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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: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Thursday July 04 2019, @07:44PM (6 children)
I keep getting these desires to burn down everything and start over! Reboot personal computing. Replacing X with Wayland fits with that urge. Wayland is not the only X killer. What about a serious push towards microkernel architecture? A big part of X is the graphics drivers. What if we didn't need kernel privileged or kernel based drivers any more? Would X or Wayland still make sense in such a system?
The x86 arch is still terrible. Can't fully virtualize it. In particular, can't virtualize the 3D graphics acceleration at 100% speed, Starting in 2013, Intel rolled out this Graphics Virtualization Technology (GVT), followed by the NVidia vGPU stuff in 2014, and most recently this AMD MxGPU, which, if their marketing claims are to be believed, is the first "hardware based GPU virtualization solution".
But, nice though fully virtualized graphics would be, I would like fully open source graphics drivers even more. For years, I've been bouncing between NVidia, AMD/ATI, and Intel graphics, trying to run with whoever is playing nicest with open source software. Right now, that seems to be Intel. It's like they're more open because they need every other edge they can get to counter the much better performance of NVidia and AMD.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 05 2019, @03:03AM (5 children)
Somebody else linked this the other day. Sorry, can't remember who. Nineteen years old and still pretty relevant to your desires.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/ [joelonsoftware.com]
I don't think he's correct that it is always a bad idea - some things need to die in a fire1 - but you need some major resources behind you to re-implement from scratch.
1. <cough>systemD </cough>
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Friday July 05 2019, @05:13AM (3 children)
Interesting read, thanks. Another way I've heard it put is, "don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good".
And yet, the concept of "bit rot" is basically analogous to the aging that nearly all living organisms suffer. If not throwing away all that experience is so great, why do so many organisms die of old age? The biological way of growing new individuals, essentially from scratch, has a lot of advantages, despite the seeming loss of valuable experience in the aging and death of old individuals, and the heavy costs involved in parenting and education.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 05 2019, @11:14AM (1 child)
How can bits rot in the cloud?
I mean, I understand bitrot on disk where sectors die.
The cloud is redundant raid almighty copies forever, right?
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Friday July 05 2019, @12:09PM
I meant bit rot in the context of unmaintained software. Changes are always breaking old software.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by deimtee on Friday July 05 2019, @02:46PM
Because you're looking at the wrong levels. The genetic code is what is passed on from generation to generation and it is certainly never rewritten from scratch.
You should look at organisms as compiled instances of the program. You start them up, run them until the hardware craps out, then recompile on new hardware.
Each generation adds a few tweaks, swaps a few modules in and out and, if the compiled instance runs well, it gets the chance to copy its code into the next generation.
ps. I just realised how double-entendred my original wording was - "Nineteen years old and still pretty relevant to your desires." pffft. I didn't even mean to do that. Sorry.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 06 2019, @06:29PM
If you want something systemd-init like without all the journald and logind stuff tagging along, there are multiple choices already.
But none of them have the resources backing them like systemd has with Red Hat (and now IBM).