Forgive me, I'm not an expert when it comes to windowing systems but wasn't Wayland started by basically all the then current head devs of xorg? Isn't that a tacit admission my the people that know best that the project they'd dedicated years if not decades of their lives to had reached a point where further development was untenable?
Beyond the above mentioned tacit admissions, didn't nearly every major active dev on the xorg team state explicitly via various emails, blog posts, and conference talks that they saw no reasonable way forward as a matter of tech when it came to the now 21 year old xorg source, now 34 year old XFree86 source, and 41+ year old protocol model that is X11?
All that said, I wish the best of luck to the X11Libre team on their endeavors.
There is no team, it's a one man show, and the split is caused by personality conflict between the author and the rest of the xorg team that doesn't feel that simply shuffling code around without putting actual hard work justifies frequent ABI breakage that leaves users with a broken graphics system. Read this for more info:
Yeah reading those links, this should have been a fork to begin with. Too many people rely on unstable XOrg. We're all used to the Linux model where HEAD is inherently unstable and breaks constantly (ask me how many times people broke the framebuffer driver in the last 5 years). But apparently XOrg does it differently.
> That fork was necessary since toxic elements within Xorg projects, moles from certian big corp are boycotting any substantial work on Xorg, in order to destroy the project, to elimitate competition of their own products. (classic "embrace, extend, extinguish" tactics)
> This is an independent project, not at all affiliated with BigTech or any of their subsidiaries or tax evasion tools, nor any political activists groups, state actors, etc. It's explicitly free of any "DEI" or similar discriminatory policies. Anybody who's treating others nicely is welcomed.
No and it never has. The default position on the internet, the one technologists working on open source always took, is that only the ideas matter and if your ideas are good you'll be included. DEI became popular because that wasn't good enough for certain groups of people who consistently failed to produce good ideas and wanted to wedge themselves in anyway.
Yeah, from a non-US citizen views, this type of policy feel like target discrimination against certain groups of individuals.
And the message sent is disastrous. Personally I am part of people who have big advantages with actual DEI policy, but I am firmly against that, because I want to be employed for my skills, not because I fit a quota or anything like that.
> this type of policy feel like target discrimination against certain groups of individuals.
Every policy is targeted discrimination for or against certain groups of individuals (and you can invert the group and make the same policy switch from "for" to "against".)
> Every policy is targeted discrimination for or against certain groups of individuals
Lol are you talking about "discrimination" on the basis of task-relevant skills?
Until 20 years ago, nobody in OS cared who you were IRL, your gender, ethnicity etc. In many cases they didn't even know, plenty people only contributed under pseudonyms. Hard to believe for people who only joined the show after social media had become pretty much mandatory, and the "I don't care who you are IRL"-crowd got drowned out by "who you are IRL is the most important thing, not what you contribute"-crowd.
I think their point is that there was never any reason to even know what people identify as, or your political views, and that there still shouldn't be. That things like "diversity" in online-only circles doesn't really make sense. I don't want to know your sexual preferences or your gender identity, not that I am against anything, just that it's completely irrelevant to writing code and learning about technology etc. and only seems to lead to more drama by including it at all.
As a more personal example, I no longer support the Linux kernel because I no longer consider it fully "open" to contributions, especially when accepting those contributions are no longer based solely on technical merit, but are also actively rejected for political reasons, even for patches that are merely fixes, which benefits everyone, and not just a sanctioned country. Even going so far as removing names from the maintainers list because of some unspoken combination of their country of origin, employer or political affiliation. Not only the lack of advance notice, transparency and empathy, but the abusive attitude Linus continues to display to the world about this and many other issues.
Back then my field had plenty women and asians, I also knew a bunch of middle easterners (mostly iranians, but that's probably by accident). They got into the field because they were interested in it, so they were good at it!
Nowadays many people (including the despised white boys) enter the field because they think it's an easy way to make money, not because they're interested in it. But at least with the white boys, employers are still allowed to filter based on interest and ability. They can't filter out "oppressed identity havers" on the basis of interest or ability, who as a result are just as bad as nepotism hires -- some are good, most aren't.
What we should have focused on for the last 20 years was reducing nepotism, instead we created a new type of nepotism based on identity. In traditional nepotism you need an uncle who is friends with the boss, here you just need the skin color that is friends the boss of your (boss's)^n boss.
> I think we need diversity. Am I wrong?
There are definitely some circumstances where identity and cultural background can be very job-relevant -- for example for understanding your customers.
