
what do people actually want X11 for now?

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#22529

Andy Burns <usenet@andyburns.uk> writes:

> Computer Nerd Kev quoted:
>
>> "It shouldn't be news to you that most of the corporate-backed
>>   developers working on the Linux desktop are no longer investing in
>>   new feature work around the X.Org Server and have shifted their
>>   efforts to a Wayland-focused environment moving forward."
>
> I think that's a good thing ... right?  Provided the efforts to
> waylandize everything doesn't fizzle out ...
>
> <https://arewewaylandyet.com>
>
> I mean, running Xeyes on a colleague's VAXstation was fun once or
> twice, and firing up a gnome session to your own windows desktop using
> cygwinand  XDMCP was so horribly insecure you'd only do it with the
> confines of your own four walls, what do people actually want X11 for
> now?

To keep running the same WM I've been using for decades.

-- 
Dan Espen

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#22530

Dan Espen <dan1espen@gmail.com> writes:

> Andy Burns <usenet@andyburns.uk> writes:
> 
>> I mean, running Xeyes on a colleague's VAXstation was fun once or
>> twice,...

And  xroach.

>> ...and firing up a gnome session to your own windows desktop using
>> cygwinand  XDMCP was so horribly insecure you'd only do it with the
>> confines of your own four walls, what do people actually want X11 for
>> now?

Oy.  Am I having this conversaion with someone who *has* his "own
windows desktop"?

> To keep running the same WM I've been using for decades.

Yes, that.

-- 
Mike Spencer                  Nova Scotia, Canada

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#22533

Dan Espen wrote:

> Andy Burns writes:
> 
>> what do people actually want X11 for now?
> 
> To keep running the same WM I've been using for decades.

I fall into the category where Gnome (my distro's default) as a WM doesn't annoy 
me enough to use anything different, I did use XFCE for a bit, and now I don't 
know which do/don't work with wayland ... that's what I meant by "fizzle out" if 
your favourite WM doesn't support wayland, eventually it's going to find it self 
beached without X11 to run on top of ..

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#22538

[Crossposting to  comp.os.linux.misc . ]

On Thu, 5 Jan 2023 11:33:39 +0000
Andy Burns <usenet@andyburns.uk> wrote:
> Dan Espen wrote:
> 
> > Andy Burns writes:
> > 
> >> what do people actually want X11 for now?
> > 
> > To keep running the same WM I've been using for decades.
> 
> I fall into the category where Gnome (my distro's default) as a WM doesn't annoy 
> me enough to use anything different, I did use XFCE for a bit, and now I don't 
> know which do/don't work with wayland ... that's what I meant by "fizzle out" if 
> your favourite WM doesn't support wayland, eventually it's going to find it self 
> beached without X11 to run on top of ..

I was under the impression that one of the plans for Wayland was to be able
to run X server on top of it so that all X11 applications would continue to
work. Has this plan been abandoned ?

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#22541

Spiros Bousbouras wrote:

> I was under the impression that one of the plans for Wayland was to be able
> to run X server on top of it so that all X11 applications would continue to
> work. Has this plan been abandoned ?

I think that still exists, XServer sits on top of Wayland, apps tolk to XServer, 
believing it's Xorg, but when that first crept into Fedora, it seemed to break 
the tradional way of X remoting by

export DISPLAY=host:0.0

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#22543

On Thu, 5 Jan 2023 19:33:01 +0000
Andy Burns <usenet@andyburns.uk> wrote:
> Spiros Bousbouras wrote:
> 
> > I was under the impression that one of the plans for Wayland was to be able
> > to run X server on top of it so that all X11 applications would continue to
> > work. Has this plan been abandoned ?
> 
> I think that still exists, XServer sits on top of Wayland, apps tolk to XServer, 
> believing it's Xorg,

Then why did you say in  <k1nqskFauepU1@mid.individual.net>

    if your favourite WM doesn't support wayland, eventually it's going to
    find it self beached without X11 to run on top of ..

? Applications needing X11 will still be able to find it.

> but when that first crept into Fedora, it seemed to break 
> the tradional way of X remoting by
> 
> export DISPLAY=host:0.0

This seems minor.

