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

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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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[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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