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

[deusexmachina]

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

Are you claiming to be an engineer? We definitely need to increase the honor in our industry again. This is shameless! If you think about what a modern car does compared to last gen car, then you might be intelligent enough to understand what I'm talking about. You're in the class of people infected with an ideology to destroy and effectively outlaw the old cars - and you've been fairly transparent about that in your speech patterns. You refuse to answer basic questions about why you're trying to make all cars lose features for no perceivable benefit. You're trying to take an engineers tools away; to make it harder to obtain a system that they can easily build on without tampering with monoliths - especially which refuse their contribution. If you cannot see this, then you are a "useful idiot" of another's agenda.

Why do people who want to be able to more easily work on their own cars - which are serving them better than the new ones - deserve to be detested and mocked by you? What is this bright future you're imagining will occur once people adopt your vision for this part of the Linux/BSD desktop stack? systemD + Wayland + XDG + whatever else being able to enforce digital rights management across the majority of the open source world? You're working for free as an ideologue due to the massive marketing budget the industry has?

[deusexmachina]

Still the same conspiracy zealotry I see.

So you're one of those who use the word "conspiracy" and "incorrect" interchangeably? You don't believe governments and companies deliberately manipulate the computing industry to bolster intellectual property, maintain secrets and control, and much more? Why will none of you argue the point? I guarantee you believe this happens in some areas - as many zealots do; the oil industry? And if we look at the term "zealots," then how are you all skewing it so much to mean "kill the old, go with the new" and not "the old is working better, no reason to kill it yet"?

[jacob]

Are you claiming to be an engineer? We definitely need to increase the honor in our industry again. This is shameless! If you think about what a modern car does compared to last gen car, then you might be intelligent enough to understand what I'm talking about. You're in the class of people infected with an ideology to destroy and effectively outlaw the old cars - and you've been fairly transparent about that in your speech patterns. You refuse to answer basic questions about why you're trying to make all cars lose features for no perceivable benefit. You're trying to take an engineers tools away; to make it harder to obtain a system that they can easily build on without tampering with monoliths - especially which refuse their contribution. If you cannot see this, then you are a "useful idiot" of another's agenda.

Why do people who want to be able to more easily work on their own cars - which are serving them better than the new ones - deserve to be detested and mocked by you? What is this bright future you're imagining will occur once people adopt your vision for this part of the Linux/BSD desktop stack? systemD + Wayland + XDG + whatever else being able to enforce digital rights management across the majority of the open source world? You're working for free as an ideologue due to the massive marketing budget the industry has?

Your post is a perfect example of why some of them deserve to be mocked and detested. How exactly does Wayland, systemd or XDG enforce digital right management? It doesn't and it couldn't if it tried, and you know it, but that doesn't stop you from spreading moronic conspiracy theories. You claim to want to service your own car yourself but instead of doing exactly that, to the contrary, you instead DEMAND that upstream Linux development accommodates you and makes life harder for itself because you say so. As far as car analogies go, you remind me of that fringe subculture among muscle car enthusiasts who "resist" against independent suspension and fuel injection because they "know" that it's part of a secret government plot to bring on communism, or whatever.

[deusexmachina]

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.

Where has your side demonstrated that X11/X12 could not fulfill those needs with less disruption than moving to Wayland costs? No one here is arguing against improving X11, but you're arguing as if they are...

[oiaohm]

Where has your side demonstrated that X11/X12 could not fulfill those needs with less disruption than moving to Wayland costs? No one here is arguing against improving X11, but you're arguing as if they are...

There is a solid fact you overlooked we have someone who attempted to implement X12 this would be Developer A12 protocol/Arcan. A12 is clearly different to X12 because X12 is not in fact implementable. The requirements of X12 simply don't work in combination.

Also X12 has to be a protocol breaking change. There are requirements in X12 that core X11 protocol cannot do.

The reality is we have reached the end of how much the X11 protocol itself can be improved. Its now a point of a breaking change.

