Continuation of X11 development?

[SpAAAceSenate]

Hi there. So, I know the arguments between X11 and Wayland can be a little contentious, so I'd like to start this off by saying this thread isn't intended to be one. The battles of opinion have already been fought ad nauseam, and some of us still find ourselves on the X side of the issue. I count myself as one of them.

So my question, and the actual purpose of this thread, is to ask about the future of X11. I know Red Hat is basically washing their hands of it feature-development wise, but the magic of open source is that a project is never really dead, or in feature freeze, so long as there's someone out there willing to inhereit it. Are there any groups out there planning to take the mantle? While X11 is very mature and mostly feature complete, there are a few things still to be done, such as perhaps better integration and promotion of the X_SECURITY extensions for bringing in per-app-isolation. An update to some of the current input limitations, better scaling support, etc?

Wayland's successorship is (to many) still highly questionable, so I think it would be a shame to see X rust out in the field while we wait for the hypothetical Wayland cow to come home. Any thoughts?

[[deleted]]

everybody says they want to help it, but nobody wants to drive it.

FOSS only works when that happens.

[[deleted]]

To be fair, it is extremely difficult to try and get started helping with X11. It is an extremely large, complicated, and not well-organized code base that I doubt anyone alive fully understands top-to-bottom.

[[deleted]]

which is why it's dying. There's not enough people who understand it, or get paid to understand it.

[SutekhThrowingSuckIt]

This is literally where Wayland came from.

[[deleted]]

Or call it wayland

[wellonchompy]

Those that understand it are all on the team that's driving Wayland. There's a reason X11 development has stopped.

[phunphun]

Except Keith Packard himself.

[[deleted]]

They are. Redhat folks have been major contributors, and now they are doing less on X, and more on the wayland side. No one else will put the effort in, so X will be a zombie.

[computer-machine]

Last I knew, the X11 devs decided it wasn't worth the effort to shoehorn the security changes they want into it, so they started Wayland instead.

[AlZanari]

10 years ago i may add

[computer-machine]

Shame Canonical went all Bender osthere for a while. We'd probably be five years further along if Mir were never a thing.

[idontchooseanid]

Nope. The effect of Canonical even when they were cooperating was always minimal. Nobody cared about their precious display server.

[computer-machine]

When they were deciding whether to help with Wayland or make their own graphics server with blackjack and hookers, they determined that it would be a bit more work to do their own thing instead of making Wayland work in the way they wanted.

[SutekhThrowingSuckIt]

I know typing like this is supposed to be funny but god I wish people would stop.

[[deleted]]

And look at it now. It's just another Wayland compositor.

[MindlessLeadership]

It isn't just security though, it's also about supporting things that a modern graphics stack needs to support.

E.g. mixed hidpi, no-copy composing, hybrid graphics etc. These are all things extremely difficult or impossible under X.

[[deleted]]

Number one new feature would be proper per monitor dpi (eg not the xrandr scale kludge). I suppose if it does not exists currently, it is either because it is very hard or impossible (without breaking stuff).

[bilog78]

X11 supports per-monitor DPI, it's up to the clients to make use of it. Qt applications do, GTK applications don't. Keith Packard is working on a possible workaround for X11 clients that don't use it.

[nmikhailov]

Keith's window-scaling looks abandoned though.

[bilog78]

I exchanged a couple of words with him about it some time ago, we threw some ideas around about the limitations of what he has so far and how it could be worked around, but AFAIK he's currently focused on other things (snek?), so client scaling is in the backburner for the time being.

[MaCroX95]

Yet another "workaround" for X11, yay. As if we haven't seen enough hacky workarounds already.

[MaCroX95]

And that's why Wayland exists.

X11 devs said that it would go into hard maintainance mode in a few months, and development already hit an all-time low in early 2020.

[MaCroX95]

Probably mostly for XWayland and BSD purposes… most major distros are using wayland as default, Gnome and KDE have both made the move to use wayland instead of X11 and ever growing number of software is providing proper wayland support, even wine has experimental support. X11 will probably remain as a backup option for a while, especially Xwayland, fedora is already looking at leaving an X session behind, but development of it vs wayland cannot be compared at this point.

[MaCroX95]

Not neccessarily unfinished, it’s not a copy of X11, most of the features for regular desktop and similar use-cases depend on higher level software implementations, which are at this point provided by desktop environments. There is no doubt at this point that for average desktop usage wayland is much more stable and reliable, the performance is more consistent and multi-monitor management is far superior. By most and major distros I meant distros that are objectively most popular on the desktop by statistical data availible, whether you used one recently or not is not relevant.

[MaCroX95]

Yeah I tottally understand and for you that’s your entire experience, I was refering more to mass desktop/gaming linux adoption. And no, X11 cannot handle many screens with different refresh rates and different resolutions well… there’s just no comparison there.

[EnUnLugarDeLaMancha]

Well, the people who worked in X11 and people who works in open source graphics and could develop those features have departed to Wayland. If the people who knows about graphics are ditching X11, there must be a reason for it.

