> Xorg is on life support, it has been getting bug fixes and nothing else for the past several years.
Imagine two cars: X11 its an old one, it doesn't quite start right, the windows are chipped, the paint is peeling of and no one really wants to invest money into maintaining it, it defaults to brakes and a steering wheel from 1980 but has seen continous upgrades over time and you can generally swap in a steering wheel from 2010 with minor problems.
Now imagine wayland, a brand new tesla, it doesn't have brakes or a steering wheel because history has shown that these concepts evolve and if anything it should be a third party provider that creates them. Who cares that it took ten years between the release of the car as ready for use and the first compatible steering wheel implementation? Who cares that getting it to run on half of the roads (NVIDIA) is still not a solved problem because they stripped out any abstraction.
> From reading the sibling comment, if BSD guys want to keep using Xorg, they'll probably have to maintain it themselves.
As opposed to wayland which pushed 90% of features on the KDE/GOME/etc. guys (to be reimplemented in dozens of incompatible APIs). Of course the people who wrote wayland also wrote X11 so removing themselves from the equation might have been the nicest thing they ever did, given their own opinion of their past work on X11.
>Who cares that getting it to run on half of the roads (NVIDIA) is still not a solved problem because they stripped out any abstraction.
a) nvidia's refusal to implement GBM in their driver was their own choice. The abstraction was never removed; GBM is the abstraction over all drivers.
b) nvidia already relented and implemented GBM in their driver.
The latter doesn't necessarily mean nvidia is a good choice of GPU even now, because it requires a proprietary driver, so compositor / Mesa / kernel devs cannot debug the full stack when anything goes wrong. So having your problems ignored is something you'll have to get used to if you choose to use hardware that requires proprietary drivers, regardless of whether you use it with X or wayland.
>As opposed to wayland which pushed 90% of features on the KDE/GOME/etc. guys (to be reimplemented in dozens of incompatible APIs).
wlroots exists to solve that problem. Whether an individual compositor decides to use it or not is up to the compositor.
At least in KDE's case, wlroots did not exist at the time they added Wayland support so of course it's understandable that they don't use it. There's a fork of kwin that uses wlroots ( https://gitlab.com/kwinft/kwinft ) but I believe it's just an experimental one-person effort rather than anything that kwin devs are working on as a replacement.
josefx: Since your reply was flagged, I'll reply here.
>Still not going to amputate my leg over a stubbed toe even if RMS considers the toe cancer.
I didn't say you should. I worded what I wrote specifically to indicate that I'm not passing any judgement on whether you made the right choice or the wrong choice.
There are many people who bought nvidia GPUs because they worked fine, and were rightfully worried that they'd stop working fine if their DE of choice decided to switch to wayland or became abandoned. I empathize with their situation completely.
All I'm saying is that you made the choice to buy hardware that requires a proprietary driver, and so you have to live with the consequences of that choice. This is not something unique to this situation involving nvidia GPUs. Only you have the right to decide whether it was a good choice or a bad one.
I really don't see why a bunch of unpaid volunteers should bother to support the only player in town that refuses to play nicely and tries to strong-arm everybody else to use its technically inferior solution.
Here's a nice write-up. I can imagine how nice it is to spend all your waking time trying to improve the Linux graphics stack and then listen to all the bullshit that we see in this discussion.
> I can imagine how nice it is to spend all your waking time trying to improve the Linux graphics stack and then listen to all the bullshit that we see in this discussion.
Is this really surprising? End users want their stuff to keep working with minimal changes. End users don't know and/or don't care that X is hard to maintain. They seen wayland coming, and they're scared that some of their stuff that they currently use will break. How exactly do you expect people to react to:
> Maybe Wayland doesn’t work for your precious use-case. More likely, it does work, and you swallowed some propaganda based on an assumption which might have been correct 7 years ago. Regardless, I simply don’t give a shit about you anymore.
Casting multi-use graphical computing aside is unwelcome.
Most of the toxicity centers on HOW that discussion has played out.