But that's pretty limited. Does your skin color or genitals have an effect on what kind of networking problems you can solve? The only reason we haven't proven the Riemann hypothesis yet is because we forgot to hire a Manchu-Bantu queer Muslim with ovotesticular syndrome and vitiligo? I don't think so.
Even if you believe that, this perceived need does not justify identity-based discrimination. Discrimination creates resentment.
Actual, legally enforced, culturally glorified discrimination (which corporate america currently has against white and asian men, unless they're nepotism hires) creates more resentment than does the ethereal, unfalsifiable, hypothetical discrimination that you assume to exist based on outcome disparities, even though companies are aggressively punished for any actual such discrimination (against anyone besides white and asian men).
The main unfairness in corporate America is nepotism. If you fight that, you'll automatically fight more white men than members of other identity groups. The main unfairness in America in general is poverty. If you fight poverty you'll automatically help more minorities. The main beneficiaries of DEI are "oppressed identity havers" from high income backgrounds. DEI reinforces/extends nepotism and income inequality instead of fighting it.
> The main unfairness in corporate America is nepotism. If you fight that, you'll automatically fight more white men than members of other identity groups.
adolph reed says something similar to this as well.
one important addition to that conversation is that what dei (in many cases) represents is the implicit acceptance of the system as-it-is except that the only problem remaining is 'equal representation'
so if (going to extremes) you have a corrupt organization, just making the identify of that organization represent the makeup of society doesn't fix that corruption; it just makes it look more legitimate...
I haven’t remembered any policy like that in past decades, for my country even more ( in the US you have to go back to apartheid to find policy who are discriminated against group of people)
And in context of work or anything like that, the only policy who actively discriminate is the skill, and I don’t place this in the same level of DEI because you can acquire more skill, but you cannot change your color skin or origin for example.
reading too deeply into it, it's basically an interjection. it doesn't refer to any meaningful facet of objective reality, it only exists according to the socio-political hallucinations of americans. doesn't matter if it's said positively or negatively, it's just a virtue signal long devoid of meaning. a bird's mating dance, if you will, but for burger-eaters.
This dude is definitely into some hysterical right wing conspiracies. I remember he got yelled at by Linus Torvalds on the LKML for trying to spread anti-vax bs.
I always find it ironic how people like this non-stop whine about "politics in mah FOSS" or video games or w/e, but will turn around and write a manifesto in the README drenched in right wing politically charged slop.
ultimately I really don't care what they spend their time doing, some people still want X11 and if they can keep it running then good for them. I use Wayland because it looks a lot better and is a lot smoother. Its that simple.
Oh this link is gold, thanks :)
Alread the completely unrelated mention of DEI on the reasoning for a fork, that's supposedly about doing big changes that are suppressed on the original project, is a pretty damning sign. Knowing he is also an anti-vaxxer nut-job says everything you need to know about his judgement. Sure the fork isn't "medical" or otherwise related to vaccines, but at least adequate judgement is needed for anything.
Wayland is a lot smoothet than X. The colors are better too and there's just something about how the pixels are rendered that looks a million times better. It becomes apparent after using Wayland and then going back to X.
> moles from certian big corp are boycotting any substantial work on Xorg, in order to destroy the project
That's what I've always thought. The "X11 developers" pushing for Wayland weren't original developers so much as RedHat "maintainers," who (understandably) wanted a frontier to explore rather than janitorial work. All I know for certain is that X11 (even as of 15 years ago) mostly worked, while Wayland of 2025 is still full of headaches & breakages.
Thanks for your anecdotes. Here's a couple of counter-anecdotes:
---
X has "just worked" for me since at least ubuntu 8.04 (that's 2008, april, over 17 years ago, for those counting), probably earlier.
I don't recall having any particular issues with X on the fedora machines I ran before I switched to ubuntu 8.04, but I don't recall clearly enough to be able to confidently say that I didn't have any X issues.
OTOH, I also don't specifically recall having X issues since some time around Red Hat 6 or so, which would be around 1998 or 1999, so it might be more like 25-26 years since X didn't "just work" for me.
---
About a year ago, I heard that wayland might be approaching a usable state. So I decided to give it a try on a raspberry pi that I was setting up.
It took literally about 15 minutes before I ran into a problem where I wasn't able to do something I've been doing for decades on X. And I want to stress that I was hoping it would work - I was not out to find a reason not to use wayland, I just happened to run into one inside of about 15 minutes.
