Phoenix: A modern X server written from scratch in Zig | Hacker News Reader

Phoenix: A modern X server written from scratch in Zig

git.dec05eba.com

674 pointssnvzz435 comments

Pretty interesting approach to make an X server that is essentially "Wayland-like" (merging display server/compositor by default, isolated apps by default, no remoting of GLX, dropping legacy protocol features to the point of breaking compat with the core protocol, etc.). Not sure who this is for, but by itself it looks like a fairly reasonable set of choices.

For people who absolutely have to have X11 this looks like a better plan than XLibre.

It depends on whether their reasons for "absolutely having to have X11" hinge on actual compatibility with e.g. old binaries or wanting full remoting without streaming pixels.

This project would satisfy people who really actually want Wayland, but were upset by transitional pains or interactions they had around it and want to stick with X11 just-cause while getting some similar benefits. This arguably does describe some people but not sure it's a whole lot in the long run.

But who knows, maybe this could also make an easier to maintain XWayland some day, or a nice basis for implementing more esoteric X11 bits down the road vs. the older Xorg codebase.

From my perspective X just got to the point where it just works for me few years ago and Wayland is just introducing more issues than it solves (to be clear it solves no current issue for me, only one that I think might be better for me is handling different refresh rate displays and maybe fractional scaling... and that could probably be done within X11)

Like, why simple "copy the screen" got suddenly so complicated? Why every WM suddenly needs a bunch of features that before were just handled by display server, where they belong ? Why some(most) WMs handle title bars but GNOME doesn't ? Why someone decided title bar management is optional to window manager ?

X11 might need to go but Wayland have learned no lessons from it. It's just knee-jerk "if X11 done it this way, let's do it differently"

Whatever the issues with X11, it was properly designed. Wayland is the kind of software that adds features with nobody looking at the consequences. Who knows what they will break next version.

Wayland design choices are heavily influenced by automotive and TV where it has been industry standard way before it became mostly usable as a desktop. And that has lead to design compromises that look odd on desktop.

But hey, you can probably run automotive UIs with your desktop compositor.

And Gnome devs are just being silly at this point.

> Why someone decided title bar management is optional to window manager?

Are you implying title bars should be mandatory in all WMs? I'm using DWM on X and I love that I have no title bars. If a program tries to force one on me I disable it or use something else if that's not possible.

I don't "actually want Wayland" because I want the simplicity of X and the ability to run my own wm, but I have no need for legacy X11 requests, for some values of "legacy". Whether this will become viable for me remains to be seen, but I need very little from my X11 server.

Fair! Though I'm actually not sure I understand what you mean with simplicity. X11 is so vastly more complicated than Wayland.

For the server/compositor.

Not for the client, or if you want to write a wm and is forced to write a compositor.

And actually I'm not even even convinced about the server if talking about a minimal server like this that insists on DRI/GBM, and ditches all the old rendering cruft.

Afaik Xorg is 'only' like ~500k lines of code, which is not huge by the standards of large porjects. In fact, one of the major counter arguments against Wayland, is that the compositor + a few core libs, like wlroots necessary to provide a similar set of functionalities, is already larger that the equivalent X11 code (which has a ton of unused cruft).

What's the simple way for a bash script to get the title of the currently focused window? In X this is easy and the bash script will work with every DE. In Wayland you have to write a different solution for each compositor/DE.. Prove me wrong, please.

It shouldn't be hard, all I want to do is fuzzy match window titles to named audio streams in pipewire, but "Oohh noo that's a security flaw!" say the patronizing Wayland developers who care more about making their own lives as developers simple than supporting basic desktop functionality.

I remember Wayland scared me off of Linux when I tried to switch to Ubuntu a few years ago. I couldn’t watch a movie without jiggling my mouse every few minutes. At the time I feel like it was like “yeah that feature doesn’t exist yet” or something. So I switched back to Windows. It looks like there’s workarounds now but I’ve mostly switch to my fantastic M1 MacBook Air at this point.

Wayland still doesn't support screensavers last I checked, which is wild to me. Truly bizarre that such longstanding feature is just absent.

Yeah, most of those real gaps have been solved at this point. I'd encourage you to give it a shot now with Avahi

Look into river. It has the window management and keybindings able to be offered by other tools (I have an idea to implement one using XMonad's layouts).

It also vastly improved battery on my Dell Pro laptop. 58% battery used in 7h45m (light compilation day, but no suspend).

That sounds cool, but TBQH the last thing I want to do is make myself dependent on some obscure piece of tech I've only heard of once before (just now.) My plan is to keep running X as long as I can manage to make it run. If river finds traction and is well known to me in 10 years then I'll consider it then.

This is one of my big problems with Wayland; the fragmentation of Wayland imposes an unacceptable cost to picking the wrong DE, whereas with X all my tools for X still work regardless of my DE.

I don't have any interest in river. I have my own wm that does exactly what I want, so why would I switch?

Wayland doesn't solve any problems I have, and would create new ones, such as having to adapt to new tools or write my own compositor.

Battery life just isn't a relevant consideration for me.

Wayland made writing WMs needlessly hard, and the benefits of Wayland were frankly not real - most of the reasons given in 2011 were patched in to X11 later. All the Wayland rewrite got us was a situation where Wayland is both bleeding-edge and obsolete simultaneously. Say what you like about X11, but by the time people unironically pushed for mass Wayland adoption, X11 was stable and boringly so.

The future of WMs is, IMO, Arcan - https://arcan-fe.com/ - but that's an ambitious project and I don't blame the main developer for deliberately going out of his way to avoid advertising it before it's ready. In the meanwhile, Wayland and X11 both more-or-less work with the occasional major pain in the ass.

I think the problem is that people wanting to build that and being in position to (being paid for by their employer), are fed up with X11.

It learned no lessons from X11. It made most things harder to write and pushed more things that really every WM needs and doesn't care much to implement differently to WMs making them harder.

For example, stuff like "WM need to manage raw inputs, so they can have more power over them" is cute on paper but in reality most of them don't want to because there is no benefit to reinventing that part. Sure, that part in X11 could be better, maybe it should have better interface for WMs to configure common options in common way without getting into input-driver-specific options, but that just required rework of the idea, not throwing it into the bin and replacing with near entirely worse framework that wastes everyone time.

Tech is full of examples of 'successor' technologies, that were aiming to provide a clean rewrite without legacy, which then got bogged down with supporting a bunch of corner cases and accumulated their own share of cruft and could be no longer be considered a cleaner alternative. All the while the majority of the userbase being stuck on the old platform because the new one is buggy and doesn't offer anything tangibly better.

Vulkan, various node replacements come to mind.

Wayland at this point has existed almost as long as X11, longer if you only count the Linux years, yet its still not quite there.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46382947

Read this including my response.

A lot of X features are actually Xorg features and they only work because there is a single implementation that everyone tried to integrate with.

Turns out the moment there are two implementations, which is hard on X and easy on Wayland, you can no longer rely on targeting a single implementation for direct integration anymore.

This means a lot of non-X but Xorg features need a protocol extension in Wayland, because things are being standardized that previously were exclusive to Xorg.

> I think the problem is that people wanting to build that and being in position to (being paid for by their employer), are fed up with X11.

