The X.Org Server Continues Cruising Along As We Approach 2019

[TemplarGR]

IRT Wayland, that's like buying a new car with no windshield. I have no problem with new. I have a problem with broke as fk and the idiots that refuse to accept it. I ain't driving a display server that I can't see a single fking thing out of. Nvidia said they aren't doing Wayland. Period. They are 70% of the users/market. Whatever great idea Wayland is, that's exactly where it dies, until you can convince Nvidia to give a shit about that pet project.

Nvidia is like the 10%-15% of the desktop market, actually... Nvidia is 70% of the dGPU market. The vast majority of desktops use iGPUs from Intel and AMD though...

So really, who gives a shit what nvidia thinks of wayland? Keep in mind that Nvidia's marketshare will keep shrinking and shrinking as APUs become more prevalent and powerful and AMD's dGPUs regain marketshare...

[pininety]

I was kind of amazed how absolute coordinates is something that is not supported. It seems like such a no-brainer. (And it's also one of the reasons why Wine is not supported on Wayland.) If it's things like this that drove Canonical to create Mir, I wish they would have stuck with it.

I personally never saw the point of absolute coordinates. Either an app is full screen like a game or it should no care there it is displayed. Heck, maybe I want to redirect one app to a complete different monitor independent from my desktop. Then absolute coordinates just do not have a useful meaning anymore.

[Raka555]

The client side decoration mess in wayland is not helping. It is wrong and a mess.
Failing to make an impact in 10 years says it all.

[Vistaus]

Wayland's slow adoption is really just due to a big series of bad luck and oversights:
[...]
* Most importantly, backward compatibility with programs tied to Xorg has been a major turnoff.

I agree with you for the most part, but how is this last thing a turnoff when people keep praising Windows for its backward compatibility?

[wizard69]

That's a compelling argument to favor Xorg, but not compelling to hate Wayland. Also, the lack of feature parity kinda ties in with my 5th point.
Keep in mind, there are people out there who just simply don't want Wayland to exist; they want it to fail, or at the very least, expect it to.

This is a common problem in the open source world. You have far too many people with childish personalities. Just consider the hate that gets thrown at LLVM/Clang for example. From my perspective LLVM/Clang is the best thing to ever happen to GCC. It isn’t just this project either many people exhibits extreme butt hurt when something pops up to challenge their favorite piece of open source.

Wayland has suffered from an active attempt to undermine it as a viable project. Frankly I’ve never been sure that it was needed, at least from my perspective there are more important things the commmunity could have pursued over the last 10 years. However I would rather see Wayland be pursued as that is the only way you make progress.

[dh04000]

I think the major desktops's share a large part of the blame. Instead of clean room engineering new compositor for Wayland, they choose to sloooooowly convert their XServer ingrained compositors and desktops to Eayland, which has been slow and painful......

The only clean, XServer free Wayland compositors are (that im aware of) are Sway and Mir.

[schmidtbag]

I agree with you for the most part, but how is this last thing a turnoff when people keep praising Windows for its backward compatibility?

Sorry - I didn't elaborate enough:
Having compatibility isn't a turnoff, it's the implementation of it. XWayland has had performance and integration issues.

[schmidtbag]

I think the major desktops's share a large part of the blame. Instead of clean room engineering new compositor for Wayland, they choose to sloooooowly convert their XServer ingrained compositors and desktops to Eayland, which has been slow and painful......

The only clean, XServer free Wayland compositors are (that im aware of) are Sway and Mir.

There is a clean new compositor for Wayland, it's called Weston. I'm not entirely sure if Weston is X11 compatible, which matters in order for existing DEs to adopt it. Whether it is or isn't, transitioning a DE to a new compositor (whether from scratch or by adapting one of a new protocol) is not a quick and easy fix. To make things even more complicated, Weston for a long while didn't have features that many DEs required (this may still be the case; I'm not entirely sure), so at that point, the DE devs were left to just port everything themselves anyway.

So inevitably, DE devs were kinda forced to slowly and painfully convert their compositors. At least GNOME and KDE are in pretty good shape as of today.

[jpg44]

That's a compelling argument to favor Xorg, but not compelling to hate Wayland. Also, the lack of feature parity kinda ties in with my 5th point.
Keep in mind, there are people out there who just simply don't want Wayland to exist; they want it to fail, or at the very least, expect it to.

Like network transparency, the clean separation of window manager and server, which more follows the Unix philosophy compared to the monolithic nature of Wayland, and the fact X apps do not need to have video hardware access.

X, when properly implemented, fully supports app <-> server network transparency, using GLX protocol which puts OpenGL commands into a command stream to send to the X server. Many prefer this, some people prefer not to have video card drivers inside of applications. Render extension can then be utilized to composite screen buffers together on the server side,

Network transparency would make a lot of sense and work pretty well if an extension were added to the X server to support X server side decoding of AVC, VP9, JPGs, GIF, PNG and most other image and video formats allowing for an efficient stream based use, perhaps housing the codecs in a seperate sandboxed process.

Another thing that will help is the Glamour project which will allow the X server to use the same video drivers as Wayland does which will save resources and allow people to choose which environment to use.

I wouid like to see the X server run as a non-root user using kernel sandboxing and fine grain kernel access controls.

[schmidtbag]

Like network transparency, the clean separation of window manager and server, which more follows the Unix philosophy compared to the monolithic nature of Wayland, and the fact X apps do not need to have video hardware access.

Some would argue network transparency is a security risk.
I would argue Wayland is less monolithic, since compositing and Window management is left to the DEs to implement.
For modern systems, there's no good reason to not have accelerated video hardware access. If you really need it, fine - stick with X11. That doesn't mean Wayland should be treated like the plague.