I spent a couple of hours trying to figure out how to do what I wanted to do on wayland. I put a nontrivial amount of effort into trying to solve the issue on wayland. During the course of this, I found several different/conflicting pieces of advice, none of which worked for me. I think IIRC I found one option which sounded promising but which meant recompiling the compositor, or something very-nontrivial like that.
I balked at that and switched the system over to X.
And the problem instantly went away, and everything started working again. And that machine currently has an uptime of well over a hundred days.
I would love for wayland to be a thing that actually works to the point that it's a viable replacement for X, but I grow more and more skeptical every year that this doesn't happen. I Expected it like a decade ago.
The reason X "just worked" is that it's very bad, obolsete software that nobody would touch so we all just got used to the things that didn't work.
High DPI, multiple monitors, hot-plugging, OpenGL... these things were hacks and pretty much never worked right. There's also very necessary for modern computers. We all just didn't care.
So what if my thunderbolt dock needed a reboot to connect a monitor? So what if youtube drops a few frames here or there? So what if I need to enforce vsync across the entire desktop just so I don't get splitting? So what if vertical bars appear for a few seconds after suspend? So what if 1.25 scaling looks like ass?
> The reason X "just worked" is that it's very bad
Yeah, sure, most bad software "just works", and there's nothing contradictory about this statement at all.
> High DPI, multiple monitors, hot-plugging, OpenGL
Of these 4 examples, I have literally never had any problems with 75% of them since at least 2008 - maybe 1999 - they all "just work". And I've never tried to do the other one, it may or may not.
You can argue about how old == bad as much as you like. Meanwhile I'll be getting work done using the bad old tech, rather than trying to debug the new broken thing.
> So what if my thunderbolt dock needed a reboot to connect a monitor?
Well if you needed to reboot, i.e restarting X didn't solve it, then that sounds like it's not an X problem at all. Maybe something in the USB stack.
> So what... So what... So what...
So what if the new thing people are trying to force on us doesn't support features we've enjoyed using for decades and use every day to get work done? So what if I've been using network transparency just fine for over a quarter century? So what if the new protocol doesn't support really basic things like screen savers properly? So what if it's suddenly a problem if an application has multiple windows, or wants to record the screen, or automate desktop usage, or reparent some other program, or have a not-rectangular window?
I'm talking about very, very basic features like changing input/output at runtime, graphics acceleration, and scaling.
These are janky on X. I'm sorry, they are and we all know it, across many drivers, not just nvidia.
Yes, Wayland is missing some very niche usecases. For my money, I'd rather be able to plug in a monitor without a restart than have a "not-rectangular window". If your priorities are different then fine, I can't argue with lived experience.
Also, for the record, some X "features" were always a bad idea. The whole "every application being to record everything at any time with no permission model" isn't a feature, it's just a vulnerability. Yes, that means we now have to be much more deliberate with how we control these things, so we have popups and portals and whatnot. But that is actually a big improvement from the alternative, which is every application comes with a built-in free keylogger and screenlogger that you're just kind of hoping nobody is using for nefarious purposes.
Some people would consider the ability to record the screen or run a screensaver - like we've been able to since the 1980s - to be a "very, very basic feature"
> I'd rather be able to plug in a monitor without a restart
I'm not sure what you're not doing that I'm doing, but like I indicated before and you ignored, I've been hotplugging monitors for like 15 years. I've literally never had to reboot to plug in a monitor as far as I can recall. At worst I have to set the resolution. And if you do have to reboot, that doesn't sound like a problem with X.
> Also, for the record, some X "features" were always a bad idea (blablabla)
Sorry, did someone say X was perfect? Maybe I missed that post.
The point being made is that X works. Today. And has for decades. Meanwhile, as I mentioned earlier, wayland is over a decade overdue at this point. And still hasn't solved enough very basic issues that I was able to use it for more than about 15 minutes without running into trouble.
The problem with "X works" type arguments is that, no, no it doesn't, not generally, and when it does it only does so because it gets maintained.
Software rots, period. It doesn't matter how perfect the software is because everything else changes. X hasn't been "just working" for 15 years like you claim as if it's some magic piece of software. No... it's been actively and meticulously maintained for 15 years. It's sort of like saying my Honda Accord with 500K miles just works. Yeah... sort of.
If nobody wants to maintain it, then yeah it won't work at all and that will happen pretty quickly. Because they're dependent on user land, and drivers, and graphics APIs, and those are all moving targets.
Maybe this maintenance will work out and X will live. I highly, highly doubt, but maybe.
Wow, someone has really been chugging on that kool-aid.
> The problem with "X works" type arguments is that, no, no it doesn't, not generally
So, to summarise: what you're saying, in a thread where I demonstrated and you yourself said that X "just works", is that suddenly it doesn't now.