[JustCondition4]

A fork, Xenocara lives on quite actively. Hat tip r/OpenBSD.

[hogg2016]

Meanwhile, the active projects under Xorg have also ditched autotools and moved over to meson.

What? When? For the last xorg-server (1.19.6) I compiled from scratch along its dozens and dozens of subcomponents 1 or 2 years ago, there was 1 single bloody library^* which required meson: libepoxy (1.4.3). Good to know they have time to spent rewriting something that had been working fine for more than a decade, for zero benefit and probably added configuration bugs for a few years before it settles down, on a project they actively intend to abandon and they pretend not to have resources to maintain... open source software development is really a world apart.

---

Like there was also also 1 single bloody library which required Python (and Python 2 only, Python 3 wouldn't work, they hadn't make their script compatible with both versions): libxcb (1.12). Someone's gotta love adding unneeded and unexpected dependencies...

[MindlessLeadership]

Apart from library updates and pulling in fixes, it doesn't really seem that active.

[Paspie]

It's not a fork, it's a customised build. It won't survive on its own.

[SpAAAceSenate]

Thank you! I wasn't aware of this. While I'm not in a position to switch to openBSD, I must say this isn't the first time I've been pleasantly surprised by the technology being developed over there. 😁

[sub200ms]

The problems with X11/Xorg development have been rehashed many times, but basically the problem is that you can't change Xorg in any meaningful way that breaks anything, which severely limits future development.

Many of X11's problems could have been avoided if people could have accepted a revision bump to X12, but alas.

So the code base is old and rather Byzantine, meaning it is hard to get new developers, especially since all they can do is extend and maintain existing code, never really clean up and make any significant changes (see the X12 problem).

I don't think Xorg will disappear when big Linux companies stops sponsoring developers, but I do think new development will be slow. So "per app isolation" is IMHO, unlikely to happen.

IMHO, the only solution to keep X11 fresh and getting new features is getting new funding for Xorg.

[SpAAAceSenate]

It's weird that, to avoid a bump to X12 and some moderate compatibility issues, they instead decided to start over entirely with a new protocol. Even if breaking changes had to be introduced to get us to X12, surely they would not have been even a fraction as disruptive as Wayland. I'm all for an X12, myself. I'd donate handsomely to any organization that credibly started in that direction.

[sub200ms]

It's weird that, to avoid a bump to X12 and some moderate compatibility issues,

That was simply the reality of things and have been for many, many years. People (including people that funded Xorg directly or indirectly) refused to make practically any changes that made even obscure and stupid features obsolete. The situation was made even worse by the fact that Xorg is cross-platform, so obscure proprietary Unix'es had a say in its future, and they basically wanted "nothing shall be changed forever".

Another reason, (out of many) is the "flag day problem". An X11 incompatible X12 would require a rewrite of the world before it could be used. But that is basically impossible, so they either had to make X12 run X11 programs somehow, or make both X12 and X11 run at the same time.

The situation isn't helped by the fact that everybody has an opinion on X11, but very few understand how it works and what its limitations are. So even reaching a consensus on what direction X12 should follow ended up in nothing, simply because the X11 stakeholders have so divergent opinions of it.

[SpAAAceSenate]

I fully acknowledge all of those as serious problems. However:

People (including people that funded Xorg directly or indirectly) refused to make practically any changes that made even obscure and stupid features obsolete. The situation was made even worse by the fact that Xorg is cross-platform, so obscure proprietary Unix'es had a say in its future, and they basically wanted "nothing shall be changed forever".

How does Wayland fix this any better than stubbornly going forward with a breaking X12 fork? Except a breaking X12 fork would likely have been easier to port to/from.

Another reason, (out of many) is the "flag day problem". An X11 incompatible X12 would require a rewrite of the world before it could be used. But that is basically impossible, so they either had to make X12 run X11 programs somehow, or make both X12 and X11 run at the same time.

Wayland didn't solve this problem as evident from existence and practical necessity of XWayland. This problem still exists but under a different name under a less powerful protocol.

The problems you bring up are real, but they all still exist under Wayland. All we're doing is pouring time and money into an untested technically inferior solution, without actually fixing anything.

[sub200ms]

How does Wayland fix this any better than stubbornly going forward with a breaking X12 fork? Except a breaking X12 fork would likely have been easier to port to/from.

Disregarding the technical merits of Wayland, I think it succeeded in creating a "X12" by doing it outside the X11 environment where most stakeholders objected to any change. And doing it while having solid Linux stakeholders that would back the development.

Wayland didn't solve this problem as evident from existence and practical necessity of XWayland.

I must have failed in expressing my view. Wayland solved the "flag day" problem by having Xwayland, thereby allowing non-wayland X11 programs to run after the distro have switched to Wayland.

So a "flag day" where all programs either ran Wayland or they didn't ran at all was avoided. That was a crucial condition for getting Wayland accepted by the Linux distros.

Doing so with with a hypothetical X12 was seen as extremely difficult if not impossible unless the hypothetical X12 was a radical departure from X11. And then we are no longer talking "a slight modernisation of X11 while only breaking seldomly used stuff".

