Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

X.Org Server 1.20.11 Released Due To New Security Advisory

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • #21
    I will ask stupid question maybe.

    Is Wayland (releasing bunch of protocols) really the best in class design to realise display server / drivers framework in Open Source environment?
    Windows has been benefitting from WDF or WDM over the years and in general from being proprietary and fully under control of single entity, having de-facto or fully production ready reference implementation.

    As was X11 somewhat. Wouldn't it be better to just have better X11, breaking backward compatibility when necessary to address its shortcomings?
    Last edited by reavertm; 14 April 2021, 06:49 AM.

    Comment


    • #22
      Originally posted by reavertm View Post
      I will ask stupid question maybe.

      Is Wayland (releasing bunch of protocols) really the best in class design to realise display server / drivers framework in Open Source environment?
      Windows has been benefitting from WDF or WDM over the years and in general from being proprietary and fully under control of single entity, having de-facto or fully production ready reference implementation.

      As was X11 somewhat. Wouldn't it be better to just have better X11, breaking backward compatibility when necessary to address its shortcomings?
      Wayland is exactly that, a better X11 breaking backwards compatibility where it is necessary to address its shortcomings.

      Comment


      • #23
        Originally posted by cynic View Post

        tsk! that's nothing, nowadays everybody accepted the end of X11.
        the real interesting comments comes when the article is about systemd or btrfs
        Well, X11 vs Wayland really calmed down a bit lately. zfs vs btrfs is a good one. Best is still e.g. "nvidia releases XYZ opensource framework"

        Comment


        • #24
          Originally posted by Alexmitter View Post

          Wayland is exactly that, a better X11 breaking backwards compatibility where it is necessary to address its shortcomings.
          Except without full/best/reference/production implementation. And last time I checked it was primary problem of Wayland - everyone needs to implement its protocols. Reference implementation is just for demonstration purpose apparently, a proof of concept. You did not address that part so my question remains open.

          Comment


          • #25
            Originally posted by reavertm
            Except without full/best/reference/production implementation. And last time I checked it was primary problem of Wayland - everyone needs to implement its protocols. Reference implementation is just for demonstration purpose apparently, a proof of concept. You did not address that part so my question remains open.
            Wayland is the protocol. It’s like HTTP. The compositors are like the browsers using the protocol to communicate. Does it make sense to complain about everyone implementing their own browser? They all have different needs and differing features. As long as they all adhere to the protocol and enable people to get stuff done, who cares?

            Comment


            • #26
              Apparently not everyone cares because it look Wayland 12 years to take off and it's still relatively nowhere.

              You clearly did not get to the point of my original question in some previous post.

              I was asking what others think about the idea that perhaps it would have been better to evolve X11 libraries in backward incompatible manner. Microsoft did that between WDM -> WDF. WDM and WDF is not a set of protocols everyone has to implement on their own.
              It's set of ready tools and libraries. That's what traditional X11 was.

              How is Wayland approach fundamentally better than "X11" approach? Releasing protocol is not always the best approach because anyone can abuse protocol, make own assumptions about it, implement it partially. You can say "then use good compositor". And I could say "it's broken by design if room for abuses was made in first place".
              Last edited by reavertm; 15 April 2021, 05:21 AM.

              Comment


              • #27
                Originally posted by reavertm View Post
                Apparently not everyone cares because it look Wayland 12 years to take off and it's still relatively nowhere.

                You clearly did not get to the point of my original question in some previous post.

                I was asking what others think about the idea that perhaps it would have been better to evolve X11 libraries in backward incompatible manner. Microsoft did that between WDM -> WDF. WDM and WDF is not a set of protocols everyone has to implement on their own.
                It's set of ready tools and libraries. That's what traditional X11 was.

                How is Wayland approach fundamentally better than "X11" approach? Releasing protocol is not always the best approach because anyone can abuse protocol, make own assumptions about it, implement it partially. You can say "then use good compositor". And I could say "it's broken by design if room for abuses was made in first place".
                The reference Wayland compositor already exists, and it's the GNOME compositor. I'm not saying this because I'm a GNOME fanboy (far from it) but because it's evident that most/many former Xorg key developers have moved on to work directly for RedHat. So it's actually even more like what you're describing: instead of having a reference Xorg server that is developed by a mostly independent team and can be used by everyone equally, we have a reference Wayland server that a single company (mostly) controls and tailors for use within its own product line (GNOME), and everybody else has to either conform to that single company's way of thinking (and its internal hierarchy) or go their own way and reinvent the wheel by developing their own server using the publicly released spec (which is practically mandatory with Wayland, because now the server is tightly integrated with the window manager).

                To be frank though, the situation was already a bit more complex: even though it's supposedly an independent tech, Xorg was already being funded by Red Hat and co since forever, so it makes absolute (financial at least, if not ethical) sense that when it came to its replacement they decided to officially hire the developers and officially assume control of the development.

                The real issue here, as I see it, is that the #1 open source corporation are acting like a typical closed source corporation and instead of helping the open source community thrive on equal terms, they have decided to assimilate the #1 component of the Linux ecosystem (besides the kernel itself) into their own product, and then use that product in order to gain an edge over their competition and secure themselves a larger piece of the Linux pie, at the cost of everybody else who's now stuck reinventing the wheel.

                Comment


                • #28
                  Originally posted by Nocifer View Post
                  The real issue here, as I see it, is that the #1 open source corporation are acting like a typical closed source corporation and instead of helping the open source community thrive on equal terms, they have decided to assimilate the #1 component of the Linux ecosystem (besides the kernel itself) into their own product, and then use that product in order to gain an edge over their competition and secure themselves a larger piece of the Linux pie, at the cost of everybody else who's now stuck reinventing the wheel.
                  This.

                  Comment


                  • #29
                    Originally posted by Nocifer View Post
                    The reference Wayland compositor already exists, and it's the GNOME compositor. I'm not saying this because I'm a GNOME fanboy (far from it) but because it's evident that most/many former Xorg key developers have moved on to work directly for RedHat. So it's actually even more like what you're describing: instead of having a reference Xorg server that is developed by a mostly independent team and can be used by everyone equally, we have a reference Wayland server that a single company (mostly) controls and tailors for use within its own product line (GNOME), and everybody else has to either conform to that single company's way of thinking (and its internal hierarchy) or go their own way and reinvent the wheel by developing their own server using the publicly released spec (which is practically mandatory with Wayland, because now the server is tightly integrated with the window manager).
                    If that's true they're doing a pretty bad job, because GNOME on Wayland still performs like a tech demo. Any CPU usage spike or I/O stalls are enough to make the GNOME Wayland experience unbearable, and worst of all, it loses all input events when it stutters.

                    The Wayland protocol is too bare bones to be subject to vendor lock-in. There's nothing being assimilated besides the session manager + window manager, which all Wayland compositors are required to do anyway.

                    Comment


                    • #30
                      Originally posted by reavertm
                      Apparently not everyone cares because it look Wayland 12 years to take off and it's still relatively nowhere.
                      I’ve been using it for years. It works well.

                      Btw, I understood your question perfectly. The answer is that sometimes the architecture of the code is so bad that to make major improvements, you must start from a clean slate. Evolving it when it’s a spaghetti code mess makes no sense because you aren’t fixing the underlying problems.

                      Comment

                      Working...
                      X