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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: 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.