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: 5, Insightful) by sweettea on Thursday July 04 2019, @03:46PM (14 children)
(Disclaimer: employed by Red Hat)
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 04 2019, @03:56PM (2 children)
Ballsy. How long till IBM outsources your job to India?
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Thursday July 04 2019, @11:21PM (1 child)
I thought Red Hat was now an Israeli/NSA spy operation. You can't afford to fuck something like that up using Indian stinkies.
(Score: 4, Touché) by c0lo on Friday July 05 2019, @12:39AM
You keep repeating that word. I'm sure it doesn't mean what you think it means (grin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 5, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Thursday July 04 2019, @05:53PM (10 children)
Maybe not for your use case. As a regular user of Windows/Android/iOS/Linux desktop sharing, VNC does that pretty well.
Disclaimer: not a fan of Wayland, nor any other change for the sake of change development - but, when your perfectly workable VNC desktop sharing solution gets ignored and people start borking systems in the field by trying to install Microsoft's Remote Desktop server on Ubuntu... one does become defensive about VNC. That being said, give Wayland another 10 years of serious development under widespread use, and I _might_ consider it ready to replace X. Meanwhile: hands off my x11vnc.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 3, Interesting) by hemocyanin on Thursday July 04 2019, @08:42PM (7 children)
Does VNC allow you to just run one program or do you have to run the whole desktop metaphor and run whatever you want inside that? When I'm running a gui program remotely, I typically just want to run that one program, usually along side some things I'm doing in the terminal window I used to SSH there. I don't need a whole desktop metaphor running inside my immediate desktop metaphor.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Thursday July 04 2019, @09:05PM (3 children)
I feel like an outsider here still using headless servers and CLI. I've yet to truly need a window manager, X, Wayland, or VNC on any server.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 3, Informative) by hemocyanin on Thursday July 04 2019, @09:25PM
For me, it isn't so much "need" as convenience. Some things are easier in a GUI and some things are harder. I've had occasion (rarely) to run GIMP over SSH -- certainly quicker and easier to get the right custom crop on a single image than using imagemagick CLI tools. By the same token, doing a mass change to an entire directory of images is way better on the CLI.
On a frequent basis, I end up using a GUI text editor because I find those more convenient than CLI text editors when I'm dealing with more than one screen of text and especially when dealing with multiple files open at the same time. One file and relatively short though? I'll just use nano. I can, with some annoyance, use vi. I don't know emacs and never had the motivation to learn.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 05 2019, @04:41AM
I have a use-case: remove visualisation of large data sets.
The only reasonable use-case for a remote window system involves a use-case where you can't transfer the required data (in which case you can use local tools).
For me that's only true when I want to make a movie from terabyte-sized datasets that exist on a cluster somewhere.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Bot on Friday July 05 2019, @05:30AM
Did you ever need to get a file on the server that is blocked as a direct download, so that even using wget with all the session data and cookies and certs fails? the only way is to run the browser on the server, get to the download and save. Last time i tried a curses browser for some web2.0 sites, it wasn't pretty.
opening a full desktop session and vnc is hugely impractical, especially since in most VPS the ram is not to be wasted.
This guy basically said: we want x11 to die by induced bitrot (we have the tools nudge nudge wink wink), so that our solution gets mainstream.
If you remove x11 expect compatibility problems till 2038.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 04 2019, @10:39PM (1 child)
however the program has to properly grab context on its own, otherwise you need at least a minimalist window manager to help handle it.
That said: I have used X and vnc in non-interactive modes for decades when I just needed something displayed on a second screen, and xinerama/multimode/etc wasn't available.
In fact the only downside to X so far has been due to no serious support for networked gl transmission to run 3d apps remotely. Since it needs the state in the GPU, VNC works out best for viewing those apps remotely.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 06 2019, @06:02PM
Crazy thing is that the first OpenGL implementation was indirect, meaning that he OpenGL instructions could be streamed across a network to a local GPU.