I think one of the intrinsic problems with relying on developers being paid by their employers is they can easily become personally disinvested from the thing they're maintaining; they get paid well, the day-to-day grind gets stale, they get interests and hobbies other than computing but keep working on the thing because it's their job. Eventually they find that just buying a Mac is an easier lifestyle at home, and gradually maintaining X transforms from something they do out of passion for the project into something which is just a job. So they look for ways to make their job easier, hit on the classic "instead of maintaining old thing it'll be more fun to make our own", and because they are now untethered from the needs of real users they only need to make sure the new thing supports the bare minimum to keep their employer happy. They no longer care how real users feel, any use case that isn't required in the checklists approved by management get deliberately abandoned. So we end up with Wayland lacking common sense desktop features in demand by users for years because it's simply not convienent for the developers who are now dispassionate 9-5ers.

I prefer to take my chances with enthusiasts keeping X working on shoestring budgets. Maybe a few more years of development of coding models will make ongoing maintenance easier going forward and I'll never have to switch. I'm willing to make that bet. If it turns out that in 5 years I am forced to switch, at least by then Wayland will be five years more mature, and maybe my cynicism will even be proven wrong by then and Wayland will be good by then (but I'm not holding my breath for that.) Anyway, I have nothing to lose by using X as long as humanly possible.

> "most of the reasons given in 2011 were patched in to X11 later"

This definitely doesn't match my memory, and I was there :) Most of the good reasons remain unavailable in X11 to this day.

There definitely were some attempts to advance X11 that post-date Wayland, most notably the proposals by Keith Packard, but they never got much traction.

> This definitely doesn't match my memory, and I was there :) Most of the good reasons remain unavailable in X11 to this day.

You two here don't mention any of the reasons. It is hard to discuss this when there are no specifics, so what was needed, and what was not added?

Let me know when X11 handles fractional scaling across mixed dpi and refresh rate monitors, with HDR and VRR. To me, who has finally been able to drop Windows for gaming in the last 3 months, the benefits of wayland are very real.

Thanks for linking Arcan, looks interesting.

After a quick scan, Arcan seems to be pushing a microkernel approach, with some clients providing display server capabilities and others talking to them via shared memory. This will have the same problem as all other microkernels - nice for research, but the extra completely outweights the marginal benefits over a monolithic thing that generally has a smaller API surface to maintain.

First time I've heard of Arcan. Sounds intriguing.

IMO, if you have to rewrite a display server implementation then you're already proving all the protocol advocates right.

The people who absolutely have to have X11 like myself usually have reasons. It sounds like currently a lot of those reasons for using X11 would prevent using this X server. Like reliable non-fragmented and widely supported screenreader protocol. Or the ability to do keyboard and mouse sharing.

>Applications will be isolated from each other by default and can only interact with other applications either through a GUI prompt asking for permission, such as with screen recorders, where it will only be allowed to record the window specified or by explicitly giving the application permission before launched (such as a window manager or external compositor).

Accessibility? Sure. Everything else? Nah, I'm sorry. There are countless ways to do remoting with Wayland. There are countless ways to do kb+mouse sharing.

I love Wayland a lot, but as far as I can tell the available remoting solutions still cannot enable a headless LXC container to serve a KDE Plasma Wayland desktop. I spent the last couple days trying to cobble some solution together for it and failed miserably. If you know a way, I would be most grateful :-)

>There are countless ways to do kb+mouse sharing.

You realize that's worse, right? And to be clearer: core Wayland protocol does not have countless ways. It has zero.

Instead of a single protocol with the strong X11 reference X server the wayland compositors pick and choose between libinput, or libei, or libportal with the InputCapture PR, xdg-desktop-portal with the InputCapture interface, some I've probably missed, or maybe you have nothing at all (weston). It's a gamble if your choice of desktop environment and it's wayland compositor's non-core wayland protocols will match up with those the developer for $software chose. On X11 linux everything that works somewhere works everywhere. With the various waylands if you stay within your desktop's ecosystem you'll probably not notice, but go beyond it and you will.

Each wayland desktop pretty much runs it's own compositor with it's own set of third party libs because the wayland core protocol spec is very minimal. I would say incomplete. ref: https://wayland.app/protocols/

> There are countless ways to do kb+mouse sharing.

Wait, what? I tried this last year. I didn't find any way to do this that wasn't dependent on the WM.

Until Wayland actually has an accesibility story, X is really the only choice. Don't think most grassroots projects will have that.

Isn't accessibility outside of the scope of Wayland, whose purpose is to composite application buffers, and deliver input events?

Something like a screen reader needs to talk to an app and query the toolkit for the contents of a window in a semantic way - that's a toolkit feature not a compositor one.

What does this matter for blind people who want to use Linux? All that matters to them is that it's super complicated and nobody wants to work with the tech to make screen readers work on Wayland.

pretty sure at-spi is independent from the display server

Parts of AT-SPI are impossible to implement under Wayland.

> Wayland has no concept of global coordinates or global key bindings. The protocol itself is designed around atomicity which is a nice concept, but is fundamentally in conflict to the need of assistive technologies to control the entire state of the desktop globally. As such, atspi methods like get_accessible_at_point are impossible in Wayland.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45237411

Long term if x11 starts having issues then probably https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayback/wayback will be it

IMO this is the real future of Wayland. It should always have been "mere plumbing" for X; the few processes that really need the isolation and security (e.g. screen lock) can be native, everything else should just keep using X, and the "in between" programs can mostly be X programs and implement some wayland protocols for the extra bits they need. Best of both worlds, no compat break.

> which allows for running full X11 desktop environments using Wayland components

Wait so is this turning Wayland into a client/server model like X11, where eventually it could support existing window managers and other stuff separate from the compositor?

I remember a year or two ago wondering if that would ever happen and I think I only got one reply saying it wouldn't happen because it was unnecessary.

Yes basically. It's one full screen xwayland context you run a normal x11 wm in

Long term? Perhaps, if successful. I am hopeful.

But, right now, XLibre[0] is available, ready for use and very active.

0. https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver

Just got a major release as well with tons of new contributors and fixes/additions: https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver/releases/tag/xlibre-xser...

I’m not sure this satisfies X11 needs without remote display capability.

I WANT to use X11, its simply better than wayland

Rewriting it from scratch is so very rarely a better plan than improving what you already have.

Why a new incomplete implementation would be better to use than a project that is stable, full-featured, and with a proven track record?

My rpi dashboards are gonna love it

Anything special about Raspberry Pi's that require X11? Raspberry Pi OS defaults to Wayland nowadays, and there's specific kiosk Wayland compositors like Cage (https://github.com/cage-kiosk/cage).

Tho admittedly kiosk-wm (https://github.com/JOT85/kiosk-wm) is much more succinct.

I write dashboards using X11/OpenGL for displaying otel metrics.

GLFW for my window library.

Wayland is overkill.

I would go straight /dev/fb if it meant I could also antialias and make it pretty and didn’t need a cursor.

less RAM and power usage

Well there is XWayland then.

Depends why you need it. XWayland is worthless for a11y.

Arguably, there is no sane a11y on GNU/Linux anywhere.

iOS/Mac/Android is on completely other level.

People who want to use X11 are likely to be the same people using older software and hardware, which this doesn't support.

I don't use any old hardware, and I have argued for a new X server following almost exactly the steps this project outlines.

Good news. The devs of x11 agree and made a replacement called... Way... Oops

> by itself it looks like a fairly reasonable set of choices.

I have not tried this myself, so I can not speak from experience, but if they have removed features that people used, then they are in a similar situation as wayland. So I don't see what the difference then would be. Perhaps your analysis was also incomplete?

I consider Wayland's choices reasonable as well. I.e. I it's not surprising that a reasonable attempt to clean up X ends up looking similar to Wayland, just in a slightly different place on the xy graph that has backwards compat and cleanup as its axis.

