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Chris Siebenmann, a UNIX herder at the University of Toronto CS Lab, asserts that the death watch for the X Window System (aka X11) has probably started:
I was recently reading Christian F.K. Schaller's On the Road to Fedora Workstation 31 (via both Fedora Planet and Planet Gnome). In it, Schaller says in one section (about Gnome and their move to fully work on Wayland):
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.
X11, for all its advantages, also has several incurable design flaws relating to security. However, the major distros have not yet been in any hurry to replace it. Wayland is touted as the next step in graphical interfaces. What are Soylentils thoughts on Wayland or the demise of X11?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 04 2019, @04:27PM (15 children)
First it was init. Now its X11. Next we'll lose the kernel; that will go to intel and redhat too.
Eventually Puttering will write his own license to replace the GPL. Every distro will adopt it; "that is where the future is".
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 04 2019, @04:50PM (6 children)
Don't like it ? Fork it ! Isn't that what you geeks always say ? Along with "choice is good" and things like that.
So when the average Joe complains, he's just a whiny bicth that should learn to code and fork it.
But when a geek complains, it's legitimate ?
Eat your own dog food, geeks.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 04 2019, @05:04PM (1 child)
Parent could very well be Linus, asshole.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 04 2019, @05:35PM
> Parent could very well be Linus, asshole.
Parent could very well be Linus' asshole.
FTFY.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by acid andy on Thursday July 04 2019, @05:17PM (3 children)
Choice is good, but:
So they are doing something now that is going to cut down on the amount of choice available, by their own admission.
If we were talking about a separate software application that any hacker worth their salt could modify, then yeah, fork away. But this is a core operating system component in use in most distros. Maintaining your own fork would be a complex and time-consuming undertaking. It also has risks associated if security vulnerabilities aren't closed in a timely manner. There's no guarantee it would get widespread uptake in the Linux community and it would need to be promoted and supported. Just because most of us don't have the knowledge or the time to do all that, doesn't mean we can't kick up a stink if all the distros want to move away from X11 and it doesn't mean we can't win an argument with you.
What do you think of SystemD, BTW?
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Friday July 05 2019, @03:55AM
Actually, they're not going to continue doing something that is no longer interesting to them, for whatever various reasons. That will have the eventual side effect of cutting down the available choices if no-one else picks up the baton and moves forward with X.
If X is truly valuable to someone(s) with sufficient resources (on the order of $1M per year), it can continue to be developed and maintained to a good level of modern functionality. If no-one is willing to pony up and do that, it must be because the available alternatives meet their needs well enough.
$1M per year might be in the form of a team of 6 full-time paid devs plus a couple of admin/website types, or it might be part-time volunteer work from 60 devs and another 20-30 open community management types. In the greater scheme, it's not a lot - whether or not it happens is a sort of capitalist / open source reality check on the value of X to the future.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 05 2019, @08:52AM (1 child)
The real problem here, is how poorly redhat does things.
Many people hate systemd. Others stand by it, but that's all irrelevant. What IS an issue is the roll out.
First, it was forced. Redhat = Gnome = Systemd. A chain of 'must use'.
Second, it was very, very buggy and not ready for prime time.
Third, there are still fundamental flaws in its design, which can be found all over the place.
Fourth? Control. Redhat now controls that whole stack.
Judging by other aspects of code redhat authors/maintains, and by things like pulseaudio, and how those have been maintained, I suspect wayland will be very, very buggy.
Primarily, they don't give a flying fuck about "other usage cases". This is logical from a business perspective, why spend money maintaining code for (say) debian, or arch, or a bsd, or anyone else the might have bugs? Where's the profit in that?
So you have weird edge case stuff? OK, uh.. whatever. It's not like they're going to test for it, or fix it if it interferes with their end goal / how they want things to run.
Realistically, what's happening here is a continuation of what's been happening a long time.
And now with IBM owning redhat. It will logically get a LOT worse, because IBM is just a hell hole of stentch. They've been in a horrid downward spiral for decades, and it's been REALLY bad the last 10+ years.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 05 2019, @09:08AM
Just to add to my above blather...
