NetBSD On The State & Future Of X.Org/X11

[avis]

5 replies to my posts, could be summarized as "Wayland works for me in Gnome and KDE", exactly what I was talking about. "It works for me, I couldn't care less about anything else" but surprisingly there are over 15 Wayland implementations, and none outside Gnome and KDE is actually ready for the desktop and offers a full array of features now present in the Wayland spec. And what about poor BSD folks which this topic is about? Local Wayland experts again show an abject lack of logic, reasoning and common sense, but demonstrate in spades a ton of zealotry.

Oh, and "back in the 80s, early 90s there were multiple X11 implementations". It's so bloody ridiculous to hear this "argument". Guess what, we are on Phoronix, a website dedicated to LINUX and Linux has had a single goddamn X11 implementation, first XFree86 and then Xorg. Boom, a straw man presented in defense of a zoo of Wayland implementations which are not interchangeable and which are heavily glued to their respective DEs, something which has never been the case for X11 implementations.

wlroots/weston or louvre being a common library, like really?? Why does neither Kwin, nor Mutter use it? False arguments against X11, false arguments for Wayland. The 1001st such topic here on Phoronix. And I'm "an idiot and should shut the f up". Yeah, right, that's been the best argument so far. I will. Thanks a lot.

[tobias]

Guess what, we are on Phoronix, a website dedicated to LINUX and Linux has had a single goddamn X11 implementation, first XFree86 and then Xorg.

You are mistaken: There were commercial X servers available on Linux in the 1990s. I ran one since my graphics card was not supported by XFree86 and because the commercial options had way faster graphics for a while.

[mrg666]

And I'm "an idiot and should shut the f up". Yeah, right, that's been the best argument so far. I will. Thanks a lot.

Finally!
2225jg.jpg

[Weasel]

At this point in the face of inevitability if you haven’t made clear tangible progress in moving over to Wayland and completely shutting off X support with only Xwayland for compatibility then you’re not a systems engineer. You’re a zealot. Every year the BSDs become just a little more irrelevant. Wayland is not a shiny new squirrel. It’s your inevitable future. If you don’t have the time, resources, engineering skill or requisite number of contributors, then it’s time to retire your project. If Wayland is not the default for all BSDs even with X still an option at install by 2026, it’s time for a mass migration away from BSDs. This zealotry nonsense needs to be squashed.

No it's called getting work done instead of using a toy like Wayland lacking essential features.

Your internet access needs to be squashed. Not in 2026. Right now.

[Weasel]

Upstreaming work to a corpse is not a strategy to stave off the inevitable demise of that platform.

[...]

To all the protesters, talk is cheap. If you can't show the code that will keep X11 alive, you are just blowing hot air. As I am not a coder, I am pretty much aware that the people building it, are the people calling the shots. Unless you know a way to make them work on something they want to abandon, I don't see a future for X.org.

Ah that explains a lot. Self-owned yourself. Are you butthurt they contribute the code? Yes you are.

Keep coping about them not abandoning what you consider dead, so that you can't use the "no patches" argument anymore. Cope.

BTW have you ever considered sometimes that stuff just works? Like, don't send patch if it works, cause it already does.

[ReaperX7]

That's probably because wayland is still a mess of mangled code that still is hasn't settled down to the point where anything tangible can be properly developed.


Wayland was designed around Linux. X11 was designed around UNIX as a whole. That's the problem. FreeBSD has adopted some of Wayland, but it vastly behind Linux. OpenBSD and NetBSD are not FreeBSD and BSD is not Linux. The zealotry is NOT on the X side, but the pro-wayland side IMO. All the "push" to get wayland shoehorned in and it's still unable to do 100% of everything X does without X.


I think the best approach is the approach of offering choice to the user. Wayland and X equally.

[marlock]

to be fair: as an API, Wayland is (by design and by necessity) not even meant to do 100%it's still unable to do 100% of everything X does without X... there is a part of X11 that's broken by design that needs to go away... and apps that counted on it will need to cope with not being able to do the exact same thing on Wayland

that being said, it took too long for wayland to propose ANOTHER way of getting SOME things done so those apps COULD cope (eg: one app freely screen recording another app without any user interaction to allow it... that makes OBS Studio easier, but it also allows spying your internet banking activities)

x11 was naive and to fix this, wayland had to be slightly less convenient

i guess this app illustrates the issue well:

Xwayland Video Bridge is a new tray app that allows (or rather: lets the user allow) X.org apps running under wayland to use screen sharing from other apps

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2023/03/xwayland-video-bridge-created-to-improve-linux-screen-sharing/

I'm sure anyone currently on a Wayland distro that tried sharing app screens knows this is not as (dangerously) easy as it was on X.org

[jacob]

Wow such vitriol in the comments above about not just NetBSD, but all of the BSDs. I may be speaking from complete ignorance here, but are FreeBSD and OpenBSD not most commonly used in headless servers? Why would it be such an imperative to ship Wayland in an OS that by default doesn't even ship with a GUI? I used to run FreeBSD on a laptop, mostly as a learning experience and my god was it that, but it was invaluable in retrospect.

No they aren't. OpenBSD is widely used for various network appliances (routers, firewalls etc). FreeBSD not so much. Zealots always immediately point out Netflix's OCA, but that's because it's one of the only examples anyone can think of. Besides, the "headless server" is close to dead, nowadays it's almost always an AWS or Azure instance.

[cj.wijtmans]

The future which is fragmented as hell and which is not the same for its users. I don't want this future.

Ofcourse you would believe this if you work for NSA/DARPA and shill for monolithic trojans like microshaft, GNU, systemd, rust etc. I geuss attacking a common vector like XZ is too hard.

[Jumbotron]

This whole statement is nothing but zealotry. Who are you to tell them how to run their project? What to use? They have free will and a desire for their things how they want them, just like you. They are human beings, just like you.

I agree the zealotry needs to stop, so please do.

I can tell them this as the last 30 years of BSD proves beyond reproach they are slowly but surely going the way of all Unixes, such as Solaris, Irix, HP-UX, AIX, DEC Unix. In fact, the most successful BSD distribution is Darwin, the basis for MacOS, previously known as NextSTEP and that’s only because Apple has over the last 30 years slowly but surely began shedding the Unix way of doing things since the 1960’s. Best of all, making the best version of C to date namely Swift by shedding the crap standard way of doing things with C and the fact the C and C++ have shown themselves to not be the compute architecture for the next 50 + years of computing if for simply two things, security and manageable code over a base of millions plus lines of code. Not to mention the utter shit show of engineering that is C++. Both of these language exist for one reason only and it’s the same reason as COBOL. There are trillions of lines of code that need to be managed and fixed 24/7 or the world goes “BOOM”. This is part of UNIX’s heritage and thusly BSD’s as well. It can’t be untangled. Linux is still infected with some of this ancient Unix thinking like “Everything Is A File” not to mention the way drivers are handled. But at least with new protocols and frameworks like systemd, Wayland, Pipewire, Vulkan, driverless printing and the slow but sure march away from C to Rust and Go and even Swift means more than ever that Linux is the new and better Unix. The only real, legitimate 21st Century Unix. And it’s because they, like MacOS are shedding the old Unix ways of the 1960s and 1970’s.

At this point every BSD with the exception of MacOS is the UNIX equivalent of AmigaOS. It a place for computer engineering masturbation.