Adam Jackson On The State Of The X.Org Server In 2020

[t.s.]

everybody already uses wayland.

Err.. nope..

[calc]

I surely must be missing something.

From what I can gather one of the primary reasons Wayland was developed was for 'security' since X11/Xorg assumes you are running trusted binaries.

So who wants to run untrusted binaries on their system in the first place? 🤦

That's not to say security can't be improved but it seems all this mess was done for a theoretical use case.

[Mez']

Any plans from Gnome to solve the wayland refresh issue? I'm talking about alt + f2 + r .

Given how quickly RAM goes up and how often Gnome becomes unstable (10 years of bad design), it's a great way to refresh it back to an acceptable state. I don't want to log out and log back in just for that.

I'm sure all other wayland issues can be ironed out so that it's actually usable in 2-3 years (nope, not before, we're still at early adopters level). But this one is a bigger issue, because it has not been planned in Gnome/Mutter.

[Mez']

"So, is Xorg abandoned? To the extent that that means using it to actually control the display, and not just keep X apps running, I'd say yes."

Speak for yourself, AJax. Wayland still sucks, especially if you're using KDE and/or Nvidia driver. Trying to run Wayland would be "choosing to make my life worse". I'll try again in 5 years. Maybe KDE will get its stuff together and maybe Wayland devs will stop being passive-aggressive dicks toward the Nvidia (and other) binary drivers.

Same goes for Gnome and/or amdgpu. Some Fedora cultists with one use case will tell you otherwise, but who cares? Not many use Fedora anyway.

[Delgarde]

So who wants to run untrusted binaries on their system in the first place? 🤦

That's not to say security can't be improved but it seems all this mess was done for a theoretical use case.

Define "untrusted binaries". Does it include, for example, a web browser that executes code downloaded from the internet? Because under X11, a browser process has the ability to quietly screen-share your entire desktop, along with monitoring keystrokes and mouse movements. And obviously, the browser shouldn't be letting random web pages do that... but you know, bugs happen, sandboxing isn't perfect, and so defence-in-depth is a really good idea.

[mdedetrich]

Bull crap. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerated-X

Its really simple to forget early X11 time frame you have competing solutions. Those competing X11 solutions were sharing stuff less than the Wayland solutions now are.

Yes, this was true in the early days but not right now. Anyways this example is kinda deceiving because the majority of people just used the one implementation, of course you can make alternative implementations but that is besides the point.

The fact that X11 eventually consolidated to a single strong implementation is the point here, so we are now repeating 30 years of bad history?

KMS DRM and GBM all provide abstraction. All vendors make drivers providing those its really simple to forget nouveau is developed by Nvidia for usage in their arm soc chips. So they picked a set of abstractions then Nvidia said they would not play ball.

Gnome/Kde/Weston ... All wayland compositors don't have special code for AMD/Intel or Nvidia embedded platforms(nouveau). It is Nvidia causing a lot of extra work.

KMS/ DRM and GBM is the wrong abstraction to use because its Linux specific and low level, thats the whole problem and thats the duplication that is being talked about. None of the desktop compositors should even be talking to KMS/DRM and GBM.

I don't know if you realize but there are other OS's out there that aren't Linux that would want to use Wayland, i.e. BSD's (and maybe ReactOS if it ever picks up). This means that Gnome/KDE etc etc have to create platform specific implementations for those OS's if they decide to use Wayland.

Ontop of this, even if we get your mentioned workarounds working for Wayland, there are compositors out there like Sway which won't work by default if you have the blob installed (regardless if you are even using NVidia for compositing/rendering, i.e. Sway will fail to run if you are only using the blob for CUDA).

So as you stated before, this approach also doesn't work with out of kernel drivers that don't use KMS/DRM/GBM without significant hacks (none of which work right now) and this is regardless of your philosophical views on the subject.

And you even admitted in this post

https://drewdevault.com/2019/08/09/D...r-Wayland.html

That not exactly true. SteamVR is Wayland compositor picky.and requires you to have AMD graphics because you need accelerated Xwayland. So the reason SteamVR does not work is not a Wayland protocol problem. Instead its particular compositor implementation and not having a jackass video card vendor.

This kind of shit shouldn't even be handled by the compositor, you even admitted yourself its compositor specific. Right now Steam VR works with X11 fine and NONE of the other compositors had to right any code specific to VR handling.

This is the issue

Its going to be bloody retarded using Steam VR with Wayland if your specific compositor happened to implement it incorrectly. The situation with clipboard was exactly the same. I mean this is frankly retarded and I am not sure how people are even justifying this.

x11 did nothing of that. every window manager duplicated window management work and every x11 server duplicated x11 server work. you are confusing protocols with libraries

Every compositor doing their own window management work is fine because it actually does differ, i.e. managing windows in a tiling WM is different to a traditional one like KWin, so by definition its not really duplication.

I am talking about the duplication of talking to GBM/DRM/KMS which really is duplication if you have a look at the relevant code in the different compositors.

everybody already uses wayland

Uh, this is fuken so wrong. Usage of Wayland is ~7% from what I last checked, in reality almost no one uses wayland (and literally anyone with a newer NVidia GPU doesn't use Wayland because of the large amount of bugs there).

Almost every major distro out there with significant market share (ergo Ubuntu but also OpenSuse/Manjaro) default to X11.

If everyone used Wayland we wouldn't be even having this discussion.

[Mez']

Then Wayland:

Wayland = Display Protocol

Wayland is a good design, and the community may well go with it because X11 is old and atrocious (it works though) and Wayland is a viable alternative.

You forgot Mir, which is more popular than most of these (but not to all).

I disagree that it's a good design. In my opinion, making it so that each DE needs to implement its own specific compositor is a design mess, a waste of ressources and a limitation of choice. I will have no other choice but to use Mutter with Gnome, and Mutter dramatically sucks. I would rather have one for all or all for all. And in the latter case, I would then use anything else but Mutter with Gnome.

[Sonadow]

I con't wait for X to perish in a fire. But...

So, is Xorg abandoned? To the extent that that means using it to actually control the display, and not just keep X apps running, I'd say yes. But xserver is more than xfree86. Xwayland, Xwin, Xephyr, Xvnc, Xvfb: these are projects with real value that we should not give up.

I'm seriously not understanding the logic here. Aren't all these *the* xserver? To abandon Xorg, the first thing that must die is xserver. How can xserver be killed if all these projects *are* part of xserver? Especially Xwayland?

[M1kkko]

The hardware cursor under X.org stays responsive only because of cheating. X moves the cursor in an IO signal handler that triggers on cursor input events.

Do you know if such a thing is possible to implement in the Wayland world? It sounds like the proper thing to do, because no matter what happens, the cursor can never become sluggish. Why aren't they doing the same over there?

[ferry]

everybody already uses wayland. if you like x, why don't you release manage it?

I highly doubt that a significant amount of people is using wayland already.

common pattern among people having issues on linux

I didn't say I have issues with kde, I said you can switch to wayland easily with kde. Certain applications (not kde) have issues when using wayland.