The thing is, X11/Xorg is a huge monolith. There is simply no way to implement every single feature in one go and then release the competing implementation.

The very thing that makes people biased towards X11/Xorg both negatively and positively is that it is a huge monolith and the only X implementation on Linux. The moment you have two implementations, you're gonna get the same complaints against the second X server as Wayland is receiving.

You think this is an indictment to the second implementation and that they shouldn't bother by saying an "analysis was incomplete" but in my opinion it's exactly backwards. This is an argument that eternally perpetuates X11 not because of technical capability but rather because it was there first.

After all, the moment there is any implementation that is second it might miss a single feature that nobody actually uses, but theoretically could be used when combining an old binary with a new X implementation.

But this argument misses the obvious fact that X11/Xorg is already dead since any code change will break existing applications. Meaning X11 has become an unsalvageable fossil.

The Linux kernel is also a monolith yet has worked forever without a rewrite.

I think there is a reasonably agreed on set of things that can be removed from X, like server-side drawing primitives, and GLX

The Linux kernel was not born obsolete on arrival like the X Window System was. At least, not fully obsolete.

It will be obsolete someday, anyways.

Funny, the other day I started writing an X server of my own. While I appreciate and welcome this work, I still use and write software that makes use of old X draw calls, which I intended to incorporate into my server, unlike the author of this work. So I'm glad to see my efforts have not been made largely redundant!

I'd at least consider moving older draw calls into an xlib replacement. Not all of them are suitable for that, but e.g. sufficient font handling to beat Xorgs server side handling requires the Render extension plus ca. 1500 lines of C for a basic TrueType renderer, or half that in a higher level language, or just use FreeType which is a dependency for most X clients anyway.

It's just a hobby, won't be big and professional like Xorg. Aiming for as much protocol completeness as I can manage within those constraints.

Is it written in C? If it is and you open-sourced it, someone might port it to Plan 9.

What I meant by this is, if we had a decent X on Plan 9, we would actually use it, because right now remoting into other systems is just VNC...

Tangentially related... Is it just me, but is Wayland still lagging behind X11? From things like window placement, night light, etc. Things seem to work just out of the box in X11, and there are always issues in Wayland.

(For me this is specifically on Fedora, and I always switch back to X11 from Wayland.)

Well, isn't this compositor related? I've never had any window placement issues running Sway (i3 for Wayland). I never used night light on that machine, so I can't comment on that particular point, but the thing seems to work just as well as i3.

The only problem I have is with JetBrains IDEs, which seem to have shaky support. They're usable (meaning you can code), but the experience is so wonky that I basically consider they don't support Wayland.

The reason I switched from i3/x11 is that we've got some 27" 5k screens at work that are basically useless at 100%, and Sway handles different scaling settings flawlessly (except for IntelliJ, which seems lost).

Wayland intellij ide support is in the works, IDEs support X11 out of the box, but you can enable Wayland support explicitly (just search for it).

As per Windows placement, Firefox won't restore windows on original positions supposedly because of Wayland, somebody please correct me if I'm wrong.

Intellij kinda supports Wayland, but it gets confused when using scaling, at least when not all screens have the same factor. It's not blurry or anything, but it's slower, and the menus sometimes appear in random places.

When I only use a scaling factor of 1 on all the screens, it's usable enough, although it still feels sluggish.

You are not wrong. But there is a new extension protocol on the way (dunno if done, very probably not rolled out if it is) that let programs solve this problem.

Using kde on Wayland for a while now, on a Nvidia card (debian trixie, just upgraded to forky a week ago), and i can't relate to any of those issues. My only complaint is a silly kernel module warning that pollutes my syslog.

At this point it is just you.

I run two different distributions myself, I know a bunch o people on even more different distributions, set of configuration and based on empirical analysis I can assure you that no one has problem with windows placement.

Out of the box I used have more problem with X11 (tearing and font rendering being the most annoyingly common ones) than I have with Wayland.

It's not just him, but for something else. HiDPI, Ubuntu 24.04, try OnlyOffice or VMWare Workstation. Both don't scale well. I assume other applications also don't scale well. Had to use X. And the scaling isn't even fractional, it's 2x.

It's not just him. I've had issues with windows popping up on the wrong display and also their scaling. Works without issue on X11; and I don't even know where to start looking on Wayland.

A lot of people would have preferred this to Wayland if it had come much earlier.

If it also runs Wayland apps, many may prefer it actually.

wondering who those people are given that Wayland was done by xorg devs

Users? Obviously xorg devs want to work on something that isn't ancient and crufty. But users want something that actually works and it has taken almost 2 decades to get to that point.

Actually I still have more issues on Wayland than X. Although it is at least starting to swing in the other direction - e.g. KDE's screen recording feature doesn't work on X. The button's still there but if you click it nothing happens.

Most users have no idea what is behind. They don't want X or anything X related, they want things to work. Most of the things worked before 2020, including legacy things through xwayland. Now all things work, except maybe remote apps through ssh ootb, but for this you can either use RDP or Waypipe.

The only thing maybe worth discussing is video acceleration. this aside, I have been using gnome on Wayland for years and no problems what-so-ever. I really don't know what the fuss is about.

I would prefer that people start moving this legacy nonsense behind and finally start accepting new and better things and focusing on things that have future. Same thing happened with systemd, it improves massively everything Linux, yet some people just want their services started with scripts.

What problems do you have when things don't work for you on Wayland?

Wayland:

* straight up doesn't work on at least one of my laptops (driver problems AFAICT)

* does run on the other one, but crashes at an alarming rate compared to Xorg

* breaks all of my accessibility tools (some have (worse) replacements, some don't)

HiDPI scaling (not even fractional, 2x aka 200%), for some apps like OnlyOffice, VMWare Workstation, but not only, on Ubuntu 24.04. Had to switch back to X.

You can blame the apps all you want, but it's a fact of life, and Wayland has been around for 18 years.

At this point you'd hope they'd pull an early 90s Microsoft: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/05/24/strategy-letter-ii...

I don't know how you can read about the many experiences people have with Wayland not working - even now, let alone 2020 - and conclude that "all things work".

I think we are finally at the point where you can say most things work and it's silly to go back to X11, but even so Wayland has clearly been a huge failure.

The name Phoenix is overused. There is an Elixir framework called Phoenix. I think I also heard of other projects with that same name before.

It's a bit like the name 'Apollo'; besides the moon landing project, I know like 2 dev projects called that and also there is a sales SaaS platform with that name.

Surely people should run a search first before choosing a name...

From the ashes of some previous project is born some new project.

It's symbolic.

I remember people naming new software projects this back in the 1980s for the same reason.

We get the symbolic reason. It’s still overused and lazy because it doesn’t even relate to the project itself except for its origin in the most generic way.

They could at least use PhoenX or FenX to link it with X

It's a great name but way overused. I guess everything these days rose from ashes of past failures. Sector is highly competitive.

Ya, and that's the same reason all those other projects picked this name too

Not in the case of Elixir. It’s a play on BEAM processes being revived.

Remember when every project acronym used to be YA-something for “Yet Another…”? Or when recursive acronyms were the hot trend?

Don't forget startup names that randomly dropped vowels. I don't miss the days of twttr.

I can second the Apollo thing. I think it might just be a natural name to give something, because when I was a kid I was working on a voice assistant thing instead of touching grass (never finished it) and called it Apollo. This was probably my first project.

How many X servers named Pheonix are there? Surely it doesn't matter if there are frameworks and libraries of the same name in other areas. It's inevitable to have collisions like this.

I think all the cool one-word names are used, and overused, by now.

