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XWayland 21.1 Release Candidate Offers Split From The X.Org Server

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  • XWayland 21.1 Release Candidate Offers Split From The X.Org Server

    Phoronix: XWayland 21.1 Release Candidate Offers Split From The X.Org Server

    XWayland 21.1 is moving forward as a standalone XWayland release separated from the X.Org Server. Given that X.Org Server 1.21 isn't moving toward release with no one stepping up to oversee that long overdue update, Red Hat engineers have devised the plan for standalone XWayland releases that are separated from the rest of the xorg-server code-base to at least get the updated X11 client on Wayland support out to users...

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  • #2
    Does it support GLX with the nvidia blob now?

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    • #3
      This is really great news, finally XWayland can make great strides without being tied to the cumbersome release process of the Xorg server!

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      • #4
        Sounds like it will result in code that only runs "well" on XWayland and XOrg becomes just a patchwork by DEs (or distributions).
        I'm starting to wonder when DEs will just drop XOrg.

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        • #5
          Originally posted by mppix View Post
          Sounds like it will result in code that only runs "well" on XWayland
          This is very likely. All the many non-standard Wayland compositors will recede, realizing the architecture is too time consuming to maintain. Instead they will just focus on XWayland. Then XWayland will basically become just another XServer and everyone can get back to work.
          Last edited by kpedersen; 17 February 2021, 04:00 PM.

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          • #6
            Originally posted by kpedersen View Post
            This is very likely. All the many non-standard Wayland compositors will recede, realizing the architecture is too time consuming to maintain. Instead they will just focus on XWayland. Then XWayland will basically become just another XServer and everyone can get back to work.
            I think this has wrong and false assumptions. I also tend to think the first thing is likely to happen, and developers with X11 applications will be starting to validate their erffort against Xwayland, so that full xorg x11 will get bitrot. Not instantly, but steadily.

            I think you're also right in your belief, that xwayland will become kind of a common demoninator, but it will never be the full xorg x11 packages: It won't drive any hardware, it will not render fonts, it will not be a compositor,... and I think this makes "just another Xserver" a wrong assumption.


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            • #7
              Originally posted by MastaG View Post
              Does it support GLX with the nvidia blob now?
              It doesn't seem likely as the patches are not merged upstream yet, but perhaps they'll get patched in on a distro package level anyway when Nvidia's 470 cycle drivers (that ought to provide driver-side support for this) make it into the repos.

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              • #8
                I still think this is good news, but this good news doesn't change the fact that xorg-server git still has important patches that have never seen a release. Xorg-server definitely still needs at least one more release. Leaving it as is simply isn't an option.

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                • #9
                  Well, it doesn't appear that there's ever going to be a "drop in" Wayland replacement for X. Wayland was first released 9 years ago, and XWayland 7 years ago. And yet even the developers still have great difficulty with it.

                  I understand that the underlying issues are varied and complex, and know the Wayland/XWayland developers are working as hard as they can on remedying them, but X is so different and ingrained in desktops that I don't see a realistic alternative for at least another 5 years.

                  And it will have to work equally well across all desktops, as I also don't see Gnome or KDE or XFCE enthusiasts dropping their favorite systems simply so they can run Wayland.

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                  • #10
                    Originally posted by Hibbelharry View Post

                    but it will never be the full xorg x11 packages: It won't drive any hardware, it will not render fonts, it will not be a compositor,...
                    Agreed. Though Linux distros haven't provided a standard xorg distribution for many years. It is always missing more niche things like xfontsel, xedit, glxinfo, etc. So no real change there I don't think.

                    As for rendering fonts, all modern X11 software uses freetype (Xft) as an extension anyway. Most Wayland compositors will still use that (in a variety of ways). Again no real change, most importantly in dependencies. Open-source software (not just Linux) really doesn't want more dependencies. It is saturated.

                    I personally believe there will be a simple compositor that only runs an Xserver. This fulfills a number of use-cases and has already really been initiated with things akin to Xweston (https://github.com/ackalker/Xweston). This only paused because Wayland was too slow to catch up in popularity oddly enough. Wayland compositors *still* only make up <7% of users (https://linux-hardware.org/?view=os_display_server) which is actually fairly shocking.

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