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

[mdedetrich]

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 would be careful about making judgements based on a few developers. Using that same reasoning Gnome is also experimental (actually considering how many things Gnome has broken historically and how many times they have changed their vision of "desktop" I would consider gnome more experimental).

The fact that a huge number of people are using KDE without problems means that its stable (which is the opposite of experimental).

[oiaohm]

With performance implications? Yeah no thanks.

On platforms that Xwayland works

https://github.com/Plagman/gamescope

As what was found with gamescope. Increased performance compared to bare metal X11.

It's getting game frames through Wayland by way of Xwayland, so there's no copy within X itself before it gets the frame.

Xwayland bypasses the X11 server compositor layers. So there are less buffers to go though before the output gets to screen so better and more stable performace,

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.

This statement is wrong. If you have Intel and AMD graphics your best performance for your games is under Wayland using Xwayland if the applications are X11 only.

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 why Valve has been working with Redhat developers over GLX Delay.

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

Yes it true that Valve is invested into Linux and they want Steam + Proton to work. The problem you have missed to run legacy games valve needs something like gamescope to work well. Like you have a 32 bit X11 graphics server and you have a 8 bit colour game and it now need nice resolution scaling as well

This is a case that Nvidia is not listerning to one of their biggest pools of users. Valve is saying over and over again they want Wayland. One way Valve could force their hand it take over maintenance of x.org X11 and drop all support for X11 server running bare metal so all output is by Xwayland this would force Nvidia hand..

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.

KDE and Gnome both use libwayland-server from Weston. Sway uses wlroots. There is not as much duplicated effort as it first appears.

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.

This totally ignores Valve problem space. Valve has a pool of games they are licensed to sell. Valve wants to be able to sell as many of those games as possible that will work for users without users knowing tweaks have been done. X11 lack of ability to cleanly abstract between hardware and application reduces the number of games Valve can effectively sell to Linux users.

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.

Its not users who absolutely dictate what happens. Valve case its about how can Valve make the most money sorry X11 bare metal does not work for Valve, The one big thing you missed that important is users using steam with AMD or Intel on Linux can install and use more games from Steam than the Nvidia users due to the limitations of X11.

Sooner Nvidia accepts the writing on the wall and support wayland and xwayland the better. Either Nvidia support Wayland and Xwayland or Redhat with Valve will make it work anyhow because that is where the profit is.

Why would Redhat for servers be interested in getting Xwayland working with Nvidia by any means required. Simple this will allow spitting low consumer cards between multi virtual machines. Redhat interest is not desktop linked and is also about money.

[JackLilhammers]

pal666 you're funny

[Nocifer]

(Situation: there are too many comments in this thread looking at the whole X vs Wayland situation in a completely wrong way. That's ridiculous! I need to write one universal comment that covers everyone's viewpoints.)

First of all, X11 is old and deprecated, period. It's by no means useless or broken yet, and it won't be going away any time soon, but there's a reason it is currently in an unmaintained (and, going by its developer team's comments, unmaintainable) state. And no, you don't get to call an unmaintained and unmaintainable software "stable" on merit of it not being completely broken yet, so please stop doing that. The only reason we're still using X11 is because its replacement, aka X12, aka Wayland, isn't ready yet - and it might never be "ready" the way we would want it to be; which leads me to my next point.

The second elephant in the room is that unfortunately, with Wayland we do not have a cross-{desktop,distro,OS} display server anymore like we used to have with X11, i.e. one that can be used and shared by all interested parties. Instead, AFAIK, we have this weird situation where the former X11 team got mostly integrated into GNOME/Red Hat, and thus the new version of X (because that's what Wayland really is) has thrown all DRY sensibilities out of the window and has essentially become GNOME's own display server, with every other X user (KDE, the BSDs, et al) left dead in the water and trying to play catch-up with their own Wayland implementations. Yeah, there's the generic Wayland protocol. Yeah, there's Weston. But in reality, nowadays the "official" X display server is mostly a GNOME project and the "official" X developers are mostly Red Hat's/IBM's employees, so for the most part their work only benefits GNOME - or, as some of them like to insinuate, and as the GNOME fanboys like to openly declare, the "default Linux DE".

This lack of cross-{desktop,distro,OS} interoperability would already be problematic on its own but, to add insult to injury, by integrating with GNOME the X team has also inherited all the known "qualities" of the GNOME development paradigm, i.e. they only care for their own use cases, they dismiss open standards if they don't intend to make direct use of them (e.g. server side decorations) and/or implement custom, GNOME-specific replacements for them, they make arbitrary decisions behind closed doors, and they tell people who "whine" about all that to stop "whining" and take a hike.