But apparently it was not giving people enough frames per second so the current scheme was adopted.
And they have the balls to claim that because of this, X is no longer network transparent.
NO, the protocol is still network transparent.
But the programs implemented in GTK and Qt these days are not because they insist on yakking directly to the GPU via Linux-specific DRI calls.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday July 04 2019, @11:35PM
I've never tried - my use case pretty much demands full desktop access, but I believe VNC protocol would allow you to just share a single window if that's how you want to configure the server, and the client would be none-the-wiser.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by stormreaver on Friday July 05 2019, @02:33AM (1 child)
Where I work, VNC and RDC have been banned as security problems. However, ssh is still the preferred access mechanism; so X forwarding through ssh is still useful to some degree. As it turns out, though, I haven't needed to run a graphical program through ssh for a number of years.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday July 05 2019, @03:42AM
Ironically enough, our corporate network also bans VNC as a security risk, but several products we sell have it baked in as our remote support tool... When I started they didn't have a desk for me so I continued to work from home as I had been doing at my previous job, installed VNC, started using the heck out of it with colleagues two timezones away, then when I finally got a cube and tried to download a VNC client from within the office network I got the big "THIS SITE HAS BEEN BANNED..." notice, oh well.
One day, about 3 months after that, some visiting IT mavens dropped by my desk and casually asked me about how I was using VNC - I explained how it helps to collaborate with our other teams around the country, how it is cross platform which is important for sharing our Linux product screens with people on their Windows based development machines, they nodded, thanked me for my time and walked away. Five years later the other shoe hasn't dropped yet...
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 04 2019, @03:50PM (12 children)
Can you have programs running with remote display over the network? Then ok, maybe, if it doesn't become a monstrosity.
Otherwise, fuck off Red Hat and PoetteringOS.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 04 2019, @05:04PM (10 children)
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.
(Score: 5, Informative) by acid andy on Thursday July 04 2019, @05:22PM (2 children)
Urrrrghhh. I think I'm going to puke!
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Friday July 05 2019, @02:35PM (1 child)
+5 Informative? LMFAO. Nice.
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.
(Score: 2) by Osamabobama on Friday July 05 2019, @04:54PM
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
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)
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)
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)
Devuan with LXDE user here - no, they aren't.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 06 2019, @06:12PM
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)
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
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).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 06 2019, @06:05PM
Apparently there is multiple schemes being cooked up to do wayland over the network.
One of them, Pipewire, is really a generic media streaming system that is aiming to replace Pulseaudio now that it has "stabilized"...
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 04 2019, @03:55PM (17 children)
When people were dissatisfies with how XFree86 handled it, X.org took over. If X.org no longer properly maintains it, someone else might take over.
Of course it might also be that someone creates a new protocol that has all the advantages of X, but none of its disadvantages. But that's much less likely, to put it mildly.
Anyway, if Wayland is the future, I don't like the future.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by canopic jug on Thursday July 04 2019, @04:20PM (14 children)
The X11 code is rather special. It requires in-depth knowledge and then a lot of work to make any kind of changes. Again, some of the flaws are with the design and those won't be fixed by patching even if someone skilled and motivated were to adopt part of the code base. What is needed is modifying or replacing the specification, and then new code. However, I agree with the other comments about the lack of remote access in Wayland being a deal breaker. VNC and the others just won't cut it for most use cases.
Another bit of special code is related to NTP. There are relatively few people capable of doing a reimplementation. Poul-Henning Kamp was one of the right people for the job and was looking at writing a replacement, after realizing that the legacy code was an intractible mess. However, he seems to have stopped blogging about it [freebsd.dk] a few years ago. A casual browse around the web doesn't turn up any recent code either and the ntimed project page has no links to and recent code [nwtime.org] and only mentions something about 2017, year which has already passed.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Snotnose on Thursday July 04 2019, @04:45PM (4 children)
Eric Raymond [ibiblio.org] has been working on NTP.