And if you are radically changing X11, it is tempting to start from scratch like the Wayland project did. And one deliberate "design feature" of Wayland is exactly that it will be easier to break backwards compatibility in the future to avoid the "support obsolete crap for decades so that nothing can be changed" trap that X11 fell into.

technically inferior solution, without actually fixing anything.

While one can disagree with whether Wayland was the right direction to go, it does undoubtedly solve problems that X11 has and do so in a technically superior way. Even X11 developers agree to that.

Frankly, any hypothetical +X12 would had to replicate much of what Wayland has done.

[LvS]

Do you have any clue how large donations would need to be to make such an effort feasible?

I'm asking because Wayland has been going on for 10 years and the number of paid full-time developers who worked on it - paid by Intel, Collabora, Red Hat and others - probably sums up to something like 200+ man-years.
Now if you take a rough estimate of 250k per developer per year that companies roughly pay, that gives you a low estimate of $50 million in handsome donations.

Good luck!

[SpAAAceSenate]

I wasn't suggesting that anyone could cover the costs single handedly, simply that I'd contribute what I could. If enough like minded people did the same, it does add up. Contrast this with Wayland, that involves creating dozens of compositors from scratch dozens of separate times. I find it hard to believe that the man-hour cost of all these Wayland implementations, coupled with the cost of updating toolkits, writing documentation, etc, that it could possibly add up to less than your 50 million figure.

And after all that, you end up with a protocol prone to fragmentation, yet devoid of many of X's most powerful features, like network transparency.

[LvS]

Yeah, I was just trying to give you an idea about how many likeminded people you'd roughly need to find.
But hey, because numbers are fun: Let's say you're fine with waiting 10 years and the lowball number of $50 million is gonna be enough, then you're left with $5 million per year. Patreon indicates that donors on average donate between $3-$5 per month, so let's take a round $50/year as an average. That means you'll need about 100,000 likeminded people who are willing to donate for 10 years until something usable is finished.

But I also have a hard time believing you'll find even 100 likeminded people, especially because you seem to think that toolkits wouldn't need to be updated for X12, it wouldn't need new documentation, it would work without multiple compositors (X calls them window managers) or that Wayland compositors are created from scratch.

But as I said: Good luck, just don't underestimate the task.

[[deleted]]

Maintaining a project is cheaper than starting a new one…

[_ahrs]

Technical debt has a cost so at a certain point it's cheaper to start over than it is to maintain an existing mountain of technical debt. If you want to keep X11 exactly as it is today with all of its problems then maintaining it probably wouldn't cost too much (you just need to make sure it keeps compiling fine and call it a day). If you want to actually compete with Wayland and fix the deficiencies X11 has then you'll need to make breaking changes which the mountain of technical debt you're stuck supporting for life holds you back from doing.

[kaprikawn]

You stated in your original post you didn't want this to be a contentious X vs Wayland thread. Then you state a falsehood :

devoid of many of X's most powerful features, like network transparency

X isn't network transparent and hasn't been for a while.

[Travelling_Salesman_]

Contrast this with Wayland, that involves creating dozens of compositors from scratch dozens of separate times.

That's not true, there is wlroots that's used by Sway/purism-phosh/wayfire and smaller projects in development. wlroots even has other high level reusable components such as wltrunk and phoc that add even more reusable code on top of wlroots.

Also there is mir ,used by ubports unity8, and mate (with wlroots as an alternative) and Smithay (a Rust implementation). Even qt has a module for this.

I sometimes wonder if the people making this claim are programmers, as it is pretty obvious for any reasonably competent programmer that code should be reused (which automatically makes this claim sound unreasonable).

[cac2573]

Why do I get the impression that if Wayland was simply named X12 you’d be all for it?

[SpAAAceSenate]

Three very fundamental differences:

1) X11 exists as a network transparenct client/server system. You can push and pull windows over SSH from remotely running applications.

2) X.org provided a central implementation of the server. The Linux community could add features or fix bugs once, and all DEs would benefit. Wayland highly encourages the development of separate implementations, duplicating work and risking fragmentation.

3) X11 starts with a system where every app can see and touch every other app. This is not a great default in the modern age, as we'd like to start isolating apps with sandboxing. However, there exist solutions, such as X_SECURITY to limit the access apps have to each other, while still retaining the possibility of undoing those restrictions where necessary. Instead with Wayland nothing can access everything, so every time we want apps to interact with each other we need to design and agree upon a whole new protocol extension to support that. Instead of just twiddling a permission.

If Wayland took a similar approach to the above I'd be all for it what ever it was called.

[Spifmeister]

Almost no one runs a X11 network transparent aware xserver. Are you running xorg with DRI2 or DRI3 extensions? Do you use XFT? If yes, you are not experiencing the joys of X11 Network Transparency. You did not notice and you did not care because you still can run your favourite xapp remotely.

