X Window System Turns 38 Years Old

[deltatux]

When I was using my NVIDIA GeForce 2080 on my Linux install until last week, Wayland is still quite broken with the latest NVIDIA driver, was forced to use X11. Switching to the GBM backend made things better but some apps are still broken under Wayland. Switching out the GeForce 2080 (to another rig) and replacing it with the AMD Radeon RX 6600XT, things that were breaking under Wayland works perfectly fine now.

This tells me that until all the Wayland bugs are squashed in future NVIDIA drivers, X11 is still needed.

Note: I still think XWayland is required for many years to come as I don't think all apps will have native Wayland support for many years to come. I'm mainly talking about the need for keeping X11.

[STiAT]

I will go with 5 years. It will probably find wider adoption in the next two years, but then corporations need to go with it for stuff like Citrix.

So I think 5 years possible but optimistic. 10 years is more likely.

Wayland has been around for quite long already (2008?) and we just start to see wider usage, and that is mostly early adopters.

[birdie]

When I was using my NVIDIA GeForce 2080 on my Linux install until last week, Wayland is still quite broken with the latest NVIDIA driver, was forced to use X11. Switching to the GBM backend made things better but some apps are still broken under Wayland. Switching out the GeForce 2080 (to another rig) and replacing it with the AMD Radeon RX 6600XT, things that were breaking under Wayland works perfectly fine now.

This tells me that until all the Wayland bugs are squashed in future NVIDIA drivers, X11 is still needed.

Note: I still think XWayland is required for many years to come as I don't think all apps will have native Wayland support for many years to come. I'm mainly talking about the need for keeping X11.

Oh, yeah, NVIDIA is solely responsible for the state of Wayland. We've heard that before. Except it doesn't (also check "WAYLAND PROTOCOL OR COMPOSITOR LIMITATIONS" which are outlined here). Um, and what about HDR and VRR?

Microsoft completely reworked the graphics stack in Windows Vista, no one even noticed. Wayland has broken so much it's just not funny.

[JustK]

Asking from a position of ignorance here:

Using the X Window System, I can do the following:

$ xhost +local:<account_name>
$ sudo -u <account_name> -H firefox

and up pops a Mozilla Firefox window on my display running in the context of the <account_name>. It is quite convenient.

How do I do similar in Wayland?

Haven't tested it, but something along those line.
Via XWayland:

xhost +local:<account_name>
XDG_SESSION_TYPE=x11 sudo --preserve-env=WAYLAND_DISPLAY,DISPLAY,XDG_SESSION_TYPE,XDG_RUNTIME_DIR -u <account_name> -H /usr/bin/firefox

Native wayland:

setfacl -m user:<account_name>:rwx /run/user/$(id -u)
setfacl -m user:<account_name>:rwx /run/user/$(id -u)/wayland-1
sudo --preserve-env=WAYLAND_DISPLAY,DISPLAY,XDG_SESSION_TYPE,XDG_RUNTIME_DIR -u <account_name> -H /usr/bin/firefox

Managing firefox profiles like a sane person:

firefox --ProfileManager

[Veto]

Wake me up when Wayland is 38 years old. Maybe I'll switch to it then.

Will do. You can go back to sleep now

X.org is effectively dead. Development has mostly halted and the major distros have switched to Wayland. Whatever issues people have with Wayland will be fixed and the world will move on. Well, most of it anyway...

[skeevy420]

I am not entirely convinced we'd be better off with electric cars. Sure, the carbon footprint may in theory be lower, but then again the change will be tiny if our replacement is fossil fuels electricity (there is probably some gain in burning in a bigger turbine, but not much more than that) and mining lithium is far from environmentally clean. I don't have a strong position, I just find it non-obvious whether it'll be better environmentally speaking.

That's why I made it a point to include green power plants. Nuclear plants would work, too. I'm like you in thinking that it's basically a lateral move if we switch from a billion small gas and diesel engines to a million gigantic clean coal and natural gas engines.

Clean Coal. I needs me a scrub brush and some Dawn and I'll just up and clean this here coal. We can throw a coal cleaning hootenanny so the town can be green for generations to come, I'll tell ya what.

I wonder how many people think that's how it works when it's more like filtered and non-filtered smokes. They're Camel Filters. They don't cause cancer. They're Clean Cigarettes.