Fortunately, there's also some good news: lately, this GNOME mentality seems to be shifting for the better (they've actually been addressing a number of papercuts that until recently they used to dismiss as wontfix) so we can only hope that the Wayland situation will improve as well. Still, for the time being, it's what it is.

Anyway, the real issue here is that most of you people are already aware of this stuff I just wrote, but instead of forming an objective opinion based on hard facts, you instead choose to ignore some of those facts and pick a side in this endless and fruitless debate. Why is that? Well, as far as I can tell:

- Those of you who are understandably fed up with Wayland as a protocol/design; or with its progress as a software and its adoption by third parties; or with GNOME's/Red Hat's/144Hz's elitist attitude; or with clueless people and/or GNOME shills declaring Wayland as ready when it's clearly not even close; you choose to blissfully ignore the sad state of X11 and proclaim it as "stable" and "state of the art" software, when even my dear ole grandma could tell it's really anything but.

- Those of you who are fed up with Wayland naysayers who proclaim it as useless; or who constantly bash GNOME's/Red Hat's and other corporations' work; or who behave like OSS zealots and casually dismiss companies like e.g. Nvidia or initiatives like e.g. systemd with seemingly no regard as to the need/wish/desire for Linux to at last grow up and become a valid OS choice for the masses; or who stubbornly keep trying to describe as "stable" a crap software like X11 that even its own developers dismiss as crap; you choose to ignore the simple fact that at this moment in time Wayland is indeed a F*CKING MESS, and that GNOME's hegemony of the project (instead of it being a neutral, shared library like X11) is anything but good and will only hurt Linux in the near future.

So, there you have it. And because this is already a very long comment and I'm getting tired of writing, I'll not bother waxing philosophical here and I'll end it with a simple TL;DR that will have to do as an epilogue.

TL;DR: X11 is not at all "stable" but rather a f*cking mess. Wayland is not at all "ready" but rather a f*cking mess. But Wayland is slightly less of a f*cking mess than X11 because it's more modern and it's being actively developed, while X11 is all but declared dead by its developers and is slowly but steadily being deprecated across the board in favor of Wayland. So everybody, on both sides, please stop f*cking around and admit the hard truth, no matter if you like that truth or not. Also: alas, woe is me! etc etc. But really, things are not as bleak as they may seem to some people, and there's more than a good chance that, God/Nvidia/GNOME willing, within a couple of years or so everything will have just clicked neatly into place. Just have a little patience and in the meantime please don't feed the trolls.

(Situation: there are now (too many comments + 1) in this thread. Oh well, at least my comment is Right™, even though it's also so long that nobody will bother to read it :P)

[mdedetrich]

On platforms that Xwayland works

https://github.com/Plagman/gamescope

As what was found with gamescope. Increased performance compared to bare metal X11.

It's getting game frames through Wayland by way of Xwayland, so there's no copy within X itself before it gets the frame.

Xwayland bypasses the X11 server compositor layers. So there are less buffers to go though before the output gets to screen so better and more stable performace

Its not just about buffers, but also about exclusive full screen (which still doesn't properly work on all wayland's implementations). There are other issues as well which I don't fully remember since I stopped using Wayland due to such issues.

This statement is wrong. If you have Intel and AMD graphics your best performance for your games is under Wayland using Xwayland if the applications are X11 only.

I am not talking about just Intel+AMD. The whole point is that Intel+AMD is not the only hardware out there, there is also NVidia and if we are talking about gamers its actually the minority that use AMD.

This is a case that Nvidia is not listerning to one of their biggest pools of users. Valve is saying over and over again they want Wayland. One way Valve could force their hand it take over maintenance of x.org X11 and drop all support for X11 server running bare metal so all output is by Xwayland this would force Nvidia hand..

Which is irrelevant to Linux gamers that have NVidia hardware. They care about the system working with their hardware not about internal Linux politics, so as long as this is the case the X11 won't be abandoned in reality (if issues need to be fixed). It will just be forked and maintained.

KDE and Gnome both use libwayland-server from Weston. Sway uses wlroots. There is not as much duplicated effort as it first appears.

Interfacing with the hardware is what is duplicated since Wayland is just a protocol and no one uses the reference Wenston implementation.

This totally ignores Valve problem space. Valve has a pool of games they are licensed to sell. Valve wants to be able to sell as many of those games as possible that will work for users without users knowing tweaks have been done. X11 lack of ability to cleanly abstract between hardware and application reduces the number of games Valve can effectively sell to Linux users.

Versus not being able to run Linux DE properly at all because you have an NVidia graphics card? I think that problem is much worse then the one you are describing

Its not users who absolutely dictate what happens. Valve case its about how can Valve make the most money sorry X11 bare metal does not work for Valve, The one big thing you missed that important is users using steam with AMD or Intel on Linux can install and use more games from Steam than the Nvidia users due to the limitations of X11.