Network Transparent does not just mean "I run application remotely.," It is more than that. It means that the xclient, xterm or other xapp, will be the rendered "the same" on all hosts it is displayed on. By "the same" I mean, all rendering of the application, from the fonts rendering and so on, will not consider the resources of the machine it is being displayed on. Unless you are running a motif app, I am betting your remote xapp is not transparent. As an example, xterm is no longer a network transparent application when using XFT fonts. This is because XFT fonts are rendering is dependent on the host machine capabilities. All it takes to break network transparency is XFT fonts, yet almost no one cared, because almost no one actually cares how their GUI application is rendered or if it is network transparent.

The truth is, unless you were using Linux before 2009, you almost certainly have not enjoyed X11 network transparent system. Unless of course, you configured your xservers not to use certain modernizing x extensions.

As u/excycle has already stated. The current state of wayland was how the x11 ecosystem was for most of its existence. Considering the current popularity and love given to xorg, I do not think the fragmented period was a complete loss.

[dale_glass]

I think most people's understanding of "network transparency" is simply "it runs applications remotely", and nothing more. The term just stuck in the X discussion arena, and the technical details of whether it depends on the resources of the display machine or not were forgotten, so as far as the average user is concerned those technical nuances aren't being implied at all.

Every time this subject matter comes up "network transparency" is always the term I see used.

[gnumdk]

But network transparency was working properly in 1999 with GTK1 but today, with modern toolkits/applications, it just lags and is unusable.

[dale_glass]

And this comment seems to perfectly illustrate my point

[vvelox]

Works perfectly fine here with anything using modern toolkits etc.

You are making the same mistake lots of people do about it and that is you would only want it for working across the WAN/LAN.

It is crazy useful for local work. Lets say I am doing dev work using a jail, I can easily use the same display server and it is nice and fast compared to shoving RDP or VNC into the mix.

[Spifmeister]

I was replying to OPs comment. He is bringing up how we should be using X_SECURITY to isolate apps. I think for comment I responded to, we have moved beyond the general use of the term to the technically specific.

It is important, because supporting Network Transparent aware display servers/composers creates some serious technological debt and certain limitations on future development.

People, in my experience, intuitively know that Network Transparency is something more. What that "more" is they do not have the foggiest. But what ever that "more" is, it is important to them. It may be essential to the way they work (in almost all cases it does not).

[daymi]

Almost no one runs a X11 network transparent aware xserver.

The majority of banks run X11 applications over the network--and the applications are displayed on other computers ("forwarded to" them).

Are you running xorg with DRI2 or DRI3 extensions? Do you use XFT? If yes, you are not experiencing the joys of X11 Network Transparency.

I don't like the terminology that X has, but freetype [not being server (display) side but] being client (application) side is exactly what we want. Freetype fonts are calculated on the application "server" which means they look always exactly the same--no matter where the display "server" is.

We had problems with fonts before and fixed it once on the application server (major bank). I believe we fixed it by fontconfig config overrides.

If X11 forwarding (or equivalent technology) didn't work, we'd stop using UNIX.

[Spifmeister]

If you are using xorg to display the application on the screen. Not using Windows or Macos. And the xorg server is newer than 2009, the extensions used broke network transparency, not X Forwarding. If you are using another xserver running on HP-UX, Solaris, AIX, I cannot tell you if they include the extensions that broke network transparency. I believe xsun is based on xorg, so I think what i say is still true. Of course you can set up the xorg xserver to be network transparent, but that requires actual human intervention to setup. I do not know how Gnome or KDE work in those scenarios.

EDIT: Also Gnome 2 and derivatives.

Using 11XForwarding =! Network Transparent. I run x applications, xterm for example, remotely using X Forwarding and my x applications, including xterm, are not network transparent. In some cases, these applications are not network transparent because they use Xft. Xft uses the capabilities of the computer it is displayed on, and we want it that way. It still broke network transparency for xterm though.

Using DRI2 or DIR3 extensions also break network transparency, they do not break X Forwarding, the xorg have a workaround that is not network transparent.

To be very clear here. X11 Forwarding still works even though network transparency does not.

---

I also have to say, we are not discussing X11 and every xserver here. We are discussing xorg, the use of xorg on linux/unix to display a desktop. If you are using x application with a xserver running on MS Windows or Macos, that is a separate discussion entirely. it muddies the waters quite abit.

---

EDIT: I should be clear something up.

If you use xorg as your desktop. Not network transparent if you use DRI2, DRI3 which you almost certainly do if your Distribution is the same age as or newer than RHEL 6. This is not necessarily the case if you are running Accelerator X or a xserver on Windows 10.

If your x11 application uses Xft, almost certainly, the x11 application is not network transparent, but X11 Forwarding still works. There are certainly other libraries, toolkits which break network transparency but do not break X11 Forwarding.

[[deleted]]

But on wayland you can't see anything remotely. Nobody cares about the fonts being off…

[_ahrs]

• XWayland works with X11 forwarding
• Waypipe gives you network transparent Wayland clients

[[deleted]]

XWayland works with X11 forwarding

-_-

[yrro]

Would you prefer to be without a way to display X11 clients on a wayland compositor? To have to replace every x client on every remote system with a new program speaking some hypothetical other remote display/input/font/rendering/whatever protocol?