Well I'll be sure to tell my laptop, it's got this thing where it's super stable for weeks at a time. Maybe my laptop hearing that actually it's DE doesn't work and that I imagined all those times I hotplugged my projector is what is needed to magically make wayland usable in the real world.
Accelerated Xwayland clients (GLX)
There is currently no accelerated GLX support when running a GNOME Wayland session no top of the NVIDIA drivers, meaning X11 OpenGL applications will use software rendering.
and:
Mode setting
Mode setting is possible, but the current requirement to use dumb buffers during mode setting before establishing the EGLSurface, EGLDevice CRTC stream link, results in memory constraint issues with multiple monitors with higher resolutions.
Monitor mirroring
Monitor mirroring is currently not possible due to the issue that an EGLSurface can only be linked to a single CRTC. The way GNOME Shell currently does monitor mirroring relies on passing the same hardware buffer to multiple CRTCs, which is currently not supported by the API exposed by the NVIDIA driver.
...Which is just a hilarious, hilarious joke. So in other words, wayland is a complete non-starter for any serious use. But I suppose, to be fair, you won't have to worry about that issue you claim is with X where you say you need to reboot to plug in a second monitor: you just can't have a second monitor! Not if you want it mirrored, or at "higher resolutions"
Hey, just for fun: I bet you can't guess which windowing system has supported all these things for decades?
"Plans are underway to add Wayland support to Xfwm4 while preserving its existing X11 functionality. However, such a restructurization will be a major effort and we cannot tell yet when/if it will be done, so please don't hold your breath waiting for it."
Lol, yep, it's X that doesn't "just work", hahahahaha.
(and no, I wouldn't be holding my breath, would I, given that wayland has now been in development longer than Duke Nukem Forever)
At this point I think you're just arguing in bad faith and you have some strange ideological reasons to cling to X.
As I've already said, if this maintenance effort works out, then great! You, and maybe some other's, can continue to use X and the world will be happy.
I doubt that's going to be the case, but I do actually wish you the best of luck.
Debates, especially on highly subjective issues, will not always be resolved quickly and definitively in the absence of bad faith. That "ideological reasons" you're sensing is the worldview of the person you're talking to.
Wayland works great for me and is significantly more stable and feature-rich, so I'm not waiting for anything. I'm doing things right now that are probably never going to be possible on X just because of the legacy of X.
Obviously, our priorities are different, and probably our hardware too. Maybe I'm lucky, maybe you're horribly unlucky, I don't know. But I will continue to enjoy my higher DPI displays, and HDR, and thunderbolt :p
IMO nvidia cards are pretty much never worth the money. They're really only competitive at the very top end, which isn't where I am or where I think almost anyone else is.
At every other price point, they're just absolutely swept by the competition. Also nvidia in laptops has been a joke for as long as it's existed.
lol. I think you need to jump onto the repos for about 500 ML frameworks and tell them that the only hardware they support well "isn't worth the money".
At this point I think you're just arguing in bad faith and you have some strange ideological reasons to cling to Wayland.
With an attitude like that it'll never be ready for adoption.
> With an attitude like that it'll never be ready for adoption.
An attitude like what? That I... don't like nvidia because they've been actively hostile to OSS for decades? What the fuck do you want me to do about that? It's nvidia's software - if they want to be jackasses then that's not something I, or anyone else on Earth, can fix.
Also what I said about nvidia is 100% factually true.
Nvidia makes good hardware... at the very top end only. Only. Every other price point, they are objectively the worst option. They offer lower rasterization performance and usually it's not even that close.
You're implicitly trying to tell people (as others have more explicitly done) that rather than using the hardware they want to use - for perfectly legitimate reasons (which you've chosen to ignore) - that they should go buy something else, just so that they can adopt your preferred software stack.
I just want you to realise that with every word you type you're digging a deeper hole: when you're digging in, shifting goalposts, ignoring perfectly legitimate issues, and spewing your insane troll logic, what you're doing is making people more hostile and less interested in adopting wayland: I didn't actually give much of a shit before, I just thought wayland was a pretty funny case of vapourware that may or may not come to fruition one day, but now that I see just how evangelical and nonsensically-ideologically-driven some of you rabid fanboys are, It'll take a fairly significant shift to make me want to try it again. Your nonsense trolling here has done wayland a disservice. Congratulations.
