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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, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 04 2019, @07:47PM (6 children)
There is also Arcan (stuff written for X11 or Wayland will run on it). It seems to be much more sanely designed than Wayland (for instance, network transparency works, and they didn't go full retard like wayland with every "window manager" needing to implement the equivalent of nearly the entirety of X11-- but I guess wayland proponents wanted a large barrier to entry to force people to not have choices, and didn't think a zillion lines of code duplication and the bugs associated with it were as important as limiting user choice (fuck redshat).
My guess is that with redshat backing wayland, they will pull the same games as with systemd to make stuff they have suffient influence over depend on wayland in an attempt to force other distros to use it. But, if Arcan can maintain wayland compatibility, then redshat might be foiled.
https://arcan-fe.com/2018/05/31/revisiting-the-arcan-project/ [arcan-fe.com]
https://github.com/letoram/arcan [github.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 04 2019, @09:42PM (3 children)
That is a single person's vanity project, iirc.
Beyond that your comment seems to be on point. And things are likely to get worse now that Big Blue is finalizing its buyout of Red Hat.
(Score: 5, Touché) by c0lo on Friday July 05 2019, @02:11AM (2 children)
What do you think Linux was in the beginning?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 06 2019, @06:18PM (1 child)
Torvalds was more than happy to accept patches from day one. The Arcan dev seems not so inclined and more into staking his own fief.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 07 2019, @01:00PM
Except there is nothing to support that claim? there is literary a page on where to contribute? Seems much more like ’I do this for these reasons, other than that, IDGAF’ which is just what Linus mail read like. If you want actual jonestown cult building, look at wlroots.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 05 2019, @11:13PM
Arcan is really really interesting. I spent a big chunk on the wiki alone and a fair bit more on the demos. The technical detail behind how it survives and rebuilds itself on crashes and how that was a foundation for the network transparency is jaw dropping. Found this https://gfycat.com/totalsecondhanddoctorfish [gfycat.com] that the author had posted on IRC. Bad video but that is damn transparent networking, literally drag and drop between machines.
(Score: 2) by DeVilla on Sunday July 07 2019, @04:21AM
I'm still dreading the forced client side decorations. I already hate when a gnome3 window pops up for some reason and doesn't implement something like "window shading" or "no raise on click" correctly because they chose to write extra code to not cooperate with my desktop environment. The wayland world is going to break some many things I take for granted.
Does Wayland have the windows behavior of not let you move a window if the program is hung the way windows did? I know most of the current apps that are using client side decorations currently seem to turn "invisible" when they program hangs. At least with "normal" X1 apps you get the window boards if not a gray window.