Anyone who believes that XFree86 was stable in 1999 was apparently running a different XFree86 to me. The sysrq key was mostly useful at the time for using the SAK shortcut to kill all processes on the current terminal, which with luck included your wedged XFree86 which would then get respawned by xdm. I don't miss those times.
XFree86 in 1999 might not have been, but in 1994 when I went to university in the UK and was using Sun computers which were solely X servers to display programs running on the "main" shared computer in the corner of the room, X and all the associated software was all stable and worked fine.
X11 became really stable in the late 00s. And since the introduction of DRI3 it is at the same technological level of Wayland concerning the efficient buffer swap mechanism. X11 is however still miles ahead on the architectural level. Parts of the system like window managers or compositors can fail or be replaced at runtime without affecting running clients. Wayland lacks the appropriate standardized interfaces for that and there are not plans if not outright refusal to actually implement them.
The choices of architecture seem to reflect different priorities, there are things that the Wayland architecture does better than X and vice versa, aren't there? Hard to say X11 is ahead architecturally if you pick features that Wayland may not consider important. I've seen commentary from people who have worked intimately on both protocols and implementations of both who consider Wayland to have the better architecture.
> I've seen commentary from people who have worked intimately on both protocols and implementations of both who consider Wayland to have the better architecture.
This link comes up in literally every Wayland thread and it is even more bullshit now than it was in 2013 when it was first posted (and it was bullshit then too). It is titled "the real story" but it is quite the opposite.
A few key points:
1) he laughs at how X has a bunch of extensions. https://wayland.app/protocols/ hypocrites much. In 2013, since it was completely unusable, it probably didn't have many. But turns out real world use leads to "useless" features being reimplemented.
2) he complains about how X.org has broad hardware compatibility. As if that's a bad thing. Meanwhile wayland, even now it still doesn't work reliably on half the graphics chips on the market.
3) It complains that certain X features are not fully network transparent. True, but most are and you can detect at runtime and gracefully degrade. Wayland "fixes" this by just dropping the whole feature.
4) it flat-out lies saying the X server does nothing yet it is so much hard to maintain code. The core X protocol provides backward compatibility and is rock solid (and really easy to impelment from scratch btw, someone did it in Javascript for a tutorial for crying out loud). Meanwhile the Wayland compositor keeps accumulating everything because of point 1. Need a screenshot? Add it it the compositor. Need a hotkey? Add it to the compositor. Need drag and drop? Add it to the compositor. Need a notification icon? Add it to the compositor. In X, all those are peer to peer. Graphics are actually a relatively small part of a graphical user interface, something Wayland is still slow to learn.
5) He complains that certain applications are written inefficiently with blocking calls which is inefficient over a network connection. Wayland's calls are ALL blocking and just has no network connection.
6) Complains that X may draw things unnecessarily. Indeed... but there's an extension to disable that. Easy fix. Wayland even uses the same drivers!
> Graphics are actually a relatively small part of a graphical user interface, something Wayland is still slow to learn.
This I think is a key insight. I talk about this in another post, but I've been working on "porting" parts of Xfce to Wayland, and there are so many things missing in Wayland that have nothing to do with "graphics" that means that Xfce+