-- 
vlaho.ninja/prog

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#22550

In comp.misc Andy Burns <usenet@andyburns.uk> wrote:
> Spiros Bousbouras wrote:
> 
>> I was under the impression that one of the plans for Wayland was to be able
>> to run X server on top of it so that all X11 applications would continue to
>> work. Has this plan been abandoned ?
> 
> I think that still exists, XServer sits on top of Wayland, apps tolk to XServer, 
> believing it's Xorg, but when that first crept into Fedora, it seemed to break 
> the tradional way of X remoting by
> 
> export DISPLAY=host:0.0
> 

That is because modern versions of the XServer have disabled TCP listening by default.

$ cat /etc/X11/xinit/xserverrc
#!/bin/sh
exec /usr/bin/X -nolisten tcp "$@"

You need to remove the '-nolisten tcp' from /etc/X11/xinit/xserverrc
That should do the trick.

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#22557

In comp.misc Javier <invalid@invalid.invalid> wrote:
> In comp.misc Andy Burns <usenet@andyburns.uk> wrote:
>> Spiros Bousbouras wrote:
>> 
>>> I was under the impression that one of the plans for Wayland was to be able
>>> to run X server on top of it so that all X11 applications would continue to
>>> work. Has this plan been abandoned ?
>> 
>> I think that still exists, XServer sits on top of Wayland, apps tolk to XServer, 
>> believing it's Xorg, but when that first crept into Fedora, it seemed to break 
>> the tradional way of X remoting by
>> 
>> export DISPLAY=host:0.0
>> 
> 
> That is because modern versions of the XServer have disabled TCP
> listening by default.

Correct, and they didn't document the change properly either. Last
time I checked the current version of the man page didn't describe
the changed default. If they're going to mess with core
functionality like that and not bother to document it, then I
_would_ much rather that they wound down work on Xorg.

> $ cat /etc/X11/xinit/xserverrc
> #!/bin/sh
> exec /usr/bin/X -nolisten tcp "$@"
> 
> You need to remove the '-nolisten tcp' from /etc/X11/xinit/xserverrc
> That should do the trick.

Incorrect, that's what you needed to do _before_ the change to the
Xorg server. Now '-nolisten tcp' is the default so that argument
does nothing. Instead to enable remote connections like X used to
do without the '-nolisten tcp' option, you use the '-listen tcp'
option in the same place:

exec /usr/bin/X -listen tcp "$@"

But I don't know whether that's the problem in Fedora, or even how
they actually launch X within Wayland there (do they even use
xinit or startx?).

-- 
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#22560

Am 05.01.2023 um 18:11:17 Uhr schrieb Spiros Bousbouras:

> [Crossposting to  comp.os.linux.misc . ]
> 
> On Thu, 5 Jan 2023 11:33:39 +0000
> Andy Burns <usenet@andyburns.uk> wrote:
> > Dan Espen wrote:
> >   
> > > Andy Burns writes:
> > >   
> > >> what do people actually want X11 for now?  
> > > 
> > > To keep running the same WM I've been using for decades.  
> > 
> > I fall into the category where Gnome (my distro's default) as a WM
> > doesn't annoy me enough to use anything different, I did use XFCE
> > for a bit, and now I don't know which do/don't work with wayland
> > ... that's what I meant by "fizzle out" if your favourite WM
> > doesn't support wayland, eventually it's going to find it self
> > beached without X11 to run on top of ..  
> 
> I was under the impression that one of the plans for Wayland was to
> be able to run X server on top of it so that all X11 applications
> would continue to work. Has this plan been abandoned ?

What is the benefit of that if the WM itself doesn't run on Wayland?

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#22561

In comp.misc Marco Moock <mo01@posteo.de> wrote:
> Am 05.01.2023 um 18:11:17 Uhr schrieb Spiros Bousbouras:
>> 
>> I was under the impression that one of the plans for Wayland was to
>> be able to run X server on top of it so that all X11 applications
>> would continue to work. Has this plan been abandoned ?
> 
> What is the benefit of that if the WM itself doesn't run on Wayland?

