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Comment by mercurial | Hacker News Reader

Don't miss the link to Greg Kroah-Hartman's G+ page [1], it's pretty funny.

[1] https://plus.google.com/111049168280159033135/posts/R387kQb1...

Those are priceless.

There is that old phrase "take your ball and bat and go home" which a child was unhappy with how a game they were playing was going they could just leave. Now when someone gets criticized for their design skills they take their changes and try to build an entirely new ballpark, ticketing system, franchise rules, game rules, and seat numbering scheme.

I'd think it was funny if I wasn't dealing with the whole drm/kms/dri/x11/gles battle to see who can build the stupidest way to plug this together for my own, otherwise fun, projects. Makes me pine for Microsoft to port DirectX to Linux, how sad is that!

I don't think that the current direction of absorbing everything into either systemd or X11 is the right direction for the Linux ecosystem to take. I find it particularly amusing that, just as Wayland was being created, other developers decided to move input handling out of an independent daemon, hal, and into XInput2.

I hope that the Gentoo developers eventually settle on a single, lightweight udev daemon that does one thing and does it well, so that it remains useful outside of the Gnome+Xorg+systemd desktop stack.

hal is long deprecated and never provided input handling. XInput2 is an extension which you can use to get support for multiple pointers and better keyboard state. The input handling is still done (and was for a long time) by XKB in the X11 server, XInput2 is just a different API.

In the dim and distant past, I could set the keyboard layout used when X first started (in particular, the layout used for my login screen, KDM) in xorg.conf. Not pretty, but it worked.

Then HAL came along, and I couldn't do that, but there was an undocumented XML file that I could use to set my keyboard layout. Even uglier, but fine, after enough googling I found out how to do it.

Then HAL was deprecated, and now I don't know how to set that keyboard layout and can't find out (after logging in is fine, but having the correct keyboard layout is if anything more important when typing a password than in general use). I asked Matthew Garrett and he asked why would you ever want to change your keyboard layout?

This is why I don't use linux any more.

See https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Configuring_keyboard_la...

Also, why would one ask mjg (who doesn’t do X11 stuff AFAIK) instead of googling? :-)

Makes me pine for Microsoft to port DirectX to Linux

A single, unified API would actually be pretty awesome.

Too bad not even Microsoft can manage the feat. The DirectX brand has been pretty stable, but the APIs are constantly being re-invented. DirectDraw: dead, replaced by Direct2D. DirectMusic: deprecated. DirectSound3D: broken by Vista. DirectPlay: deprecated and partly broken by Vista. DirectShow: deprecated. DirectInput: deprecated, partly replaced by XInput.

Even if you restrict your focus to Direct3D, which has a narrower scope than KMS/DRI/X11/OpenGL stack being ridiculed, there's still significant churn and a few complete rewrites in it's history, and basically no attempts to support more than one generation of hardware at a time.

Of course, a lot of the DirectX API churn is due to the original goal of DirectX (direct hardware access, albeit through agnostic interfaces) being obsolete. Giving applications direct access is bad, as can be seen by trying to alt-tab out of most games. Even given the above, Microsoft deserves little credit for trying to provide a stable unified API.

For all its limitations and stagnation, it seems like SDL has been the closest to providing that holy grail of a stable unified API.

Oh, I didn't say anything about stable. Just unified. :)

Well, I mis-clicked and downvoted this - my apologies.

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