It's Time To Admit It: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware

[oiaohm]

They should have done this transition when there are more than 2 programs that compile with Wayland (i.e. more than Chrome and Firefox), wine working with Wayland fully (currently impossible because Wayland doesn't give the control that Wine needs for GUI drawing), optimus for people with dual GPU laptops, VR, etc etc.

This not not understanding the problem space. Wine will be fine with Xwayland section of X11 for quite some time.

So yeah, all that I see happening is someone will fork and maintain XOrg (valve maybe?) until Wayland becomes usable for all cases and I will open some popcorn and watch the linux communities make the situation a bigger mess then it even was because thats historically what always happened in these cases.

https://github.com/Plagman/gamescope

Hard point here is Valve is not interested in X11 on bare metal. So if Valve steps up for maintaining x.org you can kiss X11 bare metal driver support by by. As Valve wants gamescope features so old games work on new display outputs well. this wants X11 to Wayland or pure native Wayland applications not bare metal.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GLX-Delay-Accel-NV-XWayland

If valve gets interested we could see more work on GLX Delay so Nvidia cards work with Wayland.

X did some things badly but abstracting away from hardware wasn't one of them.

Nothing like being completely wrong. Gamescope is purely about splitting the hardware information application sees from what the real hardware is. Something X11 is not good at is in fact hardware abstraction.

Valve and Redhat are absolutely not the white night to keep x.org working as a bare metal driver solution. I cannot name any party with funding that has a long term interest keeping x.org X11 functional on bare metal.

[Alexmitter]

Wayland should be a library as well so efforts could not be wasted anymore in countless implementations from scratch...

There is, libwayland.

[BesiegedAce]

doesn't even cover all of the cases that XOrg did

And this is a bad thing why? From what i've read, XOrg has an ungodly amount of bloat and random outdated features, iirc, a print server and a binary interpreter. I don't get why people bring up wayland not encompassing every single random thing that X does, as a bad thing.

[mdedetrich]

This not not understanding the problem space. Wine will be fine with Xwayland section of X11 for quite some time.

With performance implications? Yeah no thanks.

https://github.com/Plagman/gamescope

Hard point here is Valve is not interested in X11 on bare metal. So if Valve steps up for maintaining x.org you can kiss X11 bare metal driver support by by. As Valve wants gamescope features so old games work on new display outputs well. this wants X11 to Wayland or pure native Wayland applications not bare metal.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pa...el-NV-XWayland

If valve gets interested we could see more work on GLX Delay so Nvidia cards work with Wayland.

The reason why I mentioned Valve is because of steam. Currently the support for games is much better via X11 (also taking into account performance) compared to Wayland. Furthermore NVidia GPU's are the dominant GPU's for gaming (this is a fact, check steam hardware survey) and Wayland support here is lacking (to put it diplomatically).

This is just reality, Valve has invested into Linux but they also want to make sure that their platform (Steam + Proton) works on Linux.

Nothing like being completely wrong. Gamescope is purely about splitting the hardware information application sees from what the real hardware is. Something X11 is not good at is in fact hardware abstraction.

Just because X11 is bad at it (which isn't surprising considering its 50 years old?) doesn't mean the concept is bad. Considering that both Windows (Vista+), MacOS and Android have far superior compositors than Linux (both in terms of features and the hardware they support) you have to work a bit harder than just say "completely wrong".

Also the whole point is to reduce effort from the Linux community, right now KDE/Gnome/Sway are all duplicating the effort which is unnecessary and stupid.

Valve and Redhat are absolutely not the white night to keep x.org working as a bare metal driver solution. I cannot name any party with funding that has a long term interest keeping x.org X11 functional on bare metal.

The alternative is for Valve to ditch Linux and redhat to reduce its commitment to desktop because simply put Wayland doesn't work with the hardware/feature set that X11 did.

Users dictate what happens, not developers. If users and developers are not aligned then users will abandon the platform or developers will be forced to accommodate.