Relationship status: Available for curbside pickup.
(Score: 3, Informative) by canopic jug on Thursday July 04 2019, @05:07PM (3 children)
I'm not finding ESR's name on the list of NTP contributors [ntp.org]. However, PHK is on their active list.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 04 2019, @07:05PM
Raymond is working on NTPsec, a partial rewrite/refactoring focused on hardening and limited to non-legacy systems.
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Thursday July 04 2019, @07:47PM
Did you read Snot's link?
"It is easier to fool someone than it is to convince them that they have been fooled" Mark Twain
(Score: 2, Informative) by ncc74656 on Thursday July 04 2019, @10:20PM
He's working on NTPsec [ntpsec.org].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 04 2019, @07:05PM
Chrony (https://chrony.tuxfamily.org/)
(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
(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.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 05 2019, @08:46AM
Speaking of NTP...
Notice how NTP's timeservers are all DNS based? To be clear, what's really happening is people are donating timeserver services, and they're using the NTP.org domain to do it.
Now notice how ntp.org is now DNSSEC based?
What happens if the time is too far off, with DNSSEC based records? That's right, they DO NOT WORK!
So if your clock is out of sync too far, and we're not talking even weeks here, more like days or EVEN hours depending on the state of the DNSSEC record, you can't use NTP to update your time, because NO DNS RECORD!
What fool thought DNSSEC for NTP servers was a good idea, I'll never know. But it's indicative of people not thinking things through today. DNSSEC! SECURE!!!
And of little use, if you can't get the record.
And yes, you can disablr in your DNS server, eg bind, but of what use is that? Then why have it?
So now I have to use IP addresses on all my servers, and hope they don't change... otherwise no NTP for me!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 04 2019, @09:40PM
X11 will probably stand and fall with Keith Packard. Much like Linus Torvalds, he has been sticking with one project for much of his life. And that project being some variant or other of the X protocol. He event was brought in as a consultant by Valve to work on bringing VR headsets to X11.
The rest that has worked on it in more recent years have been far too hung up on frames pr second and the narrow use cases of the major DEs.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 04 2019, @10:55PM
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.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 04 2019, @04:12PM (14 children)
So the "incurable design flaw" is that someone doesn't know about the secure keyboard functionality?
No, you won't find it in the Gnome terminal. But xterm has it. Left mouse button menu, second entry.
And when running in its own window, Emacs will automatically secure the keyboard for password entries.
Oh, and what you see is the input to your X session. Now if you could see the keystrokes of someone ssh-ing from somewhere else with X11 forwarding, that would be a real security flaw.
Next on: If you start a program locally, it has access to all your files!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 04 2019, @04:21PM (2 children)
exwm (emacs x window manager) master race
(Score: 5, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 04 2019, @04:48PM (1 child)
emacs as a window manager sounds fascinating
just as long as it works with gvim so i have a decent text editor
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Thursday July 04 2019, @10:35PM
Would evil-mode [jeaye.com] meet most of your needs?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 04 2019, @06:03PM (10 children)
"Secure keyboard" is merely security theater. A keylogger will still be able to steal your keyboard input using XInput and there is nothing you can do to stop it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 04 2019, @06:22PM (4 children)
and do not be an idiot in public
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 04 2019, @10:43PM (3 children)
Keylogger malware runs under your account privileges and will not be stopped this way because it has access to xauth information.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 05 2019, @01:15AM (1 child)
And do not blame tools for your idiocy when you do.