Sooner Nvidia accepts the writing on the wall and support wayland and xwayland the better. Either Nvidia support Wayland and Xwayland or Redhat with Valve will make it work anyhow because that is where the profit is.

Why would Redhat for servers be interested in getting Xwayland working with Nvidia by any means required. Simple this will allow spitting low consumer cards between multi virtual machines. Redhat interest is not desktop linked and is also about money.

Yes and thats the point, if Valve wants to make the most money they need the largest possible amount of people using Steam which means they need to support NVidia, thats the reality.

So this means that either the Linux community needs to mature a bit and actually work with NVidia in trying to get a solution working, e.g. EGLStreams (instead of just them figuratively and literally fuk off all of the time) or Valve needs to deal with the fact that a lot of its Linux users will be using X11 (and even currently they are using X11) and hence in the worst case they might be forced to support X11 if the status quo doesn't change and X11 needs fixes/updates (or they just ignore Linux, hence my previous point).

Ontop of this, certain distro's will not move to Wayland unless its up to the distro's standards and the most popular distro (Ubuntu) is sticking to X11 for NVidia hardware for obv reasons.

[oiaohm]

Its not just about buffers, but also about exclusive full screen (which still doesn't properly work on all wayland's implementations).

https://github.com/Plagman/gamescope

You can spoof a virtual screen with a desired resolution and refresh rate as the only thing the game sees, and control/resize the output as needed. This can be useful in exotic display configurations like ultrawide or multi-monitor setups that involve rotation.

Fun right. Exclusive Full Screen access Valve does not want applications with. Legacy applications of valve will ask for exclusive full screen access at like 800x600 and if your monitor does not support it game is not running. This is not a ending issue you need abstraction exclusive full screen access is one of the features of X11 that does not in fact work. Instead what you need is what gamescope is where applications says what it wants and then gamescope sets up the gpu shaders to make it the right values for the connected monitors. Yes we need working abstraction when application asks for full screen.

I am not talking about just Intel+AMD. The whole point is that Intel+AMD is not the only hardware out there, there is also NVidia and if we are talking about gamers its actually the minority.

This gets more complex when you look at the valve store.

Which is irrelevant to Linux gamers that have NVidia hardware. They care about the system working with their hardware not about internal Linux politics, so as long as this is the case the X11 won't be abondoned in reality (if issues need to be fixed). It will just be forked and maintained.

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

X11 with what Valve need must cease to be bare metal from the application.

Interfacing with the hardware is what is duplicated since Wayland is just a protocol.

libwayland-server and wlroots are both libraries they both implement how to interface with hardware so when you are making your own wayland compositor you don't have to. So yes Wayland is a protocol but the upstream reference implementation Weston provides libraries in the form of libwayland stuff so you are not duplicating effort if you choose to go that route. The parties that have not agreed with the way libwayland stuff has done stuff has gone wlroots. So there is not a huge amount of duplication here.

Versus not being able to run Linux at all because you have an NVidia graphics card? I think that problem is much worse then the one you are describing

This is still you missing the problem space.

Yes and thats the point, if Valve wants to make the most money they need the largest possible amount of people using Steam which means they need to support NVidia, thats the reality.

This is really not understanding the problem space. Over 2/3 of the games Valve is licensed to sell has quirks so are needing something like gamescope to work properly. So this means currently AMD and Intel users of steam on Linux can be sold 3 games for every 1 they can sell to Nvidia users without risk of refund due to some miss behaviour. So in profitability to steam Nvidia vs AMD/Intel the AMD/Intel users are ahead for Linux users.

So this means that either the Linux community needs to mature a bit and actually work with NVidia in trying to get a solution working, e.g. EGLStreams (instead of just them figuratively and literally fuk off all of the time) or Valve needs to deal with the fact that a lot of its Linux users will be using X11 (and even currently they are using X11) and hence in the worst case they might be forced to support X11 if the status quo doesn't change (or they just ignore Linux, hence my previous point).

Funny you have not not looked at how gamescope works.

Ontop of this, certain distro's will not move to Wayland unless its up to the distro's standards and the most popular distro (Ubuntu) is sticking to X11 for NVidia hardware for obv reasons.

Does this change need for wayland and Xwayland support to run Steam provide games well the answer is no. Something crticial you missed is gamescope that is a Wayland proxy compositor in fact will run on top of X11. So to run steam games in future you have X11 bare metal for your Nvidia you want to run steam games you need Wayland and Xwayland support because you will be proxyed inside.