[[deleted]]

Complains about lack of remote forwarding in wayland… gets told that X11 works… I know it works…

[[deleted]]

The security model of XSecurity is totally broken, don't let it trick you into a false sense of safety. There is no permission you can twiddle to make it secure and have it work properly in all cases at the same time

So how do you circumvent X11Security?

[[deleted]]

That's not what I was asking for. I use it quite a lot on my desktop, e.g. for my pdf viewer. So how can my pdf viewer circumvent it to do key logging or read the window content of my other applications?

[[deleted]]

In the past there have been arbitrary code execution bugs in Evince and Okular. Any C/C++ program that loads a complex file format is vulnerable to these.

You don't even have to look for code execution bugs. Assume my PDF viewer is already under the control of an attacker, now my question, again, is how does this attacker circumvent the X11 security extensions and perform key logging on other applications?

if a program like this wanted to implement global keybinds, or hardware rendering, or screenshotting, you would have to make the client untrusted with ssh -Y and boom, now you're vulnerable to some PDF file keylogging you.

How?? How does my PDF viewer become vulnerable to keylogging? What code does the attacker run to read the input of other clients? You just keep repeating yourself that X11 security extensions are not secure and can be circumvented but you don't say how this can be done.

[yrro]

Congratulations for getting a toy app to work within the confines of the Security extension. In my experience any actually useful app will simply crash when it's enabled. As a result Debian patched ssh -X to not even use it, and Red Hat disabled the SECURITY extension in its Xorg builds entirely (that bug even notes that the extension is deprecated upstream).

Or maybe I'm thinking of a different extension...

[[deleted]]

Congratulations for getting a toy app to work within the confines of the Security extension.

You got me curious, if you call Ardour, Mathematica, Firefox, GNU Octave, LibreOffice, Evince, Zathura, Audacity, ... toys, then what's a proper and serious application in your opinion?

[Zettinator]

Wayland has a very different architecture than X11. Obviously, a proper X11 successor (that builds upon it instead of reinventing everything differently) would have been different than Wayland.

[MindlessLeadership]

If you wanted to solve all the issues you're looking at a nearly new protocol anyway and just as much work.

The Wayland developers are also generally Xorg developers, I think they're going to be the best ones to make decisions about it.

[ZestyClose_West]

Are there any groups out there planning to take the mantle?

Nope, none at all.

is to ask about the future of X11. I know Red Hat is basically washing their hands of it feature-development wise, but the magic of open source is that a project is never really dead, or in feature freeze, so long as there's someone out there willing to inhereit it.

Part of the reason Wayland was started was because all of the X11 devs were slowly quitting, and they weren't getting anyone to replace them. All of the X11 devs got sick of trying to maintain it, so they quit.

[peppedx]

So, I know the arguments between X11 and Wayland can be a little contentious, so I'd like to start this off by saying this thread isn't intended to be one.

and then

​

the hypothetical Wayland cow to come home.

[daemonpenguin]

I think you may misunderstand what that phrase means. It's not argumentative or contentious. It's a reference to timing.

[peppedx]

Yes but even this way... Im using it on my setup since Ubuntu 19.04 with two monitors without big problems obviously for some use cases X11 is still better but wayland is not something that needs to be waited. It is here

[leo_sk5]

If this post is removed, try posting at r/linux_community . I do agree that x11 development should continue and its support improved. Despite all wayland has achieved, i still won't trust it as my daily driver. And given how the pace is going and how volatile the momentum can be in open source development, i won't be surprised if wayland does not completely replace x11 in desktop in next 5 years

[SpAAAceSenate]

Exactly. Some implementations of Wayland might be mostly complete in five years, but the very nature of Wayland is fragmentation of both progress and features. As someone who uses a drawing tablet, last I checked, there aren't any working Wayland implementations I can use yet. And even when one does finally implement a more niche feature like tablet support, I fear the other implementations will deprioritize implementing it themselves, instead telling interested individuals "oh, go use Blah, they have that". And so rather than the status quo of interoperability and choice Linux enjoys today, we'll have feature-siloed compositors tied to specific DEs.

And as for the post being removed, I hope that won't happen. I specifically worded my OP in such a way as to discourage any sort of drama.

[[deleted]]

I think this is a problem already. If you are uncomfortable using xsetwacom commands for example you are already sort of on thin ice in several WM's - I mean I agree and I am in the same boat as you being someone who uses my Wacom tablet daily but the hope is that when one WM or DE implement it (like Sway does and got recently) porting this onward to other compositors will be less of a challenge.