Firefox tried to use it and was sued for trademark infringement. wxPython also has a Phoenix project. It's definitely a catchy, but overused, name.

I don’t think the problem was with “phoenix”.

It was Project Phoenix (resurrection of the Netscape browser). This resulted in the Firebird browser (Firebird and Thunderbird). But Firebird was an existing database that objected to the name. So, we got Firefox instead.

At least that is how I remember it.

Wasn't it renamed because of these people? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Technologies

Yes, and that was just the start lol... https://www.zdnet.com/article/mozilla-holds-fire-in-naming-f...

Yeah, me too. https://website-archive.mozilla.org/www.mozilla.org/firefox_...

https://www.zdnet.com/article/mozilla-holds-fire-in-naming-f...

All the first 3 names were taken. They probably had to bribe even the holders of the Firefox trademark to get it (though the terms were never disclosed).

Mozilla was sued to rename Firefox (like I said) by one Phoenix Technologies. If I remember right, they picked two bad names before picking "Firefox" but I don't remember the other one.

Firefox was Firebird, not Phoenix.

I think Firebird was the second name they tried to use that was already taken. They were definitely sued by Phoenix Technologies for one incident. Bryan Lunduke has a podcast explaining the history of this but I saw the one about Phoenix on the Wikipedia page before posting.

Edit: Here you go: https://www.zdnet.com/article/mozilla-holds-fire-in-naming-f...

Phoenix in the Elixir ecosystem is probably one of the less confusing name uses. Under that stack you get such clear library framework names as: bandit, cowboy, thousand island, and ranch. As well as mint and finch. When not riffing off of previous project names with off axis alternate names, it’s always some sort of ExThing sharing space with at least 3 other varieties of the same (e.g. ThingEx, Thingx, and ExaThing), and you're left guessing which one may have emerged as a conventional standard.

Better not ask them to think outside the box or they'll come up with something like fushichou.

There’s an AI coding tool called phoenix.love as well

This is a great project! I like and use Wayland but the portal protocols and extension mechanism does leave a lot to be desired. Wayland is still quite a way behind Windows and macOS in terms of what productivity users need

An X11 rewrite with some security baked in is an awesome approach. Will be watching!

I thought for a long time that rather than move to Wayland, we could come up with a tidied-up version of X. Sounds like a good and useful project, I hope it progresses.

I thought this too and originally thought that’s what Wayland was going to do but it went off and did its own thing.

I’m all for an X12.

An X12 was briefly considered by the community before adopting Wayland: https://www.x.org/wiki/Development/X12/

If you take the time to read through that (very partial) list of cruft and footguns in X11 it probably makes it a little easier to understand why a clean-slate approach was able to attract momentum and why many hands-on involved developers were relatively tired of X11. Critics would of course respond that backwards compatibility is worth the effort and rewrites are often the wrong call, etc. It's the Python 2/3 debate and many others.

Realistically rewrite would keep X11 compatibility layer and just do same wayland did, make new protocol.

Just... without all that mess that turned out to be at best +/-, at worst outright negative causing problems for everyone involved. And near all of the "advantages" are "the server is built from scratch" not "the protocol was the limitation"

Python 3 was actively antagonistic to Python 2 code for no reason other than to lecture us about how we were doing things wrong, writing code to support 2 and 3 to help transition was dumb etc etc.

For example, in python 2 you could explicitly mark unicode text with u"...". That was actively BLOCKED with python 3.0 which supposedly was about unicode support! The irony was insane, they could of just no-oped the u"". I got totally sick of the "expert" language designers with no real world code shipping responsibilities lecturing me. Every post about this stuff was met by comments from pedantic idiots. So every string had to have a helper function around it. Total and absolute garbage. They still haven't explained to my satisifaction why not support u"..." to allow a transition more easily to 3.

Luckily sanity started prevailing around 3.5 and we started to see a progression - whoever was behind this should be thanked. The clueless unicode everything was walked back and we got % for bytes so you could work with network protocols again (where unicode would be STUPID to force given the installed base). We got u"" back.

By 3.6 we got back to reasonable path handling on windows and the 3 benefits started to come without antagonistic approaches / regressions from 2. But that was about 8 years? So that burnt a lot of the initial excitement.

> Python 3 was actively antagonistic to Python 2 code for no reason other than to lecture us about how we were doing things wrong, writing code to support 2 and 3 to help transition was dumb etc etc.

> [...]

> By 3.6 we got back to reasonable path handling on windows and the 3 benefits started to come without antagonistic approaches / regressions from 2. But that was about 8 years? So that burnt a lot of the initial excitement.

So it's a great analogy. Wayland started out proudly proclaiming that it intentionally didn't support features in the name of "security" but everyone should "upgrade" because this was totally better, and has been very slowly discovering that actually all the stuff it willfully dropped was useful and has mostly evolved back to near feature parity with Xorg.

There’s a reason they’re called Pythonistas

It’s always drama and they’re the center of it.

(I’m joking of course, Merry Christmas)

Python is really one of the worst designed languages. It always baffles me that people recommend it to beginners.

I’ve been here since the beginning.

I remember Usenet.

X11 was built for multi-user terminals a kin to today’s Microsoft VDI garbage.

There’s some good. A lot of bad. And some WTF in there.

Be the change you want to see.

Also happy winter solstice.

It was always an option, but "just" needed someone to dedicate all their time to it and pull in a group of long term maintainers. The real question is what will happen with the project in 2 years and will it be stable for day to day use.

The fact that you can "assume Vulkan exists" helps a lot (both hardware and software renderers exist). Do remember--Wayland predates Vulkan by almost a full decade.

In addition, you can offload OpenGL compatibility to Zink (again leaning into Vulkan).

> pull in a group of long term maintainers.

"Use new cool language" seems to be a prerequisite for this nowadays ...

At least Zig is very compatible with C.

You can't "assume Vulkan exists". Any pre-2016 hardware won't have proper hardware support for Vulkan and that's a lot of hardware still in use. Software renderers are unworthy of any serious consideration due to the perfomance drawbacks.

Just use OpenGL. I don't know when this trend to overcomplicate everything using Vulkan began, but I hate it.

Nvidia had a driver for Vulkan for Kepler which launched in 2012, AMD had support all the way back to GCN 1.0 (also 2012). Intel did have issues supporting it, I can't recall if it was for hardware reasons or just lack of desire for a driver.

Vulkan has substantial advantages for multi-threaded code, as well as exposing the underlying asynchronous nature of running code on the GPU. The kind of thing you want to be able to control with a desktop compositor where controlling vsync and present timing is very important.

There are Xorg and XLibre for pre-2016 hardware.

I don't really understand what is supposedly missing in Wayland for productivity users? At work I have been using gnome with the wayland backend for years at this point and I can't really figure out anything that's missing.

Accessibility is apparently a big problem with wayland. E.g., the most popular / ?only? app that supports hardware eye trackers on Linux does not work with wayland, and states that it likely never will as wayland does not provide what it needs to add support (it is also the most popular app for voice/noise control). Even basic things like screen readers are apparently still an issue with wayland. Without a strong accessibility story, systems running wayland would have been banned at my last employer (a college).

Personally, I have a 3200x2400 e-ink monitor that has a bezel that covers the outer few columns of pixels. I use a custom modeline to exclude those columns from use. And, a fractional scaling of .603x.5 on this now 3184x2400 monitor to get 1920x1200 effective resolution. Zero idea how to accomplish this with wayland-- I do not think it is possible, but if anyone knows a way, I am all ears.

