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posted by chromas on Thursday July 04 2019, @03:41PM   Printer-friendly
from the should've-had-an-X12 dept.

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?


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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 04 2019, @05:04PM (10 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 04 2019, @05:04PM (#863165)

    It doesn't have remote rendering built in, but that's generally become a power user feature to the point that many users don't even know it exists, and it's become almost impossible to even get it turned on in most distributions. It's unfortunate, but it's also much less important than it used to be. The nice thing about X remote display is that it's kind of hard for a program to break it accidentally. But Wayland will still support things like VNC. The basic capability of remote display is important enough to enough people that I don't think Wayland will get much use until it works somehow.

    A much bigger problem is that there's no support for window managers. Unlike remote display, everyone uses those. Wayland will give everyone the same amount of user interface flexibility as Windows does.

    Won't it be great when Red Hat decides everyone needs to use the ribbon interface? That's the problem with Wayland.

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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by acid andy on Thursday July 04 2019, @05:22PM (2 children)

    by acid andy (1683) on Thursday July 04 2019, @05:22PM (#863171) Homepage Journal

    A much bigger problem is that there's no support for window managers. Unlike remote display, everyone uses those. Wayland will give everyone the same amount of user interface flexibility as Windows does.

    Urrrrghhh. I think I'm going to puke!

    --
    If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
    • (Score: 2) by acid andy on Friday July 05 2019, @02:35PM (1 child)

      by acid andy (1683) on Friday July 05 2019, @02:35PM (#863487) Homepage Journal

      +5 Informative? LMFAO. Nice.

      --
      If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
      • (Score: 2) by Osamabobama on Friday July 05 2019, @04:54PM

        by Osamabobama (5842) on Friday July 05 2019, @04:54PM (#863533)

        If you didn't, in fact, puke, you will need to return some of those 'informative' mod points.

        --
        Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 04 2019, @05:56PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 04 2019, @05:56PM (#863178)

    It doesn't have remote rendering built in, but that's generally become a power user feature to the point that many users don't even know it exists, and it's become almost impossible to even get it turned on in most distributions

    Speak for yourself. Unix is an OS for professionals, and we use features that home users don't consider.
    "Almost impossible to turn on"? Jeez, if there isn't a desktop icon...

  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Bot on Thursday July 04 2019, @07:08PM (3 children)

    by Bot (3902) on Thursday July 04 2019, @07:08PM (#863203) Journal

    So, in exchange for no tearing in the desktop, which I have already seen solved with sdl and a 3d card which everybody has nowadays, I should give up ssh -X AND my fave WM? LOL what a good deal.

    --
    Account abandoned.
    • (Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 04 2019, @09:35PM (2 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 04 2019, @09:35PM (#863245)

      Or even simple vsync.

      The basic answer is that the FOSS world have a real problem with maintenance, as people want to be seen as creators rather than maintainers. It is impressive how Linus Torvalds have stuck with the Linux kernel this long, as most other such projects would have long since been foisted on to the first person asking (and usually those are the least suitable to be handed the reins).

      For example Poettering managed to talk himself into de-facto maintainership of consolekit (it had it own share of flaws but at least it was a free standing piece), that he then went and replaced with systemd-logind. End result, graphical logins on DEs are now dependent on systemd.

      • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday July 05 2019, @12:47AM (1 child)

        by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Friday July 05 2019, @12:47AM (#863295) Journal

        End result, graphical logins on DEs are now dependent on systemd.

        Devuan with LXDE user here - no, they aren't.

        --
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 06 2019, @06:12PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 06 2019, @06:12PM (#863886)

          LXDE is slowly dying as the devs behind it has moved to LXQt because they didn't like the Gnome centric direction GTK was going. Meaning that LXDE predates the systemd putch and is unlikely to ever adopt systemd-isms.

          XFCE on the other hand, and maybe LXQt, is rapidly heading that direction.

          There is however a Qt based DE being developed over in BSD land that could be interesting in this regard.

          Note though that all this will be academic if ever Wayland fully supplants X11, as Wayland again depends on systemd-logind to talk to policykit/polkit to mediate access to the /dev entries it uses to draw those frame perfect pictures. A scheme that is becoming more and more "popular" in Freedesktop land, by splitting anything "sensitive" into a server component that communicates via dbus to a frontend. And the chatter between the two parts is again vetted by polkit and logind, to make sure it is coming from a "session" with the proper privileges.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 04 2019, @09:52PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 04 2019, @09:52PM (#863252)

    You lies. There are Wm supporting wayland they are called compositors.

    https://community.kde.org/KWin/Wayland [kde.org]
    https://github.com/Enlightenment/enlightenment/blob/master/README.wayland [github.com]
    ...

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 06 2019, @06:16PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 06 2019, @06:16PM (#863889)

      A Wayland "WM" has to take on far more responsibilities than the equivalent on X11.

      This to the point that some has started to build helper frameworks to do all the heavy lifting that X11 used to provide.

      But this still means that there will be fragmentation between Gnome's take, KDE's take, and whatever minimalist implementation the rest of the community managed to scrape together. Gnome in particular far too often goes their own way, and they have the ear of the main Wayland devs (probably because everyone is working for the big red fedora).