Same as you do not try and "secure" your arse from your left or right hand, and instead just refrain from improper use of root vegetables, household tools, lighting implements, small animals and the like: http://www.well.com/~cynsa/newbutt.html [well.com]
BTW, the ways to run suspect software with limited privileges on a GNU/Linux system are many and quite powerful, while none of them involves breaking every thing GUI presently in existence and hobbling everything else. No one prevents you from learning them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 05 2019, @09:02AM
I don't know what that new butt page is all about, except that I'm not going to go there.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 05 2019, @11:32AM
Anybody serious about keylogging will use a hardware keylogger, intercepting hardware in transit is more likely than you think.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 04 2019, @08:48PM (2 children)
A person could insert a hardware keylogger between your keyboard and the computer and what would you do about that?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 05 2019, @02:45AM
If you negotiate the minefield in the drive
And beat the dogs and cheat the cold electronic eyes
And if you make it past the shotguns in the hall
Dial the combination, open the priesthole
And if I'm in I'll tell you where to stick your hardware.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Saturday July 06 2019, @04:08AM
Understand that virtually all security is circumventable with physical access?
This is a long-standing rule of computer security.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 04 2019, @09:46PM (1 child)
xinput is a debug tool, naturally it will lead to problems.
That said, there are ways to defend against it. But it is a but convoluted right now for casual use, as it involves routing windows through something like xpra.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 04 2019, @10:49PM
XInput is not a debug tool, it is an X extension providing a generic interface to input devices. It is entirely separate from the core keyboard and mouse API and does not respect keyboard or server grabs, which is what "secure keyboard" features use to pretend they are keeping input only to themselves. XInput keeps accumulating events during the server grab and sends them on to the keylogger once the grab is released. If XInput code were to respect grabs, this last key event leak could be plugged and it would once again be possible to implement the "secure keyboard". XInput developers, however, are not interested in doing that, presumably because they are all working on Wayland first and are assuming that X will die.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 04 2019, @04:27PM (15 children)
First it was init. Now its X11. Next we'll lose the kernel; that will go to intel and redhat too.
Eventually Puttering will write his own license to replace the GPL. Every distro will adopt it; "that is where the future is".
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 04 2019, @04:50PM (6 children)
Don't like it ? Fork it ! Isn't that what you geeks always say ? Along with "choice is good" and things like that.
So when the average Joe complains, he's just a whiny bicth that should learn to code and fork it.
But when a geek complains, it's legitimate ?
Eat your own dog food, geeks.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 04 2019, @05:04PM (1 child)
Parent could very well be Linus, asshole.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 04 2019, @05:35PM
> Parent could very well be Linus, asshole.
Parent could very well be Linus' asshole.
FTFY.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by acid andy on Thursday July 04 2019, @05:17PM (3 children)
Choice is good, but:
So they are doing something now that is going to cut down on the amount of choice available, by their own admission.
If we were talking about a separate software application that any hacker worth their salt could modify, then yeah, fork away. But this is a core operating system component in use in most distros. Maintaining your own fork would be a complex and time-consuming undertaking. It also has risks associated if security vulnerabilities aren't closed in a timely manner. There's no guarantee it would get widespread uptake in the Linux community and it would need to be promoted and supported. Just because most of us don't have the knowledge or the time to do all that, doesn't mean we can't kick up a stink if all the distros want to move away from X11 and it doesn't mean we can't win an argument with you.
What do you think of SystemD, BTW?
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Friday July 05 2019, @03:55AM
Actually, they're not going to continue doing something that is no longer interesting to them, for whatever various reasons. That will have the eventual side effect of cutting down the available choices if no-one else picks up the baton and moves forward with X.
If X is truly valuable to someone(s) with sufficient resources (on the order of $1M per year), it can continue to be developed and maintained to a good level of modern functionality. If no-one is willing to pony up and do that, it must be because the available alternatives meet their needs well enough.
$1M per year might be in the form of a team of 6 full-time paid devs plus a couple of admin/website types, or it might be part-time volunteer work from 60 devs and another 20-30 open community management types. In the greater scheme, it's not a lot - whether or not it happens is a sort of capitalist / open source reality check on the value of X to the future.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 05 2019, @08:52AM (1 child)
The real problem here, is how poorly redhat does things.
Many people hate systemd. Others stand by it, but that's all irrelevant. What IS an issue is the roll out.
First, it was forced. Redhat = Gnome = Systemd. A chain of 'must use'.
