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

[r_a_trip]

Are you butthurt they contribute the code? Yes you are.

No I am not. It would be wonderful if X.org would carry on and keep being developed. Wonderful if this venerable platform would keep on trucking healthily far into the 21st century. The trouble is that I see the big boys, the ones with the money and the resources, moving away from X.org. The old guard of X.org developers have abandoned it as much as humanly possible. What I don't see is a concerted effort to get the most used X11 implementation under sustainable maintainership.

What I do see is a horde of people talking as if X.org isn't in any trouble. That it will carry on like nothing ever happened to its development. That all is rosy and that Wayland will never make it, like it is some new harebrained idea that was just proposed. I see massive parallels to the rhetoric bandied about over systemd and that it couldn't possibly replace SysV, nor compete with better init systems. Like then, nobody is seriously stepping up now. No governing body is taking over stewardship of the X.org code. Nobody is making sure that the industry has to take X.org/X11 in to account and has to support it long term. Meanwhile the Wayland train is picking up speed quickly.

To me it doesn't matter. Wayland covers my needs, so the industry moving towards it doesn't place me in an awkward position. However X.org being in maintenance mode should alert people who want to run this stack that action is required. I guess we will see where this ends.

[jacob]

Pardon my pedantry, but those are, in essence, headless servers. Unless you actually install GUI and some kind of remote desktop server (VNC, RDP, PCoIP, something else) on them.

It's different. In many if not most cases, they're not actually running a full blown VM with its own guest operating system, which would indeed be a headless server. Rather they deploy things like AWS Lambdas and similar building blocks.

[jacob]

This misses the point. Wayland fragmentation affects program functionality. Applications that target X11 work on all desktop environments and window managers and has the same functionality. On wayland it's a hit or miss if a certain program will work on your wayland compositor of choice.

That's not even close to being true. Let's not talk about the godforsaken mess that was ICCCM which tried to make the various X11-based environments at least somewhat interoperable and mostly failed even for the most trivial functions like window decorations or copying/pasting raw ASCII text. Today as of 2024 once you stray away from mainstream GNOME or KDE, you run into various compatibility issues, for example see:

https://github.com/i3/i3/discussions

[mercster]

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.

Right, the people using decades-old proven technology are zealots, and the newbies who have driven up lately and want their whiz-bang new-fangled UNPROVEN, "hey it works for me and everyone else should be held at gunpoint to use it even if it doesnt meet their needs because I want my desktop to be modern" technology are the responsible ones. Linux is for everyone, bro... I'm glad you like your Wayland, but leave the rest of us the hell alone. You are the definition of religious "my way or the highway" zealot. "bSd iS lArGeLy bEcOmInG iRrElEvAnT" rofl, have you ever run a BSD? Do you use Linux or UNIX for anything but desktops? Get outta town, noob.

[gssdu]

"Shiny Squirrel" would make a great software release codename. Maybe Ubuntu can use it when they get back to 'S.'

[User29]

You know, BSDs are always comparing themselves to the most despised OS in the world, which has left them behind and still accelerating. Any idea why?

Why are BSD people interested soooo much in what's happening in that OS? Like the jealous neighbour peeking over the fence.

I assume you know the smiling mask, crying guy meme. That are BSDs.

[deusexmachina]

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.

Yep. "Accuse your enemy of what you are doing, as you are doing it to create confusion." - Karl Marx.

[User29]

"bSd iS lArGeLy bEcOmInG iRrElEvAnT" rofl, have you ever run a BSD? Do you use Linux or UNIX for anything but desktops? Get outta town, noob.

Let me reply.

After almost 25 years of linux experience, ~20 years on linux desktop, ~10 years of BSD just out of curiosity and currently managing 30-40K linux servers, I can confidely say that BSDs are irrelevant (pls don't come with openbsds running on home routers and freebsd at netflix, because both could be done with linux equally as good). This is kind of sad, but this is the truth.

Not everything is perfect in linux, but it's getting better and better from release to release.

Edit: in the very early times angry unix people were shouting "Linux is not UNIX!!!!". Why were they angry? Did they foreseen the demise of Unix? If linux is not unix, why bsd folks blame linux not heing unix enough?

[Danielsan]

Clearly nobody here read the source article... But shitting against BSD makes Linux users happier... 🤷♂️

[jacob]

Right, the people using decades-old proven technology are zealots, and the newbies who have driven up lately and want their whiz-bang new-fangled UNPROVEN, "hey it works for me and everyone else should be held at gunpoint to use it even if it doesnt meet their needs because I want my desktop to be modern" technology are the responsible ones. Linux is for everyone, bro... I'm glad you like your Wayland, but leave the rest of us the hell alone. You are the definition of religious "my way or the highway" zealot. "bSd iS lArGeLy bEcOmInG iRrElEvAnT" rofl, have you ever run a BSD? Do you use Linux or UNIX for anything but desktops? Get outta town, noob.

That decades-old technology was proven for decades-old use cases (xterm+xeyes+twm on a diskless X terminal). For today's ones (true color, GPU compositing, 3D, HD/UHD video etc.) it's proven deficient. No need to get aggressive about being left alone, in fact the world is leaving you alone and that's precisely what you lot are moaning about: former X11 developers have moved on to wayland and don't want to support X11 at their own effort and cost purely for you. No-one is stopping anyone from taking over the maintenance and development, except that few people have the skills to do it and the precious few who do seem to be unanimous that it's pointless from a technical standpoint of view, that Linux doesn't need it anyway and that BSD is not worth the effort.

The rest of your rant is laughable: X11 is/was for the desktop and hardly anyone is running UNIX on anything these days, desktop or otherwise. Oh yeah, netflix OCA yada yada yada lest we forget it. Noob.