Red Hat Expecting X.Org To "Go Into Hard Maintenance Mode Fairly Quickly"

[chroma]

https://arcan-fe.com/2018/11/16/the-...sparency-myth/

X11 network transparency never worked out correct either. Wayland using rdp and other things may let opengl applications and other things that will not work over X11 well to in fact work well.

It seems arrogant to say something doesn't work when it's apparent that it's worked as designed for decades. I always thought it was amazing, "The Network is the Computer." If I wanted to split a task onto four machines, I simply connected to four machines and divided my work in four windows. I could open four xloads and monitor the system loads. All this was effortless, just a fluid construction of elements like running command line stdout through pipes to accomplish things ad hoc. X11 works brilliantly.

Wayland is design around what was learnt from the X11 network transparent failure. Rule 1 you have to render locally. Idea that you can render remote never worked out in the complete history of X11.

You don't render locally. You send drawing instructions, fonts, over a TCP connection and the X11 server renders the display. Here's a UI. Here's a pull-down menu. Here's a button. You can even send and display pixmaps. All the elements of a user interface rendered remotely on the display.

X11 remote terminal thing is also highly dangerous as it allowed remote connect system to capture input and do all kind of horrible things as well.
This here is 2004 and its not fixed. The idea of Network transparency has had to go back to the drawing board completely.

One person's interoperability is another's vulnerability. This feels like saying a library is highly dangerous because anyone can check out a book and never return it, or even burn down the library because, after all, it's open to the public and anyone can just walk in. That's missing the point of why a library is built, and it's hardly the case that X11 is the only system that's had exploits, there's nothing remarkable about it, but it works as intended in the LAN environments for which it was designed. Keep your LAN secure, make it a trusted environment. Only give access credentials to those who are authorized. If you need a remote point to have access, use a secure tunnel.

I think the problem is not X11 being what it is. It's that they want it to be something it is not. But for a great many applications, it's perfectly suitable, even in 2019. To replace it with something that is not suitable for those applications isn't progress, it's loss. I guess we'll see if people stop caring about the things only X11 can do well; replacing a remote X11 client with a rendered desktop is a terrible option in some cases when you just want a windowed interface and not another windowed desktop.

Don't get me wrong, I'm excited to hear Wayland will bring new abilities that enhance my computing experience and advance the state of the art for networked computing environments. I'm just not clear on exactly how it's going to accomplish that by leaving out the features and abilities I depend upon. I would have preferred a refactored X11 standard with some modern assumptions that enhance its fundamental genetics rather than throw out its paradigm without asking more carefully what value it brought to the table.

[microcode]

You don't render locally. You send drawing instructions, fonts, over a TCP connection and the X11 server renders the display. Here's a UI. Here's a pull-down menu. Here's a button. You can even send and display pixmaps. All the elements of a user interface rendered remotely on the display.

There are virtually no applications worth running on X11 which use that infrastructure anymore. In general, almost all applications anyone uses on X11 for any productive purpose will send the whole window, or at least the whole damage rectangle, as a pixmap over the network with no meaningful compression (no, ssh -C is not much help). At the most basic level, to display text in an acceptable manner these days, you generally will call into FreeType 2; and if you access that X application over the network, the text will come as pixmaps.

I still use X11 over the network because it's extremely convenient, but that doesn't mean it's all that reasonable. I think what we really need is a high quality persistent compositor (like TMUX for Wayland) that can faithfully reproduce input and control events; but which doesn't use the most brain-dead image formats to transfer over public networks. There is RDP, and RDP servers for Wayland are a thing that works, but RDP fails many of these considerations. I like that XI2 touch and high resolution scrolling inputs Just Work™ over X11 over the network.

[horizonbrave]

Please release xorg 1.21 bevor this. It has some *major* improvements for laptop users with a nvidia gpu. Yes it's true that the future is Wayland but afaik there is no solution for hybrid gpu users (at least for nvidia) on Wayland.

The future is swapping laptop with an AMD graphics one. People shouldn't make the wrong choice and then demand other to fix something that could be easily avoided.

[horizonbrave]

I think hackjobs at Red Hat should give up on their laughable efforts at providing a GUI. GNOME is a disaster, and 3 is so bad that even normies can't stand it and flee when they learn they can use something else. I could get off to the idea of red hat going out of business, especially because of their relations to NSA, which make me suspicious of everything they do.

switch back to water for your bongs mate!!

[the_scx]

Eh, old story. Wayland may be "ready", but developers/users are not ready to use it (without serious itches).

https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/linux-graphics-x-org-drivers/wayland-display-server/1098817-prolific-red-hat-developer-starts-up-wayland-itches-project?p=1099136#post1099136

[Anvil]

I despise a display protocol which is not network-transparent. It's a huge step backward.
Also, I want it to have built-in support for HiDPi displays (support for content resizing done properly).
And support for screen grabbing. This one should be easy to add. Except when developers are clumsy.
But the first two things are not happening.

dunno what kinda drugs your on, but i want some to send me loopy like yaself

[smitty3268]

I despise a display protocol which is not network-transparent. It's a huge step backward.

People who prioritize a technical implementation detail over an actual user experience are weird.

[mattlach]

If you don't want them, don't install them. Where's your problem?

Perhaps YOU don't want anything besides Apt repos, but other people do.

Open source is a lot about freedom. What you are proposing is to take the freedom away, by limiting the selection of apps to the ones prepared by the distro maintainers. That is called "conflicting goals".

It's the lack of choice which is exactly what I am worried about. These blob distribution models make things easier for so many developers, that pretty soon that's all many of them are going to wind up using, and we are all going to wind up being stuck with only one choice, the wrong one.

This is devastating considering the serious security and efficiency implications of Snaps, AppImage and Flatpak. The model is horrific.

Open source is a mess, and it will remain that way in the forseeable future, fixing all the problems introduced in the past and adding urgently required functionality, which is currently missing.

If you don't see the mess, it might be because you are using your OS only in a very limited manner.

Developers of Xorg are abandoning Xorg and switching to Wayland. At least, that's what the article says, if I can still understand English language correctly.

The conclusion would be that Xorg is likely messy and unfixable.

Are we forgetting that Xorg is the FIXED X11 server? We just did this a few years ago, when Xorg forked off from Xfree86 and rewrote large portions of the code from scratch.

[kgonzales]

My issue is that Wayland makes it impossible to have a Suckless window manager for it that's remotely useful, as it would require plenty of "bloat" just to make Xwayland bearable for wine, which is a pretty common use case. Oh, and I just don't want to waste resources for compositing.

Time for you to step up and start support Xorg code directly, or pay for people to support Xorg on your behalf. If you won't do either, stop your bitching.

[kgonzales]

Another RH forced change when the replacement is half-baked. X+KDE is rock-solid on Fedora so long as you're not using one of AMD's broken driver forks. Already several apps choke on Wayland, including NX clients or X2Go. Reinventing the wheel and forcing everybody to use hovercraft when hovercrafts are experimental is almost like forcing SystemD on a world when it's full of bugs and untested.

Looks like its time for you to step up and support the code base of your choice, or to pay someone to support that code base on your behalf.