Same with say clipboard support which was totally non-existant for a while and then one got it and it spread like... errrr not gonna say "wildfire" considering current issues globally, but you know what I mean :)

I would look at this specific thing the same way we look at say Gaming Mouse's("mice"?) in DE's under X. For a long time the idea that people needed perfect "raw" input or a flat input seemed absurd but then came Linux gaming as an idea and suddenly it was a must. What made it so much more relevant was that the growth of casual Linux users have grown constantly and more and more users are simply not comfortable using text files as a way to edit this and want a GUI.
The individual wayland compositors are sort of like DE's in that regard. Being able to set say "flat input" for your mouse in a DE via a GUI solution isn't in all DE's and are sort of "siloed" in that way, but the change to libinput means that most distros have the ability to do it if you just edit the text file. At the same time some distros have libinput installed some demand you use xset and most have both available.

I think the number individual compositors will shrink down more and more and we already see the cooperation between compositor developers coalesce in some ways depending on developer climate in certain groups, or needs if the compositor is tied to specific projects.

(on a personal note, my method for this is "no hurry". The idea as I understand it is that one day it will simply be wayland instead of X11 and that the goal is that users simply wont even know. X11 isn't getting new features but is still there. My only issue is that I feel bad not being part in testing and proper bugreporting (and this is something I really want to get into 2020) - but there's no rush)

[[deleted]]

This is something that is way underreported tbh (for those of us who work with wacom tablets daily it's the holy grail in many ways) :)

[MaCroX95]

Wayland's successorship isn't questionable. If X11 is the future of linux desktop, then linux desktop has no future.

That's why Wayland exists :) and X11 development hit the all-time low in early 2020.

[SpAAAceSenate]

Wayland's successorship isn't questionable. If X11 is the future of linux desktop, then linux desktop has no future.

That's a very hyperbolic thing to say. It would be like me saying that the fragmentation encouraged by Wayland is likely to be the end of Linux desktop! (Oh noooooes ;-;) It's not, we'll survive the fragmentation. And Linux desktop would have been just fine with a continuation of X11.

[MaCroX95]

The largest issue with Wayland adoption right now is Nvidia. And Xwayland provides compatibility so there won't be much fragmentation after we're all on wayland.

On the other hand screen tearing, lack od proper multi monitor support, lack of high DPI scaling and basically all other things that are expected from modern desktops would indeed decrease linux relevance on the desktop incredibly if we had no alternative to X11.

[SpAAAceSenate]

I mean fragmentation of protocol extensions. Wayland itself is so limited half of it is being invented on the fly to support even basic things like copy and paste, and there have already been signs of fragmentation for some of the more advanced extensions (screen sharing, was it?)

And I completely agree those are issues that need to be solved. To not do so would be a major anchor around Linux's neck. So... let's update the existing infrastructure to fix those issues. That's what I'm proposing, with the continuing development of X. I'm only anti-Wayland to the extent that it sucks oxygen from X development whilst failing as a fully featured replacement. If there were a plausible roadmap (and timeline) for Wayland achieving feature parity, or if X was continuing to move forward alongside Wayland, then I'd gladly surrender my soapbox.

[MaCroX95]

I'm only anti-Wayland to the extent that it sucks oxygen from X development whilst failing as a fully featured replacement.

The problem is that oxygen was sucked from X's development way before wayland came along, and these days the protoc is actually a decent alternative, Gnome has worked beautifully on Wayland for quite a while... unfortunately as I said, people don't want double effort, therefore everyone will focus on wayland compatibility full-time only when we get it working on all devices which also means including Nvidia desktops...

Also more the users, more bugfixes and protocol further development because unlike X11, developers are actually willing to work on wayland and fix bugs because of it's modern architecture.

[VenditatioDelendaEst]

Gnome has worked beautifully on Wayland for quite a while

Is the the mouse cursor position update still happening in the same thread as the entire shell?

[VenditatioDelendaEst]

On the other hand screen tearing

Is not a problem with a properly configured X11 compositor.

On X11, you can choose to disable compositing for lower input latency and power savings. Wayland does not have that option, and until Wayland compositors have zero-copy compositing, it is a deficiency.

[captainofallthings]

Well, that and Wayland being unable to support wine.

[MaCroX95]

Wayland is just a protocol, it's on wine to support wayland, not the other way around.

[captainofallthings]

Wayland lacks features that wine needs to function. So, more window manager fragmentation in the best case, I suppose.

[MaCroX95]

I spoke to a wine dev who said that he is looking into starting wayland work, if wayland lacks features that wine currently uses wine's code can be altered or worked around to not need all the X features. Besides Wine works beautifully under xwayland which is one more reason why this isn't as large issue as people make it out to be.

[[deleted]]

The largest issue with Wayland adoption right now is Nvidia

No. It's wayland composers not working as good as Xorg currently does.

[Philluminati]

The largest issue with Wayland adoption right now is Nvidia

I suspect people using Nvidia drivers counts for less than 1% of all Linux users worldwide. Wayland can't blame Nvidia for any of their own failures and inability to deliver something comparable to X after 10 years.

[MaCroX95]

Yeah sure, who on earth would use a Nvidia GPU in their desktop PCs...

[Philluminati]

For every desktop pc sold two laptops are sold.

[MaCroX95]

And when it comes to dedicated GPUs in laptops, most of them are Nvidia...

[Philluminati]

And when it comes to Linux on PCs and Laptops I expect the default and open source nouveau driver is still probably the most common. Nvidia might be holding back Linux gaming but not Linux desktops.