Second, it was very, very buggy and not ready for prime time.
Third, there are still fundamental flaws in its design, which can be found all over the place.
Fourth? Control. Redhat now controls that whole stack.
Judging by other aspects of code redhat authors/maintains, and by things like pulseaudio, and how those have been maintained, I suspect wayland will be very, very buggy.
Primarily, they don't give a flying fuck about "other usage cases". This is logical from a business perspective, why spend money maintaining code for (say) debian, or arch, or a bsd, or anyone else the might have bugs? Where's the profit in that?
So you have weird edge case stuff? OK, uh.. whatever. It's not like they're going to test for it, or fix it if it interferes with their end goal / how they want things to run.
Realistically, what's happening here is a continuation of what's been happening a long time.
And now with IBM owning redhat. It will logically get a LOT worse, because IBM is just a hell hole of stentch. They've been in a horrid downward spiral for decades, and it's been REALLY bad the last 10+ years.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 05 2019, @09:08AM
Just to add to my above blather...
The thing here is, 'edge cases' are what makes/made Linux great. Awesome.
It's what made for insane stability, compared to other platforms. It's what makes it so *usable*. Think ; corporate culture has a budget, has limits on should be developed. Obscure features that they don't need? Or, that some middle level manager thinks "Wtf?! Why! Who cares!" about...
Well, imagine trying to explain why you "wasted" 10% of your budget on "stupid shit 4 people use"?
Redhat has had much culture shift over the last 20+ years. And it's grown, massively. If you take away all those edge cases?
You get any other corporate OS. Like Windows.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 04 2019, @05:53PM
We have not lost anything and X11 will last forever. You're using free software wrong.
(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.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(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.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(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.
(Score: 2) by epitaxial on Friday July 05 2019, @01:19PM
Today's Linux is hot garbage and it resembles nothing of old distros. Move to BSD where you have real working documentation (the FreeBSD handbook) and a more conservative way of releasing. On Linux if something manages to compile then it ships. Things work the way they always did, no rewrites of decade old tools for no good reason other than they didn't work with systemd. I've used plenty of operating systems in my day (Ultrix, SunOS, Solaris, IRIX, OpenVMS) and right now Linux and Windows 10 are in a race to the bottom.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by hendrikboom on Thursday July 04 2019, @05:08PM (12 children)
I am still actively using ssh -X
I do it when accessing an accounting progam running on a server from my laptop.
I do it when reading my email using mutt. When I see an HTML message that seems safe, I read it using a server-side browser. I'd prefer a client-side browser (i.e. a browser that runs on the confusingly named X server), but there doesn't seem to be an obviou way to do this).
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Thursday July 04 2019, @05:37PM (2 children)
copy-paste not working through ssh?
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 04 2019, @07:52PM (1 child)
Works fine for me.
You may be seeing issues with stuff using cut buffers vs selections.
Try autocutsel (Debian has packaged it for years; not sure about other distros).
If you use startx, drop this line into your .xinitrc:
autocutsel -f
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Thursday July 04 2019, @10:48PM
Thanks, and come out of hiding!
(Score: 5, Informative) by maxwell demon on Thursday July 04 2019, @06:04PM (2 children)
I don't get why people get confused. A server is a program that manages a resource. In this case, the resource is your screen, keyboard and mouse. Your screen, keyboard and mouse are on your local computer, therefore the X server runs on your local computer.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 04 2019, @08:20PM
Is that really so hard to get? In a typical client-server architecture, the "server" is the role performing background tasks on behalf of the client, and the user interacts with the client using input and output devices. What other client-server architecture has the end user operating the server?
(Score: 4, Informative) by epitaxial on Friday July 05 2019, @01:55PM
Because when people think of a server in nearly every instance it's something remote you are interfacing with.