So that software that doesn't use a Wayland-supporting graphics
toolkit can still be run on a system running Wayland. Most distros
package many programs that will probably never be rewritten to work
on Wayland directly.

My assumption is that there's some magic that allows separate X
program windows to display in separate Wayland windows while still
sharing the same X server, like Xming can do on Windows.

-- 
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#22559

Am 05.01.2023 um 11:33:39 Uhr schrieb Andy Burns:

> I fall into the category where Gnome (my distro's default) as a WM
> doesn't annoy me enough to use anything differen

Use it on small screens or slow GPUs, then you will see that is is bad
in that cases.

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#22569

In article <tpgeu1$48kp$1@dont-email.me>, Marco Moock  <mo01@posteo.de> wrote:
>Am 05.01.2023 um 11:33:39 Uhr schrieb Andy Burns:
>
>> I fall into the category where Gnome (my distro's default) as a WM
>> doesn't annoy me enough to use anything differen
>
>Use it on small screens or slow GPUs, then you will see that is is bad
>in that cases.

Any minute now!  It's going to refresh... see... there, it's refreshing!  Now
click on the bar and hold it down until the menu appears... yeah...  keep
holding... there's the menu, scroll down and....
--scott
-- 
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

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#22531

Am 04.01.2023 schrieb Andy Burns <usenet@andyburns.uk>:

> what do people actually want X11 for now?

Does it support lightweight window managers like mwm?
I hate environments like GNOME, they are slow and annoying to use.

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#22534

Marco Moock wrote:

> schrieb Andy Burns:
> 
>> what do people actually want X11 for now?
> 
> Does it support lightweight window managers like mwm?
> I hate environments like GNOME, they are slow and annoying to use.

 From that "are we wayland yet" link I posted, no

	Enlightenment (experimental),
	GNOME,
	KDE Plasma,
	MATE Desktop (partial)

Not sure if wayland sees it as their job to port mwm etc to it, or the other WMs 
jobs to port themselves to wayland?  Guessing the latter, which if they don't 
might see the death of them in the long term?

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#22535

Am 05.01.2023 schrieb Andy Burns <usenet@andyburns.uk>:

>  From that "are we wayland yet" link I posted, no
> 
> 	Enlightenment (experimental),
> 	GNOME,
> 	KDE Plasma,
> 	MATE Desktop (partial)
> 
> Not sure if wayland sees it as their job to port mwm etc to it, or
> the other WMs jobs to port themselves to wayland?

Ok, so Wayland isn't and alternative for me at this time at all.

> Guessing the latter, which if they don't might see the death of them in the long
> term?

X11 isn't dead, there are just not that much commits as in the last
years. If all works fine, errors are fixed and the distributions still
ship X11, I can stay with it.

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#22537

Marco Moock <mo01@posteo.de> writes:

> Am 05.01.2023 schrieb Andy Burns <usenet@andyburns.uk>:
>
>>  From that "are we wayland yet" link I posted, no
>> 
>> 	Enlightenment (experimental),
>> 	GNOME,
>> 	KDE Plasma,
>> 	MATE Desktop (partial)
>> 
>> Not sure if wayland sees it as their job to port mwm etc to it, or
>> the other WMs jobs to port themselves to wayland?
>
> Ok, so Wayland isn't and alternative for me at this time at all.
>
>> Guessing the latter, which if they don't might see the death of them in the long
>> term?
>
> X11 isn't dead, there are just not that much commits as in the last
> years. If all works fine, errors are fixed and the distributions still
> ship X11, I can stay with it.

I sure hope so.  Especially since Wayland hasn't shown any of the
improvements they touted.  As far as I can see the Wayland effort
reduces function, offers no benefits, and is therefore a total failure.

-- 
Dan Espen

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#22545

Dan Espen <dan1espen@gmail.com> wrote:
> Marco Moock <mo01@posteo.de> writes:
>>
>> X11 isn't dead, there are just not that much commits as in the last
>> years. If all works fine, errors are fixed and the distributions still
>> ship X11, I can stay with it.
> 
> I sure hope so.  Especially since Wayland hasn't shown any of the
> improvements they touted.  As far as I can see the Wayland effort
> reduces function, offers no benefits, and is therefore a total failure.

