X.Org Looks To Drop DMX After Being Rather Broken For ~14 Years

[phoronix]

Phoronix: X.Org Looks To Drop DMX After Being Rather Broken For ~14 Years

X.Org's DMX DDX driver for supporting Distributed Multi-Head X looks like it will be removed from the source tree after finding out the code has been rather broken for the past 14 years...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=DMX-DDX-Dropping-2021

[gQuigs]

At least part of it has been shipped in many distros:https://pkgs.org/search/?q=xdmx

[linner]

So what are we suppose to do for a replacement? Wayland? haha, lolol The systemd of display servers.

[szymon_g]

So what are we suppose to do for a replacement? Wayland? haha, lolol The systemd of display servers.

you are more than welcome to join xorg as a developer and fix those issues.

[perpetually high]

you are more than welcome to join xorg as a developer and fix those issues.

But if its own maintainers and people intimate with the code don't want to do it, how would an entry-level person get in and even know where to start? Asking seriously. There's no mechanism even in place it seems.

[Myownfriend]

So what are we suppose to do for a replacement?

In place of a feature you haven't been using because it's been broken for 14 years? Nothing. It's an improvement because you get the space back.

Wayland? haha, lolol The systemd of display servers.

No idea what that's supposed to mean, they aren't really similar at all. Wayland isn't even a display server, it's just a protocol for display servers.

Why is Wayland such an ambiguous thing to so many people?

[treba]

The systemd of display servers.

I.e. a heavily successful modernization of its area that made life for (almost) everyone easier? I guess many Wayland devs would be happy if Wayland was already as successful as systemd.

[blacknova]

Why is Wayland such an ambiguous thing to so many people?

Because it is ambiguous. Wayland is a protocol, like X11. Xorg is an implementation of X11 protocol's server side, for all its problems it is single most used implementation on Linux, and *BSDs. It works. There is no single Wayland protocol implementation, even more each implementation do it in its own way.

I'm hearing a lot about Wayland compositors but I do not get why compositor have to be bundled with WM and cannot be separate service, why it need to handle input and clipboard instead of dedicated services and so on.

Ok, I'm not tied to desktop UI app development so I might be wrong on some points.

[mazumoto]

Why is Wayland such an ambiguous thing to so many people?

Because it's not at feature parity with X (meaning not every application got ported over) and therefore breaks stuff that used to work - while giving no percievable benefits for many people. Probably most of the problems can be solved via Xwayland - but why should I bother if there's no real benefit but just potential problems there for me? (examples: wine, steam, firefox)

For me it's basically similar to the move from 32bit to 64bit. About 15 years ago I quickly set up a no-multilib gentoo system and wanted to leave that ugly 32bit world behind me. Until I learned that some stuff just doesn't work on 64bit - and even to this day there are 32bit apps that work just fine and don't need to be 64bit. So I learned my lesson - I won't switch away from X anytime soon.

[guildem]

Xorg is an implementation of X11 protocol's server side, for all its problems it is single most used implementation on Linux, and *BSDs. It works. There is no single Wayland protocol implementation, even more each implementation do it in its own way.

There is not only one implementation of X11 : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_display_servers
And there is not many implementations of Wayland for now : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waylan...nd_compositors

And if we want to be really accurate, there's today : Xorg for X11, and WlRoots/Mutter/Kwin(/Mir ?) for Wayland. Weston is only a reference implementation of Wayland, and all the other implementations of X11 and Wayland aren't used a lot today.

If you look at the X11 Server / WM combo on Wayland side, you'll start to having it (in a way) with WlRoots lib / Compositor on Wayland. Different technologies because of different protocols.

Finally, I won't repeat the whole Wayland pros and security fixes here (each Xorg/Wayland post has a comment for it), but only that for clipboard and input, there is today different needs and uses. VR is a particular use, multiseat is another one, and Compositors can handle them with their own implementation. But ultimately, they all use libinput for input and the data sharing wayland protocol (https://wayland.freedesktop.org/docs...l-data-sharing) (and an Xwayland bridge for the years of Wayland/X11 cohabitation).

TL;DR : it is not ambiguous when you understand what is a protocol and an implementation :-)