(Score: 3, Informative) by digitalaudiorock on Thursday July 04 2019, @07:19PM (3 children)
I use ssh -X all the time as well. One example is using the mythtv-setup GUI on my headless MythTV backend. I have no X server running there and don't want one. Wouldn't trade that for anything. The article should have been talking about how wayland is dying before it's ever been widely adopted, because it's a piece of shit that needs to be sunk on the same boat as systemd.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday July 05 2019, @01:06AM (2 children)
Is it really? I'd be happier with some citations here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday July 05 2019, @03:57AM
I think this is akin to Fox news commentary on North Korean visits by recent US presidents... it's not about the actual merits of the actions, it's all about which team you cheer for.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by digitalaudiorock on Friday July 05 2019, @12:41PM
Maybe I'm mistaken. Are there distributions using it by default? I didn't think there were many (or any?). The sentiment I see most everywhere seems to be that most want no part of it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 05 2019, @08:55AM (1 child)
You could take something simple like phantomjs, or chromes rendering/test engine, and headlessly render the html -> pdf.
An email message shouldn't have any complex HTML in it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14239194 [ycombinator.com]
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Friday July 05 2019, @03:32PM
I quite agree that an email message shouldn't have complex html in it.
Those that do are mostly spam. So seeing the html in text-only mode is an easy manual filtering technique.
But I have a few corporate correspondents that send complex html only, and I actually want to read the messages.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 04 2019, @05:36PM (3 children)
Personally, I'm fine with X dying. If it destroys graphical server software installers, which have no business being graphical in the first place, in the process… sounds like win-win.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 05 2019, @01:12PM
Sounds like one of us doesn't know what X server is...
(Score: 2) by epitaxial on Friday July 05 2019, @02:11PM (1 child)
It's almost comical to run X on a laptop with a 4k display. Some programs scale correctly and some don't. Like Slack, when you move the cursor over the window it becomes super tiny. Move it away and its back to normal.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 07 2019, @02:41PM
trying to slam into the top left corner in gnome with X is annoying as hell.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by NateMich on Thursday July 04 2019, @06:03PM
The death watch will begin where there is a viable alternative.
There isn't really.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 04 2019, @06:15PM (6 children)
The very project as it is now, is already a living proof that a maintainer gone bad in the head cannot kill off X11. They can try and pretend there's no *nix system but RedHat all they wish; the *nix world out there just does not care.
The gambit they used to ram systemd down the top Linux distros' collective throats, is most unlikely to work ever again, too; bad actors got the advantage of surprise the first time, but now everyone is warned and ready.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by acid andy on Thursday July 04 2019, @07:13PM (5 children)
I really wish I had your optimism. If I did, I probably would have expected some of the major distros to see sense and go back to SysVinit after the systemd backlash.
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 04 2019, @09:32PM (2 children)
Whyever for??? Major distros are about politics. "Poly" = many, "ticks" = bloodsucking arthropods.
For all things technical, we have other distros. Slackware for quality, Gentoo for optimization, Puppy for minimal resource use, etc. etc. Naturally, that is where systemd got thrown out on its sorry ass. And just as naturally, that is where independent technical talent is. It is not Ubuntu users who are project maintainers out there, despite however many general folk running Ubuntu.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Thursday July 04 2019, @09:51PM (1 child)
Makes sense. Those same politics could now cause the banishment of X11 from those major distros.
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 04 2019, @10:13PM
and less for those major distros. However, I rather doubt IBM the new owners of RedHat are that careless with the footgun. Maybe if the day ever dawns that Wayland compiles on AIX... no signs of such now but stranger things happened. :)
(Score: 3, Interesting) by digitalaudiorock on Friday July 05 2019, @12:53PM
I'll be especially interested to see what happens when RHEL 6 starts getting near EOL (November 2020 apparently?). I have to think there's a lot of that out there, and that one may revive the backlash a bit.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 06 2019, @06:27PM
That it is a choice only between sysvinit and systemd is a fallacy.
There are multiple alternatives to the init part of systemd out there that offer much the same capabilities without all the invasiveness.