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Comment by jatone | Hacker News Reader

x11 is no longer maintained. you're thinking of xwayland, which is the only thing getting releases these days. but that is built on wayland.

gnome shell has had some version of the screencast API for 8 years now. pipewire is irrelevant to the discussion.

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/blame/main/data...

the first commit for the desktop portal (which is the end result of the gnome api above) for wlr was in 2018.

https://github.com/emersion/xdg-desktop-portal-wlr/commit/4e...

2 years before the 2020 date in the article. so in short: in 2020 zoom abused a gnome only api to implement desktop sharing, when a proper gnome only desktop sharing api already existed for ~8 years. which was the precursor to the current desktop portal stuff and you're trying to blame wayland for the problem.

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1. X11 is definitely maintained, unless you are thinking of XFree86. Xorg's last release 2 weeks ago. Many LTS distros containing it are preparing releases with it _right now_ and they will also be supporting it for at least one decade, probably way more. I would bet that Wayland will become unsupported way before (at least some implementation of) X11 does.

2. This entire article is about avoiding the Gnome private API. The only other alternative, the XDG/portal API, uses Pipewire. It's literally the only alternative even if you don't use Flatpak.

EDIT: Your "2018" link is also not showing the screencast portal API. And I am not blaming Wayland; I am blaming the distros who switch to it and as a consequence BROKE user programs.

1. no its not, no security fixes or new features are being developed, its entirely on life support: the changes are to just keep it limping along while distros finish transitions to wayland. https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xorg/2022-January/060...

2. the article is about them abusing a gnome only API when alternatives existed that would have worked better. WLR had its first commits for its desktop portal api in 2018, gnome has had some form of the desktop portal api for 8 years now.

if you're going to use a DE only API at least use the right fucking one.

1. Even if what you were saying was true (which it is not, even your own link is just showing that bugs and regressions are still being fixed), the distros who are shipping have commited to decades of security updates.

2. "The right fucking" Gnome-exclusive API is, obviously, Gnome-exclusive, and just didn't work for me for the reasons I mentioned in my original message, and probably didn't for them either (my guess because they have a custom H264 encoder for latency/licensing reasons). The "less-Gnome-specific" XDG portal API, Pipewire-based, wasn't really usable when the distro is not even packaging Pipewire.

My go-to conferencing solution is still Jitsi Meet and I am well aware of how crazy the entire situation is, even for browsers.

the last release was afaik I know just to get the majority of patches contributed out that had stagnated and to finally split xwayland out of the xserver release.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=XWayland... https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=XWayland...

its dead, the maintainers have said its dead, all major distros have either moved or will be moving in the coming year. x11 as an api will limp along due to xwayland but that's about it.

no amount of assertions will change that unless individuals/organizations step up to actual maintain it.

as for rest of your statement ./shrug I've already been very clear on the fact they were already using a gnome only api incorrectly. the generic desktop portal api not being strictly ready in 2020 due to pipewire doesn't change the fact they had a perfectly reasonable api to use inside gnome and they decided not to and were burned.

> no its not

Yes it is, the mail you linked at was about a new standalone X server (ie. not XWayland) release by its new maintainer.

> no security fixes

The very previous version released just last month[0] has security fixes.

> or new features are being developed

Two versions before that[1] added a bunch of new features.

[0] https://lists.x.org/archives/xorg/2021-December/060842.html [1] https://lists.x.org/archives/xorg/2021-October/060799.html

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