I ran into, at least, ten issues without solutions/work-arounds (like the issue with my monitor) when I tried to switch this year, after getting a new laptop. Reverted to a functional, and productively familiar, setup with X.

I don't know about other DE, but at least with Plasma there is a "overscan" option to compensate for hidden borders.

Thanks for that.

Overscan is not supported in wlroots yet. Seems the issue is that handling overscan is display driver specific.

But, now I know the keyword to look for.

The xdg-desktop-portal stuff is still too immature. For example, my friend wanted my help after upgrading his Pop_OS to 24.04, and 24.04 replaced GNOME with COSMIC. COSMI had no RemoteDesktop portal (and still doesn't have it), so we couldn't use RustDesk like we always did without him installing a GNOME session just for that.

I've been an i3 user for almost two decades, but eventually switched to Sway - to this day there's no InputCapture portal, so I can't use Synergy with Sway, forcing me to switch to i3 while I'm working.

It's been over 10 years of things like that. There's always SOMETHING missing.

Screenshots are just completely broken. People always tell me to use other apps like flameshot but IME it just doesn't work and I don't want to have to mess around so much to take screenshots.

I'm still using Wayland because it's what came with my distro (endeavour OS, gnome), but it's really strange how it came broken out of the box.

I'm curious what OS you are running that has broken screen shots on wayland because that hasn't been my experience on Fedora.

It's right there in my comment

Yeah, my bad sorry.

Headless remote desktop, at least for KDE, is very much not possible today as far as I can tell. It's the last thing I miss from Xorg.

FWIW, like everything else in Wayland, it's per-compositor. Here's a working headless sway in a container:

https://gitlab.com/yjftsjthsd-g/docker_sway-vnc

(This is not a defense of Wayland, just trying to share useful information)

Hmm, you mention in the README that it only works in a privileged container. This of course negates the security benefits Wayland supposedly has over X11, so it doesn't seem ideal.

It really doesn't. The security benefits of Wayland are about isolating applications from each other, which this still has.

Also that's only really relevant to this running in a container. My point was that you can have headless Wayland.

>what is supposedly missing in Wayland

My desktop is a bit long in the tooth (22.04), but I've long given up on trying to screen shot or screen share from Wayland. I have my Macbook sitting next to it and use it for those things, where it works basically flawlessly.

Kind of waiting for 26.04 to upgrade at this point, but I'm not really expecting any of this to be better yet.

edit: If I had it to do over again, I wouldn't have gone Wayland at 22.04.

I'm running fedora and have been screenshoting and screen sharing (with the teams PWA) just fine. So might be time to get something newer.

What keeps you from going to Ubuntu 24.04? I have been screen sharing and screen shotting on Wayland (Gnome and KDE) without problem.

I am on KDE never had any problems taking screenshots.

Autoclickers and screen macros on Wayland are all janky

> Wayland is still quite a way behind Windows and macOS in terms of what productivity users need

What's missing?

Window positioning? You cannot position the window, you cannot send a hint, nothing? So my pop-up with GTK4 will randomly be placed somewhere, anywhere, without any control. OK, GTK4 went further and also removed popups without the parent, so you hack that with an invisible anchor window and then write platform-specific code for sane platforms that CAN, of course, move the window. And let's not talk about window icons that you have to put somewhere on the file system?

Have you considered if someone wants to make a compositor where each window is projected onto a facet of a hyper cube and must place windows in 4 dimensions? These are important use cases we should support, we should make cross platform software as difficult possible to develop for Linux by removing features that have been standard on desktop operating systems for decades.

I must correct you! Wayland has not and indeed cannot remove features because Wayland is a “protocol”. It is the compositors that are removing features.

This dilution of responsibility should make you feel much better.

It's not technically behind on window positioning. Rather, it was a deliberate choice not to support it. You can very reasonably object to that, but it is sorta a necessary measure to prevent clickjacking.

I'm amazed how both wayland and x11 miss the logical solution: let the user decide.

Any function that is a threat should be behind capabilities.

A program should be able to request moving its windows. The user should ultimately decide what should happen: allow or nah.

And common sense mitigations: if a new program I've never seen before drops an actionable control under my cursor, maybe just default to not immediately accepting the next input to it so I have a chance to see it.

And that, to me, is a sufficient reason not to consider Wayland as a serious option.

Did such an attack with crazy moving windows happen in the past?

It does on Android

Happened a lot in browsers.

I mean, you can create alternate APIs that would work for the pop-up use case: you could have a command to create a new window positioned relative to the current window’s coordinate space.

That limited capability still has a risk of denial attacks (just throwing up pop-ups that extend beyond the current window’s boundaries), but those can be mitigated in a number of ways (limit the new window’s boundaries to the current window’s, or just limit how many windows can be opened, etc.).

Ads in the start menu, forced screenshotting of all your activity, and AI integration in every aspect of the desktop experience.

lol

BS, windows and macos cant even do proper window managing for a start, and then it just goes downwards from there on.. You can perhaps install various weird third party things, but it does not come with it by default.

If you took people who absolutely never tried any computing, and gave them macos, windows, and for example Plasma, they would NOT consider windows or macos to be ready for the desktop. If you go 15 years back, even way more so.

even in the early 2000s, windows was so hilariously crappy that you had to make floppy disks to even get to install the thing. If PCs didnt come preloaded with windows, regular users would never ever be able to install it, versus the relative ease a typical linux distribution was to install. This is also one of the large reasons that when their windows slowed down due to being a piece of shit with 1000000 toolbars, people threw it out and bought a new, despite the fact that a reinstall would have solved it.

> You can perhaps install various weird third party things, but it does not come with it by default.

A Window Manager and Window Server don't come by default with Linux... It's always an install-time option on the major distros.

> even in the early 2000s, windows was so hilariously crappy that you had to make floppy disks to even get to install the thing.

Windows in the early 2000s installed just fine without a floppy directly from CD or PXE booting.

Windows in early 2000s didn't even detect your early 2000s SATA drive

Windows in early 2023 didn't even detect the network card it needed to download network card drivers. After changing mobos I needed to boot into linux to download network drivers for windows...

Windows in early 2025 still uses SCSI emulation to talk with NVMe and only now the server part got a proper driver

Windows in early 2025s still need virtio driver injection to boot properly as a VM without IDE emulation

"Drivers working out of the box" were never windows strong part

> Windows in early 2025 still uses SCSI emulation to talk with NVMe and only now the server part got a proper driver

You can enable this in Win 11 25H2. I have it enabled on my box. Doesn't seem to make that much of a difference, so it's more or less a moot point that it has been using SCSI emulation.

> Windows in early 2025s still need virtio driver injection to boot properly as a VM without IDE emulation

Interesting, in Hyper-V that's a non-issue.

Unless you needed a SATA driver not included in the installer because you wanted to avoid a legacy IDE emulation for your disks.

> Windows in the early 2000s installed just fine without a floppy directly from CD or PXE booting.

when was it sata became the norm? im thinking circa 2001-ish, and what windows was latest here? im thinking windows xp. lets try remember, did windows xp include sata drivers on the installation medium?? oh wait, it didnt. There wasnt even ahci at the time, and windows xp didnt include a single sata driver for any of the chipsets at the time

> A Window Manager and Window Server don't come by default with Linux... It's always an install-time option on the major distros.

desktop distributions generally come with a desktop environment default selected, or prompt you to choose between a few. one feature that has been there since more or less forever is alt + left/rightclick mouse to move/resize windows, which is significantly better than finding the title bar or corners like. for an operating system called "windows" its pretty hilarious it has the worst window management of them all, dont you think?