The thing here is, 'edge cases' are what makes/made Linux great. Awesome.
It's what made for insane stability, compared to other platforms. It's what makes it so *usable*. Think ; corporate culture has a budget, has limits on should be developed. Obscure features that they don't need? Or, that some middle level manager thinks "Wtf?! Why! Who cares!" about...
Well, imagine trying to explain why you "wasted" 10% of your budget on "stupid shit 4 people use"?
Redhat has had much culture shift over the last 20+ years. And it's grown, massively. If you take away all those edge cases?
You get any other corporate OS. Like Windows.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 04 2019, @05:53PM
We have not lost anything and X11 will last forever. You're using free software wrong.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Thursday July 04 2019, @05:58PM (5 children)
When snap/docker/et. al. get their act together, that will become the future - every app running in its own sandbox, just sharing the basic kernel functions, maybe with a scattering of full blown VMs to support the software too niched and poorly supported to get out of their legacy OSs.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Thursday July 04 2019, @07:20PM (4 children)
30-ish years ago when I started digging into x86 assembler, protected modes, etc., I assumed OSes would do everything that way: user processes, especially, in ring 3, sandboxed. Okay, we'll let things like Netware slide- performance being the highest priority so we run in flat memory model / mode. Fast-forward to the various "hypervisors", VMWare, Xen, QEMU, Docker, etc., and I'm still scratching my head: shouldn't that all be integrated into an OS, by definition? I understand the philosophy of for example IBM VM where they can run multiple various guest OSes. But a PC OS should pretty much include sandboxing in the OS, and then run a guest OS in a container, if needed.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 04 2019, @08:13PM (3 children)
Incidentally, this is what Windows does, as soon as you install the Hyper-V role: it installs a type-1 hypervisor as boot environment and demotes the original OS to a guest vm with full management capabilities. They used this capability explicitly for the "XP compatibility mode" of Windows 7: it installed a full Windows XP as a guest vm, and used application-level RDP to integrate the applications running in the XP partition into the primary Windows (7) desktop.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Thursday July 04 2019, @10:45PM (2 children)
Thanks, I didn't know that in detail, but it makes sense, and it's pretty cool (in an MS way). The RDP link reminds me of, uh, um, X-windows maybe? :}
My point / thinking was (is) that an OS should have bare-metal hypervisor VM built in- all integrated into one thing, and run applications in ring 3 so that if something goes wrong, you don't crash the whole OS that might be running other important applications.
But as I write I'm thinking that maybe a guest OS could have little overhead, so running 1 application per guest OS might not be so bad. It all depends on where you divide the hypervisor and guest OS.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday July 04 2019, @11:33PM (1 child)
Containers like snap / Docker are very lightweight, they just carry the filesystem (that they need, which can be seriously pared down) and use the host's kernel. On the other hand, running a Windows 10 guest OS in a VM is MUCH heavier.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Friday July 05 2019, @12:51AM
Yeah, thanks, I've played with them but didn't pay so much attention to those details, like RAM overhead. Seem awesome and easy to set up. It's all very interesting to me- the various architectures, divisions, etc. Last year I came up to speed on VMWare (seemed pretty easy) thinking I would be getting a full-time job including VMWare, but that didn't pan out. And I have one machine currently running Xen / Alpine Linux and it seems awesome and very easy to configure. The Xen hypervisor seems very lightweight. So yeah, it all depends on what you're doing, how many cores you have available, how well your applications can utilize CPU cores, if it's a server or workstation, etc.
*According to the television on in the background, a pink-haired Meghan Trainor is still all 'bout dat bass. I'm relieved- I was afraid she had moved on.
(Score: 2) by epitaxial on Friday July 05 2019, @01:19PM
Today's Linux is hot garbage and it resembles nothing of old distros. Move to BSD where you have real working documentation (the FreeBSD handbook) and a more conservative way of releasing. On Linux if something manages to compile then it ships. Things work the way they always did, no rewrites of decade old tools for no good reason other than they didn't work with systemd. I've used plenty of operating systems in my day (Ultrix, SunOS, Solaris, IRIX, OpenVMS) and right now Linux and Windows 10 are in a race to the bottom.