To be fair, many users coming up on single user graphical computing have no idea what the problem is, do not have use cases and we all know the rest.
The users who do understand all that are pissed. They are being told none of it really matters or is necessary, and so on...
Of course all that is definitely not appreciated however spiffy watching videos about it all may be.
And, those users totally get the need to see the embedded use case improvements get done, and still are being asked to just forget multi user graphical computing was ever a thing because reasons...
So yeah, here we are.
People will care about Weyland exactly as much as the Weyland team cares about them.
Multi user graphical computing aware users are not cared about at all despite their repeated explanations on how they depend on that capability. Depend, as in, not having it becomes very expensive for them. Expensive enough to wash away all the value they are being told matters more to everyone else.
Non multi user graphical computing aware people basically just want it settled so they can have few overall worries. They feel some care aimed their way.
The embedded people are super happy and are cared about a lot.
All adds up to a very toxic state of affairs.
Factoring it all down:
Did we absolutely have to trade multi user graphical computing away?
Should the answer be no, this whole ugly mess will go away.
Continuing with a yes means a very painful and drawn out mess for years to come.
And it will be that way because there are plenty of people who really do get a lot of value out of multi user graphical computing.
Who knew?
I bet the former X devs did. And they just do not care.
Xorg barely works on nvidia (source: me)
vsync requires a compositor to work, and even picom needs a very specific combination of flags to get vsync to work.
Chromium cannot gpu accelerate video playback.
On rolling release distros, most major kernel updates leave your system broken, because nvidias out-of-tree driver can't build against new kernel versions.
If nvidia stops supporting your old gpu, like they just did with Kepler, you're screwed.
The problem with nvidia on linux isn't wayland, it's nvidia.
I have used strictly Nvidia gpus, on debian Linux, for 20 years, using the binary drivers, and I have none of the issues you describe. It just works, very well, stable and fast. Xorg is an amazing piece of software and combined with openbox it does exactly what I need.
Users don't care about the underlying abstraction. The points raised before at least covered features that users cared about, even if they where presented without context, vsync worked fine on any NVIDIA desktop system I used, especially without compositor.
Xorg works just fine with Debian and Nvidia (source: me). Some longish (5-10) years ago it got so stable that I managed to stop thinking about it, because it Just Works. Even across upgrades. Your problem lies not with Linux, Xorg, or Nvidia.
>If the designers of X-Windows built cars, there would be no fewer than five steering wheels hidden about the cockpit, none of which followed the same principles — but you’d be able to shift gears with your car stereo. Useful feature, that. - Marus J. Ranum, Digital Equipment Corporation
> Who cares that getting it to run on half of the roads (NVIDIA) is still not a solved problem because they stripped out any abstraction
You mean under “they” the linux kernel devs? Because it has absolutely nothing to do with wayland. Nvidia cards’ proprietary drivers work with X because you are using a part-binary blob for X. Also, finally nvidia realized that they should goddamn support linux, so what all these resulted/will result in is better integration for people with nvidia cards.
Imagine two cars: X11 its an old one, it doesn't quite start right, the windows are chipped, the paint is peeling of and no one really wants to invest money into maintaining it, it defaults to brakes and a steering wheel from 1980 but has seen continous upgrades over time and you can generally swap in a steering wheel from 2010 with minor problems.
Now imagine wayland, a brand new tesla, it doesn't have brakes or a steering wheel because history has shown that these concepts evolve and if anything it should be a third party provider that creates them. Who cares that it took ten years between the release of the car as ready for use and the first compatible steering wheel implementation? Who cares that getting it to run on half of the roads (NVIDIA) is still not a solved problem because they stripped out any abstraction.
> From reading the sibling comment, if BSD guys want to keep using Xorg, they'll probably have to maintain it themselves.
As opposed to wayland which pushed 90% of features on the KDE/GOME/etc. guys (to be reimplemented in dozens of incompatible APIs). Of course the people who wrote wayland also wrote X11 so removing themselves from the equation might have been the nicest thing they ever did, given their own opinion of their past work on X11.