X11 Server Development Pace Hits A Two Decade Low

[phoronix]

Phoronix: X11 Server Development Pace Hits A Two Decade Low

It shouldn't be news to you that most of the corporate-backed developers working on the Linux desktop are no longer investing in new feature work around the X.Org Server and have shifted their efforts to a Wayland-focused environment moving forward. In looking at the Git statistics for the X.Org Server over the course of 2022 it shows how the development has pulled back dramatically and now at a two decade low for the commits and code changes...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/XServer-2022-Development-Pace

[user1]

The super weird x11 vs Wayland fanboy flamewar begins in 3. 2. 1....

[Sethox]

The super weird x11 vs Wayland fanboy flamewar begins in 3. 2. 1....

It's not weird, people that are unaware of the situations the development for each parties, then a "fanboy flamewar" is logically induced when certain facts are mentioned.

Being a fan of anything is bad in the long run (it masks the potential truth-seeking of the facts), but it's understandable why an individual becomes biased for a thing (every individual is biased one way or another). So yeah, the balance of the good faith discussion will divide the good arguments from the bad.

[mirmirmir]

You can't improve the perfection

[guglovich]

As far as I know, the X11 developers themselves rejected changes to their project when Wayland began development. There was even a mention somewhere of a very long time to make important changes to X11. So Wayland just decided to impose it on us, for all its crude and not ready.

[ClosedSource]

X11 is still more convenient for my workflow.

[user1]

It's not weird, people that are unaware of the situations the development for each parties, then a "fanboy flamewar" is logically induced when certain facts are mentioned.

Idk, as an average user I'm well aware of the ups and downs of each one of them, but personally I just choose what works the best, depending of the circumstance. For example, if I use Gnome, i'd choose the Wayland session because at this point it's even more mature than its x11 session. But if I use KDE, i'd choose x11 because its Wayland session is still not as stable...

I'm not saying we shouldn't have any discussion about x11 vs Wayland, but by "weird fanboy flamewar" I mean that on one extreme you have the Wayland fanboys who mouth foam and want x11 to die as soon as possible, while on the other extreme you have the x11 fanboys wanting Wayland to die and refusing to accept the pros of Wayland.

[kylew77]

I wonder if the X11 master branch includes commits by OpenBSD devs working on Xenocara which seems to be quite active?

[oiaohm]

As far as I know, the X11 developers themselves rejected changes to their project when Wayland began development. There was even a mention somewhere of a very long time to make important changes to X11. So Wayland just decided to impose it on us, for all its crude and not ready.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIctzAQOe44

https://people.freedesktop.org/~daniels/lca2013-wayland-x11.pdf

The above contains why the X11 developers started X11 did. Shocking reality is over the complete time these developers worked on X.org/Xfree86 X11 servers Kristian Høgsberg and Daniel Stone removed more lines of code than they added. Same applies to the X11 protocol specification.

Wayland is what happens when a developer wakes up looks at what he been doing with X11 protocol and sees the end result of what he is doing is going to be basically completely delete the existing X11 protocol and create another one in it place.

Wayland is do the new protocols without being restricted to X11 protocol.

guglovich Kristian Høgsberg The one who started Wayland was not having any of his changes to the X11 protocol being rejected. The problem Kristian Høgsberg run into with DRI2 and X11 was this could fix most of the issues but to do this was going to require X11 protocol breaking change that legacy X11 applications would not work. Then Kristian Høgsberg notice with lot of other areas that are documented to need fixing with the X11 protocol is going to cause X11 protocol breakages again. At this point path forwards is massively break backwards compatibility starts sounding like a good idea instead of thousands of X11 protocol breakages.

Yes massive break create wayland and have X11 server run under Wayland for legacy is classed as the simple way forwards.

guglovich pick you devil and you have to pick one.
1) Push out cured and not readly Wayland on everyone and hope to fill out out over time this time hopefully done more correctly.
2) Proceed forwards to do modifications to X11 protocol that make running X11 applications into a game of random chance.

guglovich Kristian Høgsberg choose 1. Kristian Høgsberg would have been allowed to choose 2 because he was lead candidate to be given the X11 Lead Maintainer at the time. Yes person with X11 holding like UN security veto rights against any complaint is the X11 Lead Maintainer. Starting Wayland removed him from being able to come the X11 Lead Maintainer. Yes 2 was going to have Kristian be like the CEO of a company that comes in massively fires staff and so on that end up with the business living instead of going bankrupt. Yes starting Wayland also removed the importance to massively modernize X11 protocol at any cost..

The changes X11 protocol needs to come modern are lots of breaking changes. Lot of ways you have to be thankful Kristian choose 1. Think about 2 on that path when Kristian modifications for X11 server and your applications did not work you would not have had alternative option and would have dependancy hell were some applications depend on new version of X11 protocol and some depended on old version of X11 protocol leaving you totally stuffed.

[TemplarGR]

So many raging X11 fanbois online, so few commits.......