I refer you back to this passage in my original anecdote:
"I want to stress that I was *hoping it would work* - I was not out to find a reason not to use wayland"
> don't like nvidia because they've been actively hostile to OSS for decades
Hey guess what? This might come as a shock, but nvidia release drivers for X. And they have for decades. And they work just fine. How do their drivers work on wayland? Oh that's right, they basically don't - I posted links about that what feels like a hundred thousand messages ago. Your reaction was to deflect from that by saying they're not very good anyway. Which completely fails to even attempt to respond to the issue I pointed out.
> Also what I said about nvidia is 100% factually true.
You might note if you read back over the history of this thread that I actually didn't ask for your opinion of nvidia or their hardware at any point. Nor did I ask for an "objective" evaluation of the performance of nvidia cards relative to others. The reason I didn't ask that is because I don't actually give a shit what your opinion about nvidia and their hardware is. I hope this clears things up for you.
> they are objectively the worst option
Not for use cases that explicitly require nvidia cards and don't support anything else.
Also, somewhat related, it seems that like a ton of things I've said, you forgot to address my point that cuda is basically the only game in town when it comes to ML. I guess that must have been an oversight and not at all intentional and ideologically driven deflection.
X just worked for a large subset of users. However Wayland just works for a large subset as well. In either case if you are in the subset where it doesn't work then you will complain. Wayland has a design such that if things don't work for you today we have a hope that we can make it work for you in the future. Many of the issues where X didn't work for some people could not be fixed, and some of those were issues that are becoming more important.
> Wayland has a design such that if things don't work for you today we have a hope that we can make it work for you in the future.
The reason we hate Wayland so much is that X is being killed off now, with things only ever maybe working again in the future. Wayland would be way better if the people behind it added support for all of the missing features and use cases first, and only then killed off X.
Right, and I wish them luck. Though signs point to this person not being a good mainainer - breaking basic
features and so on. Maybe this is needed to get into a long term better place though.
Not working with the Xenodm people also seemed like a sign of bad maintainership to me. I don't think the baseline is hard to improve on and him forking it is almost certainly a step in the right direction.
> Though signs point to this person not being a good mainainer
I don't know about that. If you read through the whole issue which was linked, you'll see the guy was quite responsive, fixed the issue very quickly, and gave a reasonable explanation as to the cause of the issue.
> Maybe this is needed to get into a long term better place though.
Yeah, agreed.
I think a separate repo/branch seems like a good place for him to do his work, so he doesn't have to mess with the core repo and has no chance of breaking anything.
I do sympathise with the X maintainers - 1500 commits is a lot to try to keep up with, particularly if you're not very interested in maintaining the thing. I feel like doing the stuff he's doing as a ton of PRs might be a mistake - a separate branch and a couple of huge PRs might have been a better approach.
Maybe he'll be able to make some progress and improvements. That would be cool.
Perfectly true. What I was getting at is that you should direct your frustration to the correct place: not with the efforts of wayland and kernel devs but with the stubbornness of the hardware vendors that don't want to make their code public, and in the case of nvidia, (or) use the same driver building blocks that the kernel community recommended.
What you seem to be missing is that a whole lot of people don't actually have any "frustration", except when people come along claiming that their new windowing system is "totally ready... except it doesn't support any good hardware".
For people like us, X works just fine, with our nvidia cards, and we're not actually interested in the philosophical purity of who's fault it is that wayland doesn't work with our nvidia cards. If we cared about that kind of stuff so deeply, we wouldn't be using the proprietary drivers.
IF you want people to switch to wayland, then solving all those edge cases, and making it work properly with proprietary graphics drivers (or maybe getting nvidia et al to open their code, good luck with that) is your problem.
Some people think it comes off as petulant and entitled when you create a new thing with no regard to being compatible with the old thing, and then demand that the entire world adapts to you and starts supporting your thing.
> I hope you'll invest some effort in supporting this new group of people prolonging its life.
If they can show some tangible progress and improvements I almost certainly will! :)
And here I thought the wave of the future was generative AI, which damn near requires Nvidia to even function. Sure can't wait for RedHat to deprecate and nuke and blacklist and hellban all Nvidia capability!
Indeed. I've seen tons of things that specifically require nvidia and support nothing else - more and more in the last couple of years. Some proprietary games don't support anything but the nvidia proprietary drivers on Linux.
More than 2/3rds of your examples are from over 5 years ago, and one of the links is to a site that replaces its content with an image of a testicle when hotlinked from HN.
> and one of the links is to a site that replaces its content with an image of a testicle when hotlinked from HN.
jwz is calling other people manchilds, but as someone who also had such a script on their website and also had HN blocked this way... he is the manchild who needs to grow up.