Indeed I don't see why I'd want to switch to Wayland. On a
technical level X11 had various extensions to get around the fact
that the protocol wasn't designed for applications to interact
directly with the graphics hardware of the machine that they were
running on. As early as the mid 90s there was a proposed
replacement for X being worked on by some of the X developers,
called Fresco which would have been more like Wayland in design,
in order to get around this problem. However at the same time the
various work-arounds were getting better, while retaining
compatibility as well. So they were a better practical solution
than Fresco would have been then, and Wayland is now.

Fresco:
http://web.archive.org/web/20100729173932/http://fresco.org/index.html

The root problem is that all these extensions make make it very
hard to understand all the processes going on in the X server. It
also means that separate display drivers are required for the X
server itself, and for applications communicating with graphics
hardware themselves via OpenGL. So X was simply hard work for
developers to make big changes too, and Wayland is a more lazy
option for them that does what the average user wants without so
much complexity. As the article points out, the active X developers
were/are mostly working for large companies, so they probably
worked out that Wayland would be cheaper to maintain in the long
run than X.Org.

But that's from a developer's perspective. As a user I don't
actually want anything new from X, or even anything that it didn't
do ten years ago (new graphics drivers are nice, but I'm happy
enough even with the general-purpose VESA or framebuffer drivers).
Remote windows can be useful, and SSH makes it very easy to get
around the security problems with that when they're relevent. All
those extensions just work, and in spite of all the complexity it
all runs more than fast enough on modern computers (probably
because the developers had to make everything work on computers
from 20-30 years ago), so Wayland really doesn't have a leg to
stand on from a user's point of view.

The only trouble is that eventually (probably not for quite a while
though) popular graphics toolkits like GTK and Qt might stop
supporting X11 and go Wayland-only. Most of the programs I use are
old and will be stuck requiring an X server (either displaying
directly, or into a Wayland window) forever anyway, but there are
sure to be some new ones that I want to try without needing to
switch to Wayland for them. To that end a few years ago I looked
into whether it's possible to run a Wayland "compositor" that
displays as an a window in X. The answer was yes, and indeed this
was a feature of one of the project's example compositors, although
I couldn't find the exact code due to various poorly-documented
reorganisations and re-namings (_definately_ the same developers
who used to work on X.Org :) ). For now there's no point because
everything supports X still anyway, but this convinced me that it
shouldn't be that hard to build a system to run Wayland programs on
X, and I expect someone else will have developed that long before I
find that I need it myself.

So I don't expect that I'll ever need to switch to Wayland. I'm
not all that concerned about X.Org not getting any new features, or
applications eventually dropping X11 support. The only issue might
be how X ties in closely with the Linux kernel (expecially now that
it uses the Kernel's DRM interface, which is bound to change over
time). So if development gets entirely abandoned, eventually it
might not compile/run on modern Linux at all. But I recently
succeeded at getting the last release of XFree86, from 2008, to run
on modern Linux, as well as on ARM, after performing a long list of
minor code fixes. So I expect that an X server will remain
runable on Linux for me, at worst after an approachable amount of
individual work.

-- 
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#22547

Computer Nerd Kev wrote:
...
> So I don't expect that I'll ever need to switch to Wayland. I'm
> not all that concerned about X.Org not getting any new features, or
> applications eventually dropping X11 support. The only issue might
> be how X ties in closely with the Linux kernel (expecially now that
> it uses the Kernel's DRM interface, which is bound to change over
> time). So if development gets entirely abandoned, eventually it
> might not compile/run on modern Linux at all. But I recently
> succeeded at getting the last release of XFree86, from 2008, to run
> on modern Linux, as well as on ARM, after performing a long list of
> minor code fixes. So I expect that an X server will remain
> runable on Linux for me, at worst after an approachable amount of
> individual work.

  did you post those changes someplace?

  not that i'd ever need them myself but perhaps someone else
would be able to use them.


  ant

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