KDE's Nate Graham On X11 Being A Bad Platform & The Wayland Future

[MadCatX]

You should take the advice you preach, Desktop Window Manager is the DE that was introduced alongside WDDM in Vista because WDDM was completely rebuilt and wouldn't have worked with XP's and some basic Wikipedia searching makes this obvious

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desktop_Window_Manager

So when I said that in Windows 7 the entire graphics stack was rebuilt, it really was rebuilt. WDDM is completely different to what existed in NT/XP, its explicit sync rather than implicit and the graphics driver are running in kernel space rather than user space. This required the DE/compositor to also be fully rebuilt.

And can you do me a favour and spend 5 minutes doing basic research before shitting c**p from your mouth in your next reply?

Since this DWM/WDDM vs. Wayland comparison gets brought up a lot it should probably be pointed out that this comparison is very much fallacious. Vista introduced composited desktop in a manner similar to Xgl or AIGLX. There way how applications asked Windows to put pixels on the screen did not change, nor did it have to. The transition went relatively fine because number of parties that had to care was limited the the components that needed fixing up well isolated. Xorg also went through numerous internal changes that only impacted the display drivers and compositors. Wayland overhauls the concept of how applications and compositors interact and THAT is the source of all the issues we are discussing.

[babali]

Maybe MIR would have been a better option if it wasn't killed by the community?

[bple2137]

At least you acknowledge the truth - Wayland needs Xorg because Xwayland is nothing more than another Xorg xserver. And without Xwayland, your legacy application support is going to completely suck, which is entirely unacceptable in the enterprise and institutional settings. Think banks, governments, hospital corporations, militaries, stock exchanges, power plants, police agencies, etc, etc, etc. Regardless of the shriekings of the Wayland sycophants for the death of Xorg, Xorg is here to stay for a good long while, because Wayland can't survive without it.

It’s not fair to say Xwayland „completely sucks” for having some of the same issues that regular Xorg session has - in most normal setups it’s hard to tell what server the app uses until checking it with something like xprop. In fact, there are use-cases like gaming where running app in Xwayland brings benefits (for example being able to do fake screen with fake resolution to then upscale the result is literally game changer for so many pains of screen mode changes not only in X11 but in Windows too). The point is, Xwayland issues are fixable, Xorg is not and even if it was, nobody wants to touch it anymore.

[Artim]

You should take the advice you preach, Desktop Window Manager is the DE that was introduced alongside WDDM in Vista because WDDM was completely rebuilt and wouldn't have worked with XP's and some basic Wikipedia searching makes this obvious

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desktop_Window_Manager

So when I said that in Windows 7 the entire graphics stack was rebuilt, it really was rebuilt. WDDM is completely different to what existed in NT/XP, its explicit sync rather than implicit and the graphics driver are running in kernel space rather than user space. This required the DE/compositor to also be fully rebuilt.

And can you do me a favour and spend 5 minutes doing basic research before shitting c**p from your mouth in your next reply?

To dumb to get anything, huh? WDDM was introduced in Vista. But I never said that it wasn't. But it was you bringing that ridiculus claim

Windows completely redesigned their compositor/DE system in Windows Vista which they call WDDM

Now you finally got WDDM is not the DE, but DWM. But that they had a new name for it along with some smaller changes doesn't prove that Windows ever had such a large switch like Linux has today with X to Wayland and like macOS had when they switched from QuickDraw to Quartz in 2001.

[pabloski]

You mean the chaps who wrote the buggy X11 code

seriously, are you people just trolls or plainly ignorant? do you know that XFree86 aka Xorg is a fork of the original X11 and that the "chaps" didn't write the original "buggy" code? nor they took part in developing the X11 architecture!!

[mrg666]

Maybe MIR would have been a better option if it wasn't killed by the community?

Community did not kill anything, because opensource (free software) is not exactly a democracy. It is more like a meritocracy, meaning the ones who do the job get to decide. All discussion and comments in this thread are ... background noise. I am glad it works to keep Phoronix alive though.

[t1r0nama]

What do I mean? The print server was inside X11!! Why the hell was a display server built to handle printint on paper?? Maybe they thought that showing pixels is just printint on screen, so they added the bonus of printint on paper too!

Are you using systemd? There is a freaking http server and a qrencode package in it, in an init system! It also does DNS! But here you are complaining that X11 handles printing on paper?

[fitzie]

While definitely true, I would argue the reasons behind the systemd hate were different. People seemed to hate that systemd was a "monolith" and "against Unix philosophy" even though those people couldn't differentiate between a monorepo and a monolith.

That and the typical political Lennart Poettering hate.

There was this small issue with pulseaudio being a buggy mess for so long. systemd wasn't nearly as bad, fortunately.

[andyprough]

And again you are lying through your teeth completely ignoring the fact that they won't be using Wayland anyways as those legacy programs usually work on well isolated devices that don't get software updates in the first place, otherwise Wayland would be the least of their problems. Also, the majority of those industries either have their software on Windows or on some custom OS that has been specificly tailored for their use and not being based on Linux or anything UNIX. So they are even less relevant in this discussion.

You say I'm "lying through my teeth" and then defend your position by talking about things that "usually" happen and that happen in the "majority" of cases. I hope you are right, but even if you are that still leaves lots of cases that won't be resolved by anything but the continuation of Xwayland and/or Xorg. So no, I'm not "lying through my teeth".

[fitzie]

It was designed to serve the needs of a past era. And it suffers massively from the "hacker" free software mentality, in the sense that free software folks ( more often than not ) have this "agile" mentality and they just start hacking code instead of planning the architecture beforehand. What do I mean? The print server was inside X11!! Why the hell was a display server built to handle printint on paper?? Maybe they thought that showing pixels is just printint on screen, so they added the bonus of printint on paper too!

Nate is right when he says that X11 was a dev platform and not just a display server. The problem is that today's computing world is much different: more things to do, very different things to do, need to decouple components for manageability and bug squashing. So maintaining X11 as a "display server" would need a massive rewrite and refactoring of the architecture. This is why the Xorg folks ditched it and started building Wayland. And this is why Wayland, after 15 years, isn't fully ready. There were discussions inside the Xorg community, they really tried to just revise Xorg, but it was unfeasible. So they chose to start stripping parts out of it and transferring them into the kernel. Modesetting was an Xorg thing, not it is a kernel thing. Same with input handling. And other little and not so little things.

Also I note that many people lamenting the Wayland way, really hate the new concept of sandboxed computing. Their problems all stem from Wayland not giving full access to the framebuffer, to other windows pixels and they go all the way to how Flatpak sandboxes applications, how Portals open holes, etc... They want total access to the system. I don't blame them, after all, sometimes, even I have the desire to return to the old days of DOS and get access to hardware registries.

this is just some major fiction. X11 added this as an extension in X11R6.3, not a core thing. certainly if things like ipp mdns dbus been around back then people wouldn't have tried to take it on, it was a largely unused extension that got removed after a while because it had no users.

I think the reason people are lamenting wayland has nothing to do with fear of a sandboxed desktop. In my opinion it's a disappointment at gnome specifically for constantly taking features away, and blocking standardization of the protocols needed to have a consistent cross compositor desktop experience. Gnome decisions to abandon ssd which they still support for x11 apps just shows how my-way-or-the-highway their attitude is and how big a deal this is for applications developers still after over a decade and the gnome guys just don't want to give up their vision of what a desktop compositor should and shouldn't do.