The first iteration of SATA was announced in 2000 and released in 2003.

> desktop distributions generally come with a desktop environment default selected

You missed the point. "Linux", the kernel, does not come with a WS/WM.

> If you took people who absolutely never tried any computing, and gave them macos, windows, and for example Plasma, they would NOT consider windows or macos to be ready for the desktop.

There's some truth to this. I've been installing fresh Windows 11s on family computers this holiday season, and good lord is it difficult to use.

The number of tweaks I had to configure to prevent actively hostile programs from ravaging disk read/writes (HDD pain), freezing and crashing, or invasive popups was absurd.

As someone who came from Windows, and has used Linux as my primary OS for 15 years, and MacOS here and there (cos work provided laptop), I can tell you that Linux was not ready for prime time 15 years ago. Today, I feel it is, but definitely not 15 years ago.

I use Linux on the desktop since 1997, and there was no point where Windows was even slightly more attractive.

I don't know what "prime time" means here.

edit: apart from, you know. Applications and drivers for random hardware.

With prime time I mean being comfortable enough to install it for a non-technical user. Even during Ubuntu's Unity days it didn't feel like I could install it on a computer for my parents or siblings for them to use as a daily driver.

My parents did fine with Linux. My mom still does; it's certainly less maintenance effort from me than Windows would require.

It was fine for non-technical users since at least early GNOME 2, if you're ready to help them set up and maintain. Semi-technical users (Windows power users, gamers, &c — people who like to install and configure things, but fear the deep dark abyss of the terminal) were and remain more problematic.

Unity days were the nadir of linux desktop ux — it was when Gnome 2 was gone, and 3 not yet there. Still better than contemporaneous Windows 8, though.

I can bet there’s no OS that are easy to install for a non-technical user. And that start from booting the installation media. Give someone a OS with their software already installed and they will use whatever OS that is.

People are always task-oriented, not tool oriented unless they’re nerds.

I had Kubuntu installed on my grandfather's computer for a year. I ended up replacing it for Windows because my aunt likes to install stuff on it. But my grandfather was happy with it. He only needed a working web browser and a program to use the TV tunner.

15 years back people were given Windows macOS and Linux and people voted which OS were ready for the Desktop and which were not. The only BS is your inflammatory contribution to this topic.

Nope, Macs were expensive stuff games did not run on, and linux was just not pushed by near anyone.

It was not a war "which desktop is easier to use", it was "which system can run stuff I need". And if "the need" was "video games and office stuff", your only choice was windows.

The average user only cares what they can run on the desktop. Linux did not have as much choice back then.

they were not, they purchased what was in the stores, which was only windows. all the way from first windows to windows xp it was the biggest pile of shit imaginable. the average user wouldnt even have half a chance of installing it, and certainly couldnt use it with any kind of reasonableness, it was a giant mess, it was just the mess people were used to. Most people would throw out their computer and buy a new when windows became slow, because, of course it gradually becomes slower, makes perfect sense, no?

KDE from 15 years back was HUGELY better than windows at the time, and frankly, also windows now

I can’t tell if this is satire.

As the application author you can set the release mode in the build script so that the release flag looks like `zig build --release` instead, and the user doesn't choose the optimization mode.

As a user you can pass `--release` to `zig build` to request release mode. If the application doesn't want to pick for you, you'll get an error and then you can pick for yourself.

In this case, it looks like the author of Phoenix wants to choose ReleaseSafe as the official release mode of the application.

Phoenix is the name of my hometown, btw.

This is the kind of initiative I’d prefer to see from X preservationists. Great job, I hope it succeeds. I prefer Wayland, but there’s still a place in the world for X; it just needs new dev teams to shoulder the burden.

I disagree. The choices in the Linux ecosystem lead to unnecessary fragmentation and development/packaging nightmares.

I say let X11 die, bury it, and never let it rise again.

Then we can all focus on making just one display server as good as possible.

Which one? The Gnome Wayland, the KDE Wayland, the xroots wayland, Weston, or one of the others? Each one is an independent implementation of a Wayland compositor, with a differing, incompatible set of extensions.

X11 was a single, pretty janky implementation. Wayland is the worst of both worlds -- it's cleaned up a little, but it's still kinda janky. In exchange for a little bit of cleanup, mainly around bitmap fonts, it's no longer a unified protocol.

And to top it off -- it kept the worst part of the X11 protocol, the XKB extension, but got rid of input handling entirely, which means that every platform needs to reach for platform specific code to implement reading from the mouse and keyboard.

Yay.

If we're hypothesising a perfect world, ideally they standardise some way of sharing framebuffers between programs into Wayland. I suppose maybe they already have I gave up on the ecosystem in the early 2020s. That seems like it should be long enough ago now that they've got even advanced features like screenshots under control and rolled out.

Your "perfect world" sounds suspiciously similar to a remote infiltrator's paradise.

Sure, but I don't see a world where keeping X11 alive, in addition to all of this, makes anything better or easier, for anyone in the medium to long term.

If, as an application developer, you target X11, you have a program that will work on Linux and BSD with all desktop environments. It'd even work on Wayland via Xwayland. If you want to use it on other OSes, it's less smooth, but also working on MacOS via Xquartz, and Windows via Xming. There's even an X11 compatibility layer for Haiku (Xlibe).

With Wayland, you don't even get compatibility with Gnome and KDE. You need conditional compilation to get mouse events if you port to FreeBSD Wayland.

For the medium term, if your goal is to reduce fragmentation, X11 is the portable target, even if you use Wayland.

It makes things a lot better for me, for one, and clearly there are more of us. You may not think it matters, and that's fine, but X11 won't go away because there are enough of us that won't let it.

The answer has been Gnome Wayland for years

> The choices in the Linux ecosystem lead to unnecessary fragmentation and development/packaging nightmares.

You cannot possibly use this as an argument in Wayland's favor. X11 sucked because it baked everything, including multiple outdated kitchen sinks, into a single Xorg monolith. Wayland sucks because it factors out everything, including really important features, into optional extensions, ensuring that anything more interesting than "draw pixels to a window" will always be different on every single compositor.

Completed in 2007.

https://www.x.org/wiki/ModularizationProposal/

The *original* X11 should die, but the modern Linux GUI stack has long abandoned most of its features anyway. X11 was already reduced to a bit-blitter protocol long before Wayland.

So, in theory, we can embrace a rather-minimal X11 implementation that can run the modern UI, including some desktop features missing in Wayland.

This is the worst argument ever. The choices in the Linux community is what's made it the best OS in the world today.

Linux on the desktop only took of because Ubuntu, with mixed results and a lot of controversy, decided to standardize and polish the experience for "normies".

The distribution sprawl I largely see as a detriment to the ecosystem.

I would argue that Desktop Linux finally took off because of Steam Proton, and because of Windows 10/11 and macOS starting version fartascular or whatever their versions are named.

I remember seeing Linux gaining some traction 15 year ago, and Ubuntu focusing on polishing the user experience (with initiatives such as fixing "One hundred paper cuts"), but then this changed instead of keeping this stable the great rewriting began. Seeing Wayland (which is just one example) users having a problem with screen sharing just convinces me how much of a self-own this was from the Linux community.

Yeah but Ubuntu screwed up switching from Gnome to Unity back then, which sent tons of users elsewhere. You can't just rug-pull the entire GUI people were used to, which was also similar to Windows.

There isn't a successful Linux desktop OS. The Linux kernel is successful on servers and appliances, but only the kernel. And there aren't many even-split choices on your typical server. Like yeah zsh has a bit of a following, but everyone assumes you use bash, which is a good thing.