> More than 2/3rds of your examples are from over 5 years ago
Exactly! If you scroll to the bottom of each one, you will see that most are either a) still open, or b) abandoned (too hard or impossible), then closed as stale.
One open issue has a comment at the bottom saying that the issue is fixed and was an issue with Mutter. There's no evidence to think that it was ever a "wayland" issue.
One open issue has had locked comments for 5 years. It's probably fixed but nobody has bothered to close it.
Most of rest were not actually "wayland" issues, either. Yes, someone's hobby project screen recorder might not get updated to work with wayland, but there's dozens of those, feels a bit unfair to ignore that there's alternatives.
Can't speak for obs and raspbian, but jitsi definitely is more of a hobby project than a stable reliable product. I have dealt with it firsthand for years and its a complete mess and unstable with poor quality and reliability and zero support. It tries to do one thing, and does it horribly. Users HATED it. Ending up costing our company millions in wasted dev time and hosting fees. Probably the biggest project failure ive personally witnessed. This is not something you want to use to offer some service to users. There are better and cheaper products out there.(it costs more to host crappy jitsi than it does to just pay for zoom licences).
> Most of the stuff that's come out of freedesktop.org always seemed to make things less usable.
I thought so too. I also thought they have many problems and do not help very well. I mostly try to avoid them.
(There are problems with X window system as well (and with Xlib), but still it seems the freedesktop had made things that are designed in a worse way.)
I'm not going to pretend judging people by their skin color (or any other bogus criteria like those outlined by the hacker ethics) is not discriminatory.
Whatever DEI was meant for, due to its unagreeable practices its unrecoverably burned into the ground.
I, for one, am in favour of DEI pillars such as pregnancy leave and accessibility to the disabled. Especially the latter seems pretty important when it comes to developing a core component of a computer interface.
Well, that sucks, because whenever you argue for being more "inclusive", you are now one of the annoying people. Regardless of the actual merit of your point. Its a pretty shitty time to be disabled.
I think is good that they don't use DEI. (When one side is DEI and other side is discrimination and racist, both sides are bad.) They do not seem to exclude anyone because of this, and they said they aren't excluding anyone because of this (and hopefully they are not lying). They should include people, and DEI is not a very good way to do it.
I also think is good that they had deliberately being trying to avoid other problems, so that they will not be affiliated with the BigTech and the related stuff.
Hopefully they will actually be able to improve it.
Seems to just open the door for discrimination under false pretense. "well their code wasn't good. Nothing to do with their identity." We've seen it time and time again that it's confusing why so many reject reality.
L take, DEI and the people pushing gender and race based preferential treatment can go take a long walk off a short dock.
ETA: You don't deserve respect for the color of your skin or what's between your legs, you earn it tbrough your actions. Anyone who disagrees is an intellectually dishonest wannabe tyrant.
I don't understand why the link is to the commit list for a branch and not to the repo home page, unless OP was intentionally trying to have people avoid reading the README.
The README contains a minor political rant that primarily complains about corporate influence but also takes a shot at DEI. The CoC page was intentionally left up with just the content "404". Reading between the lines, it sounds like toxicity all around.
It's abandonware. None of the grown-ups in the Linux graphics space are interested in maintaining it beyond the minimum necessary. I suppose new features could be added to Xorg, but anyone who actually knows something about the graphics pipeline is 100% committed to Wayland, so it won't be done.
And Enrico's code was apparently so shitty and disruptive he's earned himself a ban from Freedesktop.org. Or is that because he associated himself with Lunduke?
That dude had a crazy amount of patches ready to go. I don't have the technical skills to judge if the patches are any good, but that's an impressive amount of work.
I'd be a little concerned that this is just one person doing the work, but we'll see if others join in.
From looking at his Xorg contributions on FDo, his technical work amounts to mostly code style changes and cosmetic-level refactors in an attempt to clean up the codebase. In the course of this, he's broken the master branch on multiple occasions and introduced a large amount of churn in the Xorg ecosystem, all while not fixing any bugs or improving anything user-facing. The reason why he started this fork seems to be that his changes pissed off everyone working on Xorg who could review his MRs, so they started piling up without getting reviewed.
> Changing calls pScreen->DestroyPixmap to dixDestroyPixmap doesn't meaningfully improve the code or make it easier to reason about. Moving byte-swapping of requests and events from one function to another doesn't make the code more robust. Cosmetic changes to the way length fields are written doesn't help with byte vs. word unit confusion, or keep you from writing the wrong amount of data. You're just moving the complexity from point A to point G, not reducing it.