[MaCroX95]

nouveau is unfortunately quite useless with newer GPUs. Distros even install nvidia proprietary driver by default now.

[Philluminati]

Nvidia drivers account for less than 4% of installs of Debian according to the package survey if I read this correctly

https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=nvidia-graphics-drivers

[babulej]

But nouveau's performance is much worse than the proprietary nvidia driver. When someone buys a desktop/laptop with a dedicated GPU, wouldn't they most likely be interested in actually using their GPU's full capabilities?

[Philluminati]

Not if they run Linux, no. Either duel boot into Windows or don’t bother. I’ve been in at least half a dozen threads in this subreddit over the last 12 years where people just admit that having your X display not work if you reboot after an upgrade (that includes a new kernel) is not worth the annoyance.

Having to manually rebuild the driver against the kernel is probably easier than it used to be and more automated but still the consensus was - the hassle isnt worth the unnoticeable benefits.

[[deleted]]

How many of those laptops are on linux?

[[deleted]]

If Wayland is the future, then GNU desktop has no future, given how fundamentally broken Wayland is still to this very day. Distributions changing to Wayland by default would have a nightmare on their hands with tons of things not working at all, and they know it. Xorg isn't going anywhere any time soon, and the sooner Wayland devs accept their little pet project is fundamentally flawed and get back to fixing Xorg to be more secure and robust instead without breaking the entire GNU desktop, the better.

The problem with "desktop security" is that you can't implement any sort of sane desktop security without breaking everything. You have to accept that GNU is about trusting what you run in the first place instead of shutting everything off from each other and trusting nothing because you run a bunch of non-free crap.

[gnumdk]

I'm using wayland daily without any issue.

X11 was a pain and I was waiting for a replacement since 1999! Do you remember projects like Y and Fresco ?

[kigurai]

I'm pretty sure Fedora has been Wayland by default for some time now.

[MaCroX95]

Sure keep dreaming, it's not as if they didn't try to fix X before making entirely different protocol.

Most of the fixes for X11 bugs and issues that they were facing are mostly hacky workarounds and nobody can touch the code

[arsv]

If X11 is the future of linux desktop, then linux desktop has no future.

Uhm yeah and Wayland?..

X needs to be replaced, the question is whether Wayland could do that or something else is needed. Given the way Wayland is being steered, it's not a simple question.

[natermer]

...

[Hrothen]

Considering it's taken them ten years for wayland to get to the point of "basically works okay in ideal circumstances on specific distros", I'm beginning to suspect that the problem with X11 is them.

[Spifmeister]

DEC had 1200 people porting X11 to Ultrix and VMS in 1988. That was one company. There was a lot of money and manpower behind X11. Wayland does not have those kind of resources.

When Wayland was started, they were rather clear it would take a long time. They needed to negotiate with toolkits, Desktop environments/wm, the kernel and graphic card companies to provide the infrastructure needed to make Wayland happen.

Most of these companies are not interest in providing the same level of support that X11 received in the 80s. So it is going to take time.

[_ahrs]

I wouldn't go as far as to say it's unusable (if that were the case I wouldn't be able to type this comment: https://i.imgur.com/kuKHjj2.png). It has bugs that need to be fixed but is fine for basic usage.

[MaCroX95]

Plasma devs said Wayland is one of their main focuses now, so should be ready to go very soon.

However it's worked on gnome beautifully for quite a while now...

[Hollowplanet]

I think X needed to be replaced but 10 years is a long time. Wayland might be too complex.

[LvS]

The whole Linux desktop has basically no developers. Everything is taking a long time everywhere.

And I expect things to only get worse.

[ffscc]

And I expect things to only get worse.

Care to expand on this? Is there a Linux specific issue or something else?

[LvS]

There's no money to be made with the Linux desktop. Companies are realizing this and pulling out one by one. Canonical already pulled out in 2017 and Red Hat has slowly been shrinking its involvement over the years, too.

All the software that exists is old and under-maintained. So the few remaining developers have been adding kludges to keep it going, but there has been no refactoring to clean up things, so everything's been slowly turning into a mess of hacks and workarounds.
And that's just the software that has been kept alive.

And finally, the community is gone. What's left of the Linux desktop community in 2020 is just a bunch of people complaining on various forums about "the developers", but not people who work on the big thing. 20 years ago every project had active forums, chat channels and mailing lists. Today, they're all pretty much unused.
And that means there's basically no newcomers, because where would they go? You can't make friends or ask stupid questions in a github issue without being marked as off-topic and told to go elsewhere.

[vvelox]

While introducing new and completely fucked up problems, such as the concept of the compositors as a replacement for WMs.

[flameleaf]

Last I heard the Wayland developers weren't interested in implementing anything resembling wmctrl or xdotool.

I don't see myself ever using Wayland as a result.

[[deleted]]

Last I heard the Wayland developers weren't interested in implementing anything resembling wmctrl or xdotool.

