Comment by sprash | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sprash | Hacker News Reader

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Money Quote:

> So, a lot of the design of X11 is giving clients and apps a large set of tools to design and implement their app, without any real opinionated design about how an app should be made. An X client can use this tool or that tool to battle this tradeoff or that tradeoffs, and neither is fundamentally a wrong choice.

That is something that can not be said about Wayland. Besides the "every frame is perfect" mantra Wayland has no design philosophy at all. It is also a weak argument to introduce a new protocol. With modern drivers it is rare to experience tearing on X11 and on some occasions it even makes sense to disable vsync (e.g. competitive gaming).

The introduction of Wayland was a mistake because X11 has a huge ecosystem with lot of little programs and a large diverse users base. Almost every Unix OS supported X11 at some point. There is a reason why Intel still stuffs the i368 instruction set in their processors, Microsoft Windows still can execute programs from 1995 and IBM is still able to make money with vastly overpriced mainframes. Successful systems have the tendency to stay and accumulate cruft as a result. The abandonment of X11 will be a heavy blow to the FOSS community (and maybe that is exactly the intend).

Author of the article here.

One of my many mistakes that burned me out on the whole project was trying to present X11 in a neutral way. I personally believe there's a lot broken with the architecture and the ecosystem, but wanted to let X11 sell its own ideas, slowly letting you figure out they were the wrong ones. But that never happened. I should have been more up-front by pointing out brokenness when I see it. The whole window tree was the wrong idea.

I worked closely on Wayland for a few years of my professional life, and helped design important parts. I believe X11 made plenty of wrong choices, and Wayland made much more informed ones.

But my attempt at staying neutral only fueled the Wayland vs. X11 debate. I stepped away entirely from open-source graphics in 2016, but it still goes on today.

As someone who is working with X11, I strongly disagree. It really needs replacing badly. It doesn't even work; only a few code paths even get tested on for example GLX, which is why complex X11 apps like browsers need blacklists.

> There is a reason why Intel still stuffs the i368 instruction set in their processors

If you want a CPU analogy, Wayland is more like ARMv8, which was mostly a clean break in terms of the AArch64 ISA, but which still supports 32-bit at the process level. 32-bit and 64-bit code cannot be intermixed in the same address space, but you can run 32-bit and 64-bit apps simultaneously on the same OS, analogously to the way you can run X11 and Wayland apps on the same Wayland desktop using Xwayland. This actually worked out beautifully, and I would have preferred that x86 had followed the same trajectory.

> As someone who is working with X11, I strongly disagree. It really needs replacing badly. It doesn't even work; only a few code paths even get tested on for example GLX, which is why complex X11 apps like browsers need blacklists.

Blacklists are needed because OpenGL drivers for specific hardware have bugs and can have missing functionality. Those can affect Wayland too, since the same drivers are used.

Modern Xorg supports direct rendering well, Keith Packard authored a lot of modernized infrastructure such as DRI2/DRI3, and even support for VR (work he's been doing for Valve).

There's also the important VK_display_timing extension implementation he's done with Croateams Alen Ladavac:

https://twvideo01.ubm-us.net/o1/vault/gdc2018/presentations/... on Xorg

Sadly, I don't see much more recent activity from him or Alen about these topics, but it shows that Xorg is still the main platform of inovation for Linux real-time graphics needs.

X11 and its ecosystem of applications isn't abandoned by Wayland, because you can run an X11 server on Wayland. By all means, debate the merits of Wayland itself, but don't lean on inaccuracies and conspiracy theories.

My window manager won't work, my hotkey daemon won't work, my screenshot tool won't work, any X11 program that draws to the root window won't work. Xwayland is obviously not a working solution to fix the ecosystem problem. Who is inaccurate now?

> debate the merits

Wayland has no merits. That is kind of the problem. It is just a reimplementation of stuff that worked.

Also, even the limited X11 support which there currently is under Wayland will probably go the way of the dodo because it involves about the same amount of code as supporting X11 natively. For example, it requires every Wayland compositor to be a X window manager with all the complexity that implies, plus running a full hardware-accelerated X server and the OpenGL driver support for that. I can't imagine the desktop environments and distros who are so keen on dropping legacy features like X and support for 32-bit apps will keep all that code around for long.

Once the integrated X support is gone you can't just replace it with a standalone X server of the sort that's available on OSes like Windows and Mac OS X either - by design, the standard Wayland API doesn't provide the functionality required to run X (or Windows) apps. In particular, it provides no way to set or get the absolute position of top-level windows, which apps on those platforms need to support things like menus. In a few years time, I can easily see modern Linux becoming the only current desktop OS that cannot run X apps.