GLX Relay from Redhat, Zink from another developer are competing out for the Xwayland solution. Of course those who keep X11 on bare metal for gaming playing using steam games will have extra overhead those who don't. Sorry this is Valve road map.

There is no future with Valve for their games interfacing with a X11 server on bare metal directly, Valve X11 needing games will all interface with Xwayland inside a wayland proxy compositor that may be on top of a bare metal X11 server or a Wayland compositor horrible point the one on top of X11 bare metal will have extra overhead.

[ezekrb5]

Personally I don't care either if I use Xorg or Wayland, I've had mixed experiences with both.
Right now I'm on Xorg because all I care is that I can use my applications everyday without anything bothering me. I don't "use" my OS, or "my display protocol", or "my desktop environment", I use my applications, like the browser, the terminal and its programs, I use gimp and audacity, and so on.
So I couldn't care less about wayland vs xorg, I just pick what gives me less errors and headache and move on. Once I run into issues with xorg on my current PC I'll try another thing.

I see many people on this post falling into Display Tribalism, like "I'm a wayland user" or "I like xorg because xxx". All you should be caring is that you can get your things done on your system, which is through applications, not OSs/Display Protocols or even DEs; you just pick whatever is comfortable and move on to actually using the system.

[mdedetrich]

I am not responding to the rest since I would be repeating myself but on this specific point

Funny you have not not looked at how gamescope works.

Actually I have, but its funny that you have missed the main point which is that the majority of people will only be running bare X11 since NVidia currently now only works properly with bare X11. So all of these measure to get Wayland working with applications is only effecting the minority of people that are actually running Wayland (in context of Steam gamers).

And while gamescope can theoretically support a sandboxed wayland inside of a bare X11, it currently cannot with NVidia because its missing a feature in X11, i.e. from their README

> It runs on Mesa+AMDGPU, and could be made to run on other Mesa/DRM drivers with minimal work. Can support NVIDIA if/when they support accelerated Xwayland.

And this is precisely the point I am making, in order for this to work NVidia needs to work properly with Wayland/XWayland which it currently doesn't because of the reasons I stated before. So gamescope currently doesn't work with NVidia with X11, so we are back to square one again.

Obviously Valve wants to minimize their work on legacy codebases as much as anyone else, I have never discounted this. The critical point is that if there is some problem/bug/feature that requires a change in X11, this either needs to be picked up by someone (I only mention Valve because I think they are the most likely to do such a thing for reasons stated earlier) or it will be ignored. The XWayland issue I noted earlier is an example of this.

[jo-erlend]

its russian transliteration means several things https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homonym

It doesn't matter that a word _can_ have several meanings. What matters, is the meaning it's supposed to have. In context of the Mir display server, it's obvious that the intended meaning is "peace".

[oiaohm]

Actually I have, but its funny that you have missed the main point which is that the majority of people will only be running bare X11 since NVidia currently now only works properly with bare X11. So all of these measure to get Wayland working with applications is only effecting the minority of people that are actually running Wayland (in context of Steam gamers).

This is still missing.

> It runs on Mesa+AMDGPU, and could be made to run on other Mesa/DRM drivers with minimal work. Can support NVIDIA if/when they support accelerated Xwayland.

Thing you missed is running on a Wayland or X11 bare metal with Intel or AMD gamestop in fact works.

And this is precisely the point I am making, in order for this to work NVidia needs to work properly with Wayland/XWayland which it currently doesn't because of the reasons I stated before. So gamescope currently doesn't work with NVidia with X11, so we are back to square one again.

The interesting point you miss is gamestop will work with wayland supporting games under Nvidia because it does not need working XWayland and can use eglstream to get there.

Obviously Valve wants to minimize their work on legacy codebases as much as anyone else, I have never discounted this. The critical point is that if there is some problem/bug/feature that requires a change in X11, this either needs to be picked up by someone (I only mention Valve because I think they are the most likely to do such a thing for reasons stated earlier) or it will be ignored. The XWayland issue I noted earlier is an example of this.

Making Xwayland work does not require changing X11. GLX Relay and zink are a Mesa3d code base patch and both can result in XWayland coming functional on Nvidia

The hard reality here is Valve supporting legacy applications in there store don't need a new version of x.org X11 server at all. Updates to mesa3d yes.

Valve has absolutely no reason to do development work on x.org X11 server.

mdedetrich the reality here is you have been clueless the reason why Nvidia Xwayland does not work is that Nvidia drivers don't install the parts so Xwayland can work. Of course since this is driver failing to install required parts this does not require patching X11 server to fix. Instead its patching the drivers. The drivers for XWayland are not in the X11 x.org code base but are in fact in the mesa3d code base.