> It is possible to reduce the complexity of the code, by delving deep into the interactions between DIX/MI/FB/DDX to flatten the code flow, making some deep structural changes. Or by using structured (de)marshalling through XCB. Doing this would be incredibly risky, but at least have a much higher payoff than just cosmetic shuffling because it is 'cleaner'.
> The immense value X11 has - that it always had and will have for decades to come - is its backwards compatibility, still being able to run 40-year old apps. You correctly called the codebase 'fragile' - you've been finding this out as your changes repeatedly break things. If you're breaking apps, then what exactly is the value in a codebase which is 'cleaner' to your subjective standard but doesn't actually work?
I hope so. I've tried to use wayland more than a decade ago, it was unable to replace xorg. Again last year, same story, and we get told that it's our fault because we need to adapt our workflows to wayland. I chose Linux because I get to choose how I work.
Exactly. I came to Linux because Microsoft keeps changing; correct way to do things, configuration files/locations all while deciding to shove ads and tracking down our throats.
The MR that caused the drama that caused the fork to happen complained about this author doing tons of work to tons of legacy code with no direct user-facing benefit without testing his changes properly. From the sentiment of the discussion I gather this isn't the first time either.
I think trying to improve the quality of such old code bases is good and "don't touch it in case something breaks" has caused more problems than it solved, but in this case the lack of testing caused X to die when someone runs xrandr. Not exactly a vague use case. Large restructuring work and taking care of tech debt is good, but it should go along with diligent testing.
Until all the work is done, I don't think this will be a very stable alternative to X.org. I also don't think many people will follow this guy to the new project because the comments on the MR seems very "this guy versus everyone else".
Even if the fork stabilizes, that's just where the journey begins. The X.org system interacts with tons of other systems (the kernel and GPU drivers, among others), so that work need to be kept up with. At the same time, developing all of the new features the dev wants to add will be pretty useless unless applications start making use of them, and they're not going to if the project remains small.
If the anti-Wayland people unite behind this project and maintain their own X fork, there may be promise in this fork. But looking at the history, this is more likely to become another X12/Y11, or maybe a Mir if he can get a distro to back him.
well, some time ago i had a deeper look at his social media activity (including such niche things like devuan mailing lists or facebook), and that's my conclusion; and it's really not just because of the extremely stupid anti-vaxxer views he pushes.
Wow: “xrandr doesn't work anymore on xorg-git” “I do not think this should be specifically on you, it is not unreasonable to expect that the author of a change tries their change before even submitting it upstream.” does not give a warm fuzzy feeling about the author of the at-fault patch leading a fork.
I think it's not the one to blame who broke this but those who implemented everything all the time without adding any tests. Xorg has quite a large codebase but almost no automated tests.
So we agree that the maintainer is at fault: he wanted to change things and not have to thoroughly test his changes by doing the boring work of adding test coverage to the modified area.
>> I'm a aware that some people from Xorg development team think that @metux changes are not useful enough for various reasons
> Apologies for being blunt, but I'm afraid it's more like "everyone except you" by now. He's managed to fall out with pretty much every other active project member.
>> Xorg is dead anyway
> That's not a reason for me though. I actually feel bad for Xorg users, Enrico's churn is causing pain for them for no clear benefit.
There are evidently both technical and social issues at play.
Later in that thread, Encrico/metux offers a defence, an explanation with detail that this is part of a mission to “make X11 great again”. Don’t read too much into the comparison (please don’t!), but one similarity with the American politician who has been using a similar phrase for the last dedcade is that they don’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. In both cases, some think the broken eggs are acceptable collateral damage toward a worthy goal, and others don’t. In this case, other X11 maintainers aren’t interested in making X11 great again, but would prefer to let it rest obsolete and minimally maintained; and so, taking the best interpretations I can imagine, it’s necessary for this Enrico to fork the project and go it alone. But he’s going to be swimming upstream against a raging torrent. And he seems to be making various mistakes in some changes that weren’t supposed to change behaviour, due to inadequate testing (he offers explanations that at least some consider reasonable; so the errors may not indicate a broader pattern).
Never coded, made a change or updated X11. It always just works. But reading this thread that spawned some of the feelings around the ‘fragile’ codebase sounds like it is really hard to work on
From what I've seen he hasn't actually addressed any bugs or features in xorg... ever. I'm not sure if that even grants the title of "maintainer". Shuffling code around is fun and easy, but not necessarily productive.
a) noone looks at the code
b) they make random user-facing changes
c) random churn that makes the code better (preferably with as few user-facing modifications as possible)
IMO the best option is c). Guy is literally doing the single best thing possible.