Xwayland doesn't need a hardware specific DDX driver, because firstly, many of the features can be implemented by forwarding to the Wayland server, and secondly, the drawing operations (which don't exist in Wayland) have been implemented hardware independently, based on OpenGL, in the GLAMOR backend.

https://blog.mecheye.net/2014/04/xwayland/

https://wayland.freedesktop.org/docs/html/ch05.html

If hardware vendors don't have to care about it, then Xwayland should not create a huge maintenance burden and thus I'm pretty confident it will be available until 2030; enterprise distros likely won't be able to remove it earlier anyway.

X doesn't need a hardware specific DDX driver either when running on hardware supported by Wayland+Xwayland. The GLAMOR backend works just as well for a standalone X server, and it can just use the same libraries and APIs as Wayland does for the rest of the stuff. (There's not really any kind of hardware abstraction layer in Wayland itself.) The main reason why people use the hardware specific X drivers still is because they're more mature and robust than the Wayland stuff.

Maintaining Xwayland basically means maintaining all of Xorg except the hardware-specific drivers. And Red Hat doesn't want to maintain that code base anymore. Therefore, Xwayland will soon be abandoned, then deprecated, then removed entirely.

The wayland project exposes what marvelous piece of software X11 really is since Wayland is still not able to compete, otherwise the whole Linux community would use it already.

I respect the intention and efforts of the Wayland community to make things better. However, I wished the community would have focused on making X11 better (easier to maintain with modularity etc.) instead of following the mainstream which is focused on eye candy and other sensual features to attract customers.

The unfortunate developments of KDE3/4, Gnome2/3 and Win7/8 exposed that boring usable functionality is much more important than exciting sensual functionality.

> I respect the intention and efforts of the Wayland community to make things better.

My understanding is that Wayland was started by a few core developers of Xorg who just couldn't stand maintaining Xorg anymore.

It is, including the author of this post. Unlike other controversial things like systemd or pulseaudio, Wayland was started by major Xorg contributors. I've watched some of their talks and can see why they went down this route.

I've tired Wayland a few times and whenever I do, I give it an honest shot for a few weeks, but tend to run into issues (Sway being pretty buggy or oddities with old X apps or Steam, etc.) I've heard Sway has gotten a lot better and I should really try it out again; probably the next time I setup a laptop.

I do wonder what plans FreeBSD and OpenBSD have for the future. Currently they main their own Xorg trees, but I wonder if we'll ever see Wayland implemented on other platforms.

I used Sway during the 0.14 cycle and ran into some issues e.g. with pointer warping in X-based games, so I decided to wait until 1.x. I just switched to Sway again, with 1.1.2 AFAIR, and mostly everything is working smoothly for me this time around, including Minecraft. :)

Things that don't work for me:

- mirroring (i.e. two displays showing the same windows at once), but AFAIK this is being worked on

- KDE Connect (not Sway's fault, but not having this working really hurts sometimes and might just make me go back to Plasma)

> Win7/8

Windows 8 was a major improvement saddled with an untested UI that someone was using to make their political mark. The internals of Windows 8 and Windows 10 are a major, major step forward from 7.

Do you have a horse in this race? I ask because the writer's background is in writing Wayland, a lot of other commenters are writing software related to compositing, and there are even a few developers of X Window Systems.

I only ask because it's very easy to be cynical online and I'm not sure that this comment comes with much to back it up. There's very much an 'old man shouting at cloud' vibe to it, even if unintended, but I ask in good faith in case you have insights we don't know yet. :)

I just witnessed how complete ecosystems are destroyed all the time in the name of incremental updates. Some prominent example are Python3, Gnome3 or KDE4. Every time such a transition takes place lots of people that are not full time programmers but are using and creating in the FOSS realm mainly in their spare time have to spend a lot of time to adjust to the radical changes. And every time some useful legacy software just gets lost because the maintainers don't bother with porting and just scrap the thing altogether. A permanently moving target makes FOSS that is dependent on many hobbyists just impossible. Just stop changing things all the time. FOSS is clearly reliant on hobbyists and those usually have real jobs and other things to do in their life.

The real KDE isn't dead:

[1] http://trinitydesktop.org/

For a distro built around that

[2] https://www.q4os.org/

And if you absolutely can't live without the look, or just wanting to make fun of people looking over your shoulder:

[3] https://xpq4.sourceforge.io/

The funny thing about that stuff is it works better with multimonitor setups than every other environment which followed later. By that i mean laptops in docking stations with one or two external displays, not necessarily the same size and resolution, and hotplugging.

But how do i dare to speak of that when the herd moved on and bleats bitrotten!,deprecated!,unsafe!,unsupported!,obsolete!

/me mumbles something about stoned sheeps which obviously had too much of the wrong weeds...

I run a Arch with the newest GPU drivers and the Compton compositor. I still have significant screen tearing in every app except video games with v-sync enabled and mpv with the vulkan backend.

This is your video driver's fault not X's.

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