> I say let X11 die, bury it, and never let it rise again.

totally awesome! And once we are done with X11, lets put pulseaudio to the grave! We can all focus on having an audio stack that does realiably stream to many sinks!

And polkit... su and sudo should have been enough

> And once we are done with X11, lets put pulseaudio to the grave!

That'll happen first, I think. The trick is that pipewire is actually a fully functional replacement, instead of trying to declare everything out of scope, so with only minor effort people can just switch and everything works.

It's still a mess compared to what it should be (and imho compared to plain ALSA, which itself made many wrong choices compared to OSS).

Sound like you should use a BSD instead of Linux if you don't like choice.

FreeBSD is indeed nicer to use than your average Linux distro, and has a really good manual. The blocker is that everything is made for Linux.

I’d love to have a proper x11.

Run gui apps in your container, local or remote.

Perfect

Why would a new rewrite be better preservation strategy than a full refactor and refresh of existing stable and working codebase?

Please prioritize to keep accessibility features working.

This is really the main issue with wayland. Yes, it might be more stable these days and work fine for you. We can talk how how it makes writing you own WM needlessly complicated and all that but the one thing that makes wayland unacceptable is its lacking accessibility story. After so many years.

Accessibility is not something you can worry about adding later. It is the first thing you should think about when designing new software.

As someone who is not deep into linux desktop history: Can you please elaborate on the missing accessibility features in wayland or direct me to resources on that?

I've been using wayland for a while now and am very happy with it, but my accessibility needs are pretty basic.

See this comment for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46380075#46381858

Here is a slightly-hopeful article: https://fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/i-want-to-love-linux-it-d...

thank you!

> Accessibility is not something you can worry about adding later.

I don't think there's any concrete proof of this. Ideally I think people want accessibility handled by their WM/DE; you're not getting Windows or macOS-quality a11y "for free" unless your desktop embraces it. At which point you might as well make it a separate, aftermarket protocol and slap it into d-bus.

If the Linux ecosystem is going to be fragmented and move past single-point-of-failure, polishing Xorg's accessibility works against the goal of standardized a11y.

Not just WM/DE, but also the toolkit too.

Same author behind https://git.dec05eba.com/gpu-screen-recorder/about/ , the best screen recorder for wayland imo (I had tried other alternatives but none of them helped in recording at 4k 60fps, this worked out of the box).

I have no idea how well this one works, but I am all up for more projects that can compete against the singularization that corporations currently try (see paid developers for wayland, GNOME and now also KDE). I wonder how much money would be needed to make the xorg server adapt to the modern era; I don't even know the featureset that is missing for this either. But I also know that wayland, after 20 years (!!!), will never cover those requests users had over tohse 20 years, simply because it tries to cater to a narrow specification wanted by corporations rather than the people - so much is now clear (wayland protocol was released in 2008, so it is soon 20 years actually; in a few days we have 2026, so it will be 18 years).

So … does xterm work? emacs? xfig? ghostview? xload? xev? oclock? xmodmap? xpilot?

I gave it a quick go and very few things work at the moment. None of the programs you listed do.

From the README:

  At the moment it can render simple applications that do GLX, EGL or Vulkan graphics (fully hardware accelerated) nested in an existing X server.

And that sounds about right. As far as I can tell it doesn't yet have a lot of the core X11 stuff that "normal" clients expect. For example xterm doesn't start because requests like X_AllocColor, X_OpenFont, X_PutImage (a few picked at random from the error output) are not implemented yet.

glxgears on the other hand does work :)

It’s possible that most of old X11 toys would not work properly, because many of them rely on X11 drawing APIs, but they are pretty simple to implement anyway.

motif apps? xmag? xfontsel? forwarding over ssh? ~/.XCompose? "links2 -g"?

> The compositor will get disabled … if the client runs a fullscreen application and disabled vsync in the application.

This is interesting to me, why would vsync being enabled mean that the desktop compositor needs to stick around for a full screen app?

I imagine because vsync and triple buffering introduce latency. There are cases like games where you don't want all that lag.

If the goal was to reduce latency, wouldn’t you want the desktop compositor out of the way when vsync is on?

That's very true, and I believe Wayland has a DRM leasing extension just for this use case. SteamVR uses it to punch through the compositor and draw straight to the screen.

Bit of an observation, but I've noticed that there's been quite a few pragmatic projects started in Zig. Bun vs Deno comes to mind (one focused on DX, the other on security), and now this vs Wayland. Not to say that designing something properly is wrong, just that it tends to throw away a lot of important interoperability.

Multiple screens support is listed as non-goal. Would that prevent its usage with window managers which support virtiaul desktops? I am i3 user and it is a critical feature for me.

In short: No.

In X11 "screen" has a particular meaning, and only supporting a single screen doesn't preclude multi-monitor support or virtual desktops.

Is this why back in the day sometimes a Linux distro would have a multi-monitor setup where each monitor was an actual different desktop cube for example. There was a time when each window for an Nvidia graphics card in that type of configuration could not be moved from one screen to another, etc.

Yep!

Given that they're fine with adding breaking changes to the protocol, I think it's a shame that they're not supporting multi-screen. This will lead to the same problem with Xrandr based multi-monitor where you get screen tearing with mixed refresh rate displays. I would prefer to see "traditional X11 multihead but you can move programs between screens" as the solution for multiple monitors. Even if it worked like Mac OS X where you can't have a single window span across multiple monitors, it would still be better than the current state of X11.

As others have already mentioned, the continuous multi-monitor(Xinerama) was an afterthought. A good news is that, by design, it’s actually pretty easy to add in the later steps.

I finally caved and switched to Wayland 6 months ago or so. Things just work so much more smoothly.

Some things do but for some details I'm amazed what I need to do to make it work, like going to sleep with multiple displays. Maybe it's a sway thing and I'm not complaining at all, crafting a solid minimal configuration has its charms.

I'm just thinking why did it take me so long to do the switch. I still keep X around, but not sure how long. Like keeping vim around after switching to nvim few years back..

What are the things specifically that work better? because most of the case people dont have issues because of the x11 (the protocol), but because of how the xorg server works

Nice! We do need more X servers, since Wayland refuses to incorporate essential protocol elements due to religion.

Yeah, we should introduce competition. It doesn’t feel like Wayland is improving these days. Missing features force me to hit X11 regularly, and I still get Wayland session crashes etc, while X11 could happily run over a year without crash and run all applications I need without issues.

“Wayland” cannot crash, its a protocol. Your complaints are to your compositor.

Wayland is a display system design, and is responsible for problems arising from the system design.

Another potentially interesting project is zigx, an X11 client library for Zig applications:

https://github.com/marler8997/zigx

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPWFLkHRIAQ

Compared to libX11, it avoids dynamic dependencies, uses less memory, and provides better error messages.

If you are not going to implement X11 drawing ops and XRender (which I, and many others, still use heavily), what's even the point? Any 'modern' program that only does client-side rendering already supports Wayland. AFAIK GTK 3 doesn't even support DRI on X11 unless you somehow trick it into using the abandoned OpenGL Cairo backend, but that's not modern enough apparently.

We get the window management APIs back perhaps, unlike the eternally broken Wayland ecosystem.

Where do they say they're omitting drawing and xrender?

It talks about trimming 'legacy' features and specifically says they are omitting 'font-related' operations. That obviously means no useful core X11 application will work (unless you count xlogo and xeyes). Whether the XRender glyph cache mechanism is included is unclear. It also says only DRI is *currently* supported, but maybe that's incidental?

