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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: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 04 2019, @10:55PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 04 2019, @10:55PM (#863275)

    Keith Packard was one of the major fork proponents, and if you go and look at his pedegree, he was with X since X11R3 or so, before they had even formalized it into a hardware agnostic protocol (Early X versions had all sort of endianness and other issues, as well as major performance regressions when run on a big or little endian platform for a feature expecting the other. Most features were big endian at the time, which caused issues on little endian platforms. This all got fixed between R3 and R6, but there were many incompatible breakages along the way.

    Personally I think the best solution at this point is an X11R7 that fixes some of the issues in the protocol (particularly around synchronization performance) and fork off new revisions of the libraries that allow some new function calls (stubbed out but added to the older R6 Xlib fork, so apps can be API compatible at the expense of performance, or just do that in the toolkits if anyone would actually support backwards compatibility...)

    End result: X11R7 gets performance gains comparable to wayland, backwards compatibility can be maintained, albeit along a slower codepath, and new optimized programs can run at speeds that couldn't be obtained with the previous synchronization features.

    A tangentally related idea: It's time to reimplement Display Postscript. It would actually be useful, performant, and scalable enough on modern GPGPUs, would allow wysiwig screen to paper printing, and it would negate a whole slew of kludges in modern display toolkits caused by relying on raster graphics for everything.

    Just my 2 cents as a long time user and a sage of esoteric display subsystems.

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