Both Wayland and Arcan A12 come out of the fact X12 is not in fact implementable so lets cut the requirements back to what implementable that does mean tossing a few more X11 historic things in the X12 document out the window atleast. Both Wayland and Arcan you end up with needing something like XWayland for legacy X11 applications. Both are breaking change as in existing Windows managers will have to be ported.

We could also bring the dead mir protocol into this as well. Reality here multi parties have worked out we have hit the end of what we can do with the X11 protocol so now we need a protocol breaking change. Protocol breaking change is always going to be disruptive.

Calling items like Wayland names does not change the fact we have hit the end of what X11 protocol can do. The change from X10 to X11 was also another protocol breaking change by the way where stuff had to be rewritten just it been 30 years since then so we have not use to what this means.

[deusexmachina]

The reality is we have reached the end of how much the X11 protocol itself can be improved. Its now a point of a breaking change.

Where exactly is the evidence for this? You have evidence that a piece of software cannot be improved? Could it not be the same behaviors and beliefs that are bogging down Wayland development were also applicable to X11 development?

What exactly are the edge cases that require us to deliberately push out X11 - and why can't separate programs be used on top or beside X11 to remedy them?

[User29]

Why do people who want to be able to more easily work on their own cars - which are serving them better than the new ones - deserve to be detested and mocked by you?

No mockery is deserved ofc. But those people are like "old man yelling at clouds" (pun intended) and claiming that their kinda vintage stuff is better designed and produced just because it's older and a lot of them are convinced that new stuff is just bad because it's new and their old cars don't have that feature. It's bad because we don't have it. We don't have it because it's bad.

The thing is that the world goes forward. There are new needs, new use cases. Some are valid some are not. Some are good but will be forgotten, some are bad but will survive (who knows why).

X11: also the "if it works don't touch it" is not a 100% valid statement, because it doesn't tell anything about "how it works" and "does it work because it's good or does it work because we got accustomed to the way it works and thus we consider it working".

Edit: "Linux/BSD desktop stack?" why should be those two glued together? Just because they have some very thin distant ancestry? Or because one can (probably) comile foobartool on both? I don't really see the reason.

[User29]

LOL my feeling is that if wayland wasn't named "wayland" but X13 or X11.1 or something with X11 in it, people will be happy to have it, even though it was the stuff as wayland is now (not being X11 at all). Because people are just people.

[oiaohm]

Where exactly is the evidence for this? You have evidence that a piece of software cannot be improved? Could it not be the same behaviors and beliefs that are bogging down Wayland development were also applicable to X11 development?

https://www.x.org/wiki/Development/X12/

Everything on this page requires X11 protocol breaking change to make work.

Lets start with the first one.

Security designed-in from the start
Systems need to be secure. X12 needs to be designed with security in mind.

This requires rewriting the X11 core protocol in way that will not be compatible with existing X11 applications. Do note X10 to X11 the core design of the X10 protocol was changed to come X11 to fix a security problem this also resulted in X10 applications would not work on X11 server and X11 applications would not work on X10 servers. Yes 30+ years ago the security fix was not done right and it could not have been done right because back then the operating systems did not have the permission systems we have today that are required to be able todo the security side right.

Over 1/4 of the items listed x.org X12 page needing to be changed for X12 were changed with X10 to X11 nothing was put into X11 to make these sections future changeable. This confirms over 1/4 of the list without question is a breaking change.

The fact X11 developers started writing X12 list is because they worked out they had hit the limit of what the X11 protocol could do. The existence of the X12 document tell you that we are at a breaking change point. There is a limitation on how nice a breaking change is going to be.

[moonwalker]

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.

Fair enough, though in AWS the term "instance" almost always refers to EC2 instance, which is a full blown VM. I've never used Azure myself, but from a quick search it appears the same is applicable there as well. Either way, at this point we're arguing semantics and are way off topic. Again, apologies for the pedantry.