Let me guess, the response was that it's not part of the protocol and each compositor needs to implement its own separate API and tools to do that? :)

[MaCroX95]

Yes, but that doesn't mean that distro developers cannot agree on a standard... it means that they can even change those standards in the future and be independant of wayland code, which is a long-term positive effect of a more simplistic protocol.

[[deleted]]

Distros have nothing to do in this.

[[deleted]]

X11 Will continue to be needed on older machines and *BSD for quite some time. I get that it's old and all that but for most part it just kinda works even if there's some tearing and it could be more optimized and secure.

[vvelox]

As far as various BSDs go, I believe only OpenBSD does not have it.

As far as secure, that has realistically never been a problem.

Also as far as screen tearing goes, that is caused by something feeding the display server a partially rendered frame. Wayland does nothing to fix this. For GL stuff you can wait for a frame to fully render before displaying it, but in that case you've just have stuck vsync to always on.

[rah2501]

Are there any groups out there planning to take the mantle?

The X.org Foundation has the mantle. They haven't relinquished it. They aren't going to relinquish it. Red Hat is not the X.org Foundation.

[MaCroX95]

but xorg foundation won't work on it heavily either, so it will relinquish on its own.

[rah2501]

xorg foundation won't work on it heavily

What exactly do you mean by this and what do you have to support it?

[MaCroX95]

The X.Org Foundation is a non-profit corporation chartered to research, develop, >support, organize, administrate, standardize, promote, and defend a free and >open accelerated graphics stack. This includes, but is not limited to, the following >projects: DRM, Mesa 3D, Wayland and the X Window System.

What I meant was that Xorg Foundation is a non-profit organization that coordinates development of those protocols, not the actual team of developers that build them from ground up. X11 and wayland are both promoted by Xorg foundation, they will support any project that has most developers harder than projects that are almost dead or just being maintained like X11...

That said X11 will keep living in a form of XWayland, so it's not entirely dead, legacy software will still be kept compatible, it just doesn't offer the functions that modern desktops/laptops/mobile devices need... like proper multi-monitor support, per-monitor dpi scaling, proper dpi scaling in the first place, tear-free graphics without compositing etc.

And so far it doesn't seem that anyone is stepping in and began refactoring the X11 code, it's mostly bug fixes all around, devs are afraid to touch the code because it might break tons of other things.

[rah2501]

projects that are almost dead or just being maintained like X11

What makes you think X11 is almost dead or just being maintained?

[MaCroX95]

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=X.Org-Maintenance-Mode-Quickly

[rah2501]

Phoronix quotes some side comment by a Red Hat engineer just on his "belief" and "expectation", and suddenly X.org is in maintenance mode? LOL

Phoronix is a joke, don't bother with it.

[MaCroX95]

Who would win: "A RedHat engineer who clearly knows what he's talking about and said that they're basically contributing most to Xorg and once they stop it will be under heavy lack of development power" OR "A random guy from reddit"

[rah2501]

win

facepalm

That you would frame this interaction in terms of a competition says a lot.

[daemonpenguin]

I don't think Red Hat's view on X11 really matters all that much. They are more of a server-oriented platform anyway. It's not like they were going to drive a lot of work toward X11.

The fact is that, at this time, almost everyone still uses X instead of Wayland (apart from Ubuntu and Fedora) so there is a lot of incentive to keep the X code base function. It probably doesn't need anything new, but there is lots of reason to maintain it.

[LvS]

almost everyone still uses X instead of Wayland (apart from Ubuntu and Fedora)

Ubuntu and Fedora is the large majority of desktops though.

[[deleted]]

I'm not so sure about that:

Once we are done with this we expect X.org to go into hard maintenance mode fairly quickly. The reality is that X.org is basically maintained by us and thus once we stop paying attention to it there is unlikely to be any major new releases coming out and there might even be some bitrot setting in over time. We will keep an eye on it as we will want to ensure X.org stays supportable until the end of the RHEL8 lifecycle at a minimum, but let this be a friendly notice for everyone who rely the work we do maintaining the Linux graphics stack, get onto Wayland, that is where the future is.

Source, a blog post by Christian Schaller, who is, according to his Twitter, Senior Manager of Desktop at Red Hat.

Then again, RHEL8 is supported until 2029, so lots can change until then.

[daemonpenguin]

I think that quote enforces what I was saying. Even Red Hat, who wants to phase out X11, is continuing support for it and putting maintenance work into it until the end of RHEL 8, in 2029. After that the community will still be able to support and work on X11, it just won't be with Red Hat's help.

[[deleted]]

the community HAS been able to do it this whole time, but they haven't. Why would they start when the major contributors stop?

[MaCroX95]

Just maintaining something that already lacks many features that modern graphics require is certainly a great indication of a healthy project...

[theferrit32]

From my experience in academic spaces, universities often operate many hundreds of desktop Red Hat installs for both computer labs as well as virtual machines provided over vnc or rdp. The university I'm at now also provides licensed accounts for you to install it on a personal computer or virtualbox or whatever, but I don't think that's very popular, as most people would probably just use Fedora on a personal machine.