XRender isn't part of the core protocol so it should be implemented in the future. There is already some xrender code in there. Almost no applications use x11 core protocol font, except for cursor. Since the x11 core protocol font (on xorg server at least) is rendered without anti aliasing and doesn't really support unicode.

Core fonts absolutely support Unicode. My (non-Xft) xterm windows are full of Unicode characters right now. It is true that anti-aliasing is not supported by the X.Org server, although scalable fonts have been for a while (https://www.x.org/archive/X11R7.5/doc/fonts/fonts.html#AEN49...). But you don't need anti-aliasing on a high-DPI display, and on a low-DPI display you can use any of the many beautiful bitmap fonts, unlike a lot of ‘modern apps’ these days.

Is there anything at a protocol level that prevents using a modern font rendering stack for it?

If I could give a comment HN Gold, it would be this comment. 3 times.

This is cool. What X is really missing though is a little bit of love from the toolkit side, e.g. proper latency hiding using XCB, support for dis- and reconnect or support for moving windows to display on different devices.

First my mind went to Phoenix (elixir framework), then to X (twitter) before it clicked what this was actually about. Some very overloaded names

The meaning of 'X server' has been well-established for 30+ years.

(tangent)

This is true, although entertainingly, the "server" part has always been easily confused.

In X11, the "server" runs on your local machine, and the "client" frequently runs on a remote system.

The server runs on the machine that allows clients to connect to it. What is the confusing part about this?

The part that is counterintuitive to most people when it comes to the "server" terminology is that, with X, your end-user workstation (which may be an incredibly dumb X terminal) is the "display server", which means you remote into a server (in the traditional sense) elsewhere, which then acts as an X client by making requests to your local machine to display windows.

The way most people think about it, "client" is your local machine and "server" is the remote machine that has lots of applications and is potentially multi-user, but X turns that backwards. The big iron is the client and the relatively dumb terminal is the server.

X has the terminology the other way around compared to all other consumer facing software.

This is because of its mainframe style history and technically it does make sense, it's just that everybody else does things the other way around.

For the people who weren't around in the ancient mainframe times who end up messing with Linux for the first time, this is confusing for a while.

I think most of the confusion arises because when you are tunneling X via ssh, the X client/server is the reverse of the shh client/server.

Add to that that the user manages the ssh connection while the X connection is managed for them...

I think the confusion is obvious, given a little empathy for the range of people who use computers.

The server is usually a remote machine, especially back in the time when "client-server" architecture was emerging in mainstream (business) vernacular.

Yes, it’s simultaneously logical if you look at how it works and immensely strange if you don’t understand the architecture. (As has been noted all the way back to the UNIX-HATERS Handbook[1], although, pace 'DonHopkins, the NeWS Book uses the same terminology—possibly because it was written late enough to contain promises of X11/NeWS.)

[1] https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/unix-haters/x-window...

There is nothing at all strange about the terminology. Go run ps on macOS and marvel at the "WindowServer" process. The generic architectural term is "display server".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windowing_system#Display_serve...

Programmers aren't good at checking if the name is taken. We've done this particular one before. Phoenix (Firefox) had to change names because of Phoenix Technologies, then again because of the Borland Firebird Database.

Phoenix was also the name of Mozilla's browser before they changed it to Firefox

I'm hoping they go with phoenix11 #seewhatididthere

Does this mean we can finally be done with the farce of pretending that Wayland is a serious contender for replacing X11?

Why is it not? I get the impression Wayland has been built by former X devs

The issue (to my understanding) is that it is a very different protocol, which makes it quite onerous for application and desktop environment developers to transition to. Also, since some desktop environments have really grown opposed to Wayland (e.g. XFCE) it puts the application developer in the position of having to wait.

Complements XLibre[0], an active fork of the X11 server from Xorg.

XLibre is trying to advance the existing implementation which Xorg abandoned, whereas Phoenix is writing a new, compatible server from scratch.

0. https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver

XLibre is a joke. They're making changes for the sake of changes: for example, commit aefde9 strips out vendoring in an ad-hoc, incomplete fashion (introducing a minor spacing bug in the process); and commit aafd986 replaces `int` with `unsigned int` (instead of `size_t`), failing to properly fix the bug that the compiler warnings identified (albeit, also removing an unrelated C footgun along the way, so this does look like a bug fix). The main author has a history of cowboy commits: 533c45e (which made it into mainline Xorg before he got kicked out) straight-up prevents ‎hw/xfree86/os-support/bsd/arm_video.c from compiling, so it's clear there's no actual testing taking place.

I doubt the XLibre authors understand the X security model, either – they never do, in forks like this – and they've alienated most of the security researchers who might otherwise clean up after them.

Phoenix and Wayback are much more interesting projects, in my book. Wayback's designed to actually work, and I expect it to be production-ready much sooner; but I expect Phoenix to be the more technically interesting project, since it's deliberately breaking from the X11 spec.

Seems interesting that they're not using the XML protocol specs for code gen, the way the Xorg server does.

Between this and zigx zig can become the whole x11 stack

https://github.com/marler8997/zigx

Cool project I guess, don't see the point but technically interesting. Will be cool to have another modern display protocol/server. I personally would have rewritten Wlroots in Zig or something, but I guess this is more interesting.

the xserver implementation itself is only part of the problem. the other part is the X11 protocol is just bad, and IMHO can't be solved by subsetting.

this might make a good alternative to Xwayland though, which can be exciting.

Nice but 2008 called and want their git web UI back. I can't take anything "modern" seriously if it seems firmly archaic, my problem I get it.

Very much your problem.

https://git.kernel.org

Funny that this shows up now. I just started trying to write an entire window server + DE combined in Rust, for educational purposes.

Are different DPIs for different monitors supported too?

This is very good.

We can see innovation in this space.

Next I suppose is porting Motif to Windows.

So this can be an interesting option for XWayland?

Well no because it's not actually compatible with X11

The README mentions xwayland so maybe it could be in the future

Look, my setup works for me. Just add an option to reenable spacebar heating.

The Wayland people were right about everything

No active development in the last 4 months?

It's christmas and not april fools!

But this is a treat, not a silly joke!

This is a really really bad name. There's already a Phoenix that is well known in tech. https://phoenixframework.org/

OP if you're the author I suggest you rename to avoid confusion. Don't name it Rails either haha!

This is a really really bad comment. I've never heard of the framework you're talking about and I thought you were talking about the Firefox prototype.

I don't have an opinion on the matter, but it's pretty popular. According to [1], Phoenix "was used extensively over the past year" by 2.4% of responders.

[1] https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/technology

Phoenix is a well known web app framework regardless of your ignorance of it.

It's still a silly comment. The Phoenix web framework is a little over a decade old, and there are many other tech things named Phoenix that pre-date it, even just within the web application space. I assume Apache Phoenix and the web framework have a lot more to be annoyed at each other for.

I'm also pretty sure that there was an "Elixir" in IT before there was the language said framework is written in… I mean, given that the letter "X" is in both Unix and X11, I'm pretty sure most words containing it have already been used once or twice.

(I still think they should've stuck with "Firebird", little danger of confusing a browser with a database system mostly used by Delphi devs)

If you’re in software dev or frequent hn, how have you not heard of Phoenix? It is consistently voted as most loved web framework.

I’ve been on hn for almost 10 years, and have been doing mostly frontend development for the whole time. As far as I know I have never seen it mentioned. But then I have no interest in elixir, so I might just not have remembered the name even if I saw it.

Your link is about a nice web framework written in Elixir.

But I don't see how a X server implementation should avoid name collision with web frameworks.

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