[sinepgib]

That's why I made it a point to include green power plants. Nuclear plants would work, too. I'm like you in thinking that it's basically a lateral move if we switch from a billion small gas and diesel engines to a million gigantic clean coal and natural gas engines.

Clean Coal. I needs me a scrub brush and some Dawn and I'll just up and clean this here coal. We can throw a coal cleaning hootenanny so the town can be green for generations to come, I'll tell ya what.

I wonder how many people think that's how it works when it's more like filtered and non-filtered smokes. They're Camel Filters. They don't cause cancer. They're Clean Cigarettes.

Yeah, but even green sources have environmental impact. Which is worse, again, is not obvious to me. Some may or may not destroy entire ecosystems. Their impact is localized at least, instead of causing global warming.
Nuclear would be cool. I don't know if the mining is any worse than lithium, but at least you need far less ore. The problem with nuclear is that you'll never get society to accept it after Chernobyl and Fukushima, as safe as it can be made with the right regulations, it's simply not something that will be seen kindly by the public, so my bet is it will never get wide enough usage to replace fossil fuels.
All that said, we certainly need to search for alternatives. The obvious improvement would be to improve public transportation tho. If you use fewer vehicles you are likely burning less energy, of whatever nature, thus reducing contamination.

[carewolf]

Well, X has been pretending to be 11 for 35 years I guess.

[skeevy420]

Yeah, but even green sources have environmental impact. Which is worse, again, is not obvious to me. Some may or may not destroy entire ecosystems. Their impact is localized at least, instead of causing global warming.
Nuclear would be cool. I don't know if the mining is any worse than lithium, but at least you need far less ore. The problem with nuclear is that you'll never get society to accept it after Chernobyl and Fukushima, as safe as it can be made with the right regulations, it's simply not something that will be seen kindly by the public, so my bet is it will never get wide enough usage to replace fossil fuels.
All that said, we certainly need to search for alternatives. The obvious improvement would be to improve public transportation tho. If you use fewer vehicles you are likely burning less energy, of whatever nature, thus reducing contamination.

I'd argue that localized impacts are better than global impacts. Even then, mass mining requires a lot of fossil fuels which are global impactors. Localized impacts can be mitigated and worked around...strip mines can be refilled, forests can be deforested and replanted in ways that allow wildlife time to migrate, etc; BUT, most all of that requires a lot of fossil fuels due to the heavy, industrialized machinery being fuel based. Electric chainsaws only go so far and are powered by fossils. It's hard to mitigate ice melting and flooding town away for a few thousand years. Dams and levees only go so far.

I think that step one should be to switch mining and other heavy industrialization machinery to nuclear power as well as to implement conservation requirements for mining. We need (sort of) green tools to get green energy and green infrastructure and we need regulations to ensure the process of getting green energy/infrastructure is as green as we can make it.

I wonder how well we could embed wireless charging systems into the road for vehicles? Cut out the need for so many batteries; so much mining for rare earth metals. Unfortunately, that falls into hippie free electricity so that'll never happen (in our lifetimes at least).

[deltatux]

Oh, yeah, NVIDIA is solely responsible for the state of Wayland. We've heard that before. Except it doesn't (also check "WAYLAND PROTOCOL OR COMPOSITOR LIMITATIONS" which are outlined here). Um, and what about HDR and VRR?

Microsoft completely reworked the graphics stack in Windows Vista, no one even noticed. Wayland has broken so much it's just not funny.

Thing is I'm not even using KDE nor anything in NVIDIA's limitation list. KDE's Wayland implementation in some aspects are still behind GNOME's, although their progress has been very good in recent years. The issues I was facing wasn't the desktop environment, but application specific. For example, Firefox's WebRender can break when running with native Wayland backend on the NVIDIA GPU drivers, the exact same settings works perfectly fine with the amdgpu driver. Based on my experience, Wayland works much better on AMD hardware than NVIDIA's.

While NVIDIA is not solely responsible for the state of Wayland, their current drivers doesn't help the situation and as a major GPU manufacturer, they do hold back Wayland adoption. People won't want to daily drive using Wayland as their backend if their GPUs can't render properly on Wayland and would rather fall back to X11 until it's fixed by the application/DE developer and/or NVIDIA.