[mdedetrich]

And this is a bad thing why? From what i've read, XOrg has an ungodly amount of bloat and random outdated features, iirc, a print server and a binary interpreter. I don't get why people bring up wayland not encompassing every single random thing that X does, as a bad thing.

I am talking about usecases today which are commonly used, i.e. Wine and Nvidia

[Sonadow]

Users dictate what happens, not developers. If users and developers are not aligned then users will abandon the platform or developers will be forced to accommodate.

Users do not get to dictate anything if they are not paying for it.

Want something different, learn the skills of the trade and make it happen. Otherwise shut up and use what you are given.

[mdedetrich]

Users do not get to dictate anything if they are not paying for it.

Want something different, learn the skills of the trade and make it happen. Otherwise shut up and use what you are given.

Wrong, Linux is only as supported as how many users it has. Linux without any users will turn into a joke and become abondonware.

The reason why Linux is where it is now is because it supports a lot of hardware, more hardware support means more users use Linux and more users means that Linux community gets more feedback on what works and what doesn't (talking about Linux desktop here).

Linux developers do not have every single hardware configuration, so they need users for this reason.

[Sonadow]

Wrong, Linux is only as supported as how many users it has. Linux without any users will turn into a joke and become abondonware.

The reason why Linux is where it is now is because it supports a lot of hardware, more hardware support means more users use Linux and more users means that Linux community gets more feedback on what works and what doesn't (talking about Linux desktop here).

Linux developers do not have every single hardware configuration, so they need users for this reason.

Bull. Linux works on a large variety of hardware because large OEMs like Dell, Lenovo, HP etc and companies like Red Hat, Broadcom, Qualcomm, Nvidia, Intel, AMD etc plough in lots of money to have their developers and engineers contribute upstream patches in the kernel for hardware support, or work downstream to provide a driver blob or in ARM's case, a custom kernel with all kinds of patches, proprietary bits and DTBs preloaded so that it even boots.

It's money, money and always about money. Linux doesn't need a desktop user like you to be successful, and most of its success comes in headless server deployments where there is no such thing as X.

The average user is nothing to Linux.

[mdedetrich]

Bull. Linux works on a large variety of hardware because companies like Broadcom, Qualcomm, Nvidia, Intel, AMD etc plough in lots of money to have their developers and engineers contribute upstream patches in the kernel for hardware support, or work downstream to provide a driver blob.

Your comment is bull. The only 2 companies which you listed that are still contributing to the Linux kernel in a relevant manner are AMD and Intel. Broadcom/Qualcomm supplied a driver ages ago which the Linux community had to work to keep it updated. Also note that Qualcomm's wireless drivers for android are proprietary.

Nvidia only added support for Tegra to the Linux kernel, which is now dead apart since no Linux phone is really using Tegra (I think Nintendo Switch is the only mainstream device that uses Tegra).

You completely missed the point, which is that those companies are users which happen to be developers, i.e. they use Linux for their own goals. They also happen to only contribute to Linux in the areas they care about, i.e. companies like Microsoft are one of the biggest contributes but its for windows virtualization due to Azure.

Also I am talking in context of Linux desktop, so the only 2 relevant companies you listed are Intel and AMD which doesn't cover a lot of hardware

It's money, money and always about money. Linux doesn't need a desktop user like you to be successful, and most of its success comes in headless server deployments where there is no such thing as X.

Also wrong because its reductionist.

The average user is nothing to Linux.

Yeah all of the free testing done by users is nothing Also do note that just because companies contribute code doesn't mean it works in all cases (and this has historically been a fact). There is also something called regression testing.

[timofonic]

KDE is hardly an experiment. It's been around longer than GNOME.

And? Experiments can take even decades!

I knew many KDE developers, most of them abandoned KDE. They got bored of that "experimental" mindset and relying on a third party toolkit with too much corporate instability.

I like lots KDE features and consider GNOME lacking too much features in comparison, but it needs to be a lot more stable and focus on certain stuff that some forks (such as kwin-ft) try to fix separately.