I hope this succeeds plus I hope they are open to allow patches from OpenBSD. IIRC, Xorg would not accept patches from them, them, thus we have xenodm.
Also I hope NetBSD, FreeBSD and DrogonFlyBSD jumps on, this way the BSDs do not have to jump through loops for Wayland and they are not being forced to follow Linux.
I read through some of the context and his commits and the guy seems like an absolute liability. I’m more careful making such changes on our internal greenfield prototype…
I've often wondered why there are so many people who want X to just die and will dismiss any criticism against Wayland. They sure do like shifting the blame elsewhere instead of acknowledging that some users do have issues running their applications.
Just yesterday I checked again if anything's changed, but nope. Jitsi Meet flickers, gr-fospher flickers and doesn't even render the plot, Emacs Application Framework doesn't work, etc. All these work perfectly fine with X.
Here is an excellent opportunity for those who believe in the continued development of X to pick up maintenance and push it forward. Time will tell at the end.
Can someone explain what's the big idea with that ? I keep seeing conspiracy theories about how Red Hat is sabotaging the Linux desktop on purpose, but I would quite honestly like to see an explanation as to *why* Red Hat would do that.
Ubuntu was winning on Desktop and they had to come up with something. And they did. They are following the EEE strategy, are actively trying to replace and undermine everything with tightly-coupled, in-house, break often technology. (In the meantime Canonical gave up, so there is no real need to destroy the desktop experience further further.)
(edit: of course Canonical was trying to control Debian in the meantime, so it's not like they are the Champion of Open Source here, just the underdog)
While I doubt Nvidia will back this fork over the real X.org, their open source drivers should be less problematic.
Unfortunately, whether or not you can use their open source drivers depends on what year you bought your GPU, and anything not labeled RTX or GTX-16* will never get a fully functional open source Nvidia driver.
Wayland is still pretty garbage. Hyprland is the most viable window manager replacement. The community is amazing too, way better than the Sway people. Lots of help from their forums and chatroom. Still, I had trouble with some basic stuff not working. So much tool replacement! So much work, for so little reward.
With i3/X11, I can run xrandr and see all my disconnected displays. As far as I can tell, there is absolutely no way to see disconnected display outputs in any wlroots or other Wayland composer. None. There's no standard way to do screenshots or video recording. It requires some custom portal for every single composer. I've never gotten Flameshot working in Sway or Hyprland and the suggested replacements are clobbered together garbage.
I do use network transparency (ssh -Y) quite often and it's not there in Wayland.
i3/X11 is just so much better and smother and I don't see the gain of Wayland. It's 100x more difficult to write programs that need to work in different composers. I hope this project succeeded and we really do see an X11R8 out of it.
I'm old enough to remember the switch from XFree86 -> xorg. I hope we see that again and we have real competition so the Wayland devs can finally get around to fixing their broken garbage of a display regression.
> I do use network transparency (ssh -Y) quite often and it's not there in Wayland.
There's waypipe (https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe), which works well in my experience. Although I must say I don't use network transparency (be it X or Wayland) much these days.
I have to say I find the architecture of X much better than Wayland's. It is mostly the same, except X is more modular which I think it is a problem that Wayland is not.
Fantastic news. Glad that someone is continuing to support functioning graphics on Unix and Unix-like operational systems. Wayland is a joke toy with no future.
Why? Well, the existing protocol is 40+ years old, widely used and seriously battle hardened. The new one would be brand new and therefore infinitely better according to basic open source logic
Mir had an important thing going for it: Much faster progress towards replacing X11 on the desktop with all its features. It took several years after the failure of Mir for Wayland to become really practical.
That said, I'm not sure if Mir would have been a good thing in the long term, mostly because of Canonical's control over it.
> ZeroMQ has support for Unix Domain sockets even on Windows.
The support for Unix-domain sockets is there, in X and in the OS, regardless of whether you add ZeroMQ in the middle. Adding ZeroMQ wouldn't solve any problem in this regard.
Beyond the above mentioned tacit admissions, didn't nearly every major active dev on the xorg team state explicitly via various emails, blog posts, and conference talks that they saw no reasonable way forward as a matter of tech when it came to the now 21 year old xorg source, now 34 year old XFree86 source, and 41+ year old protocol model that is X11?
All that said, I wish the best of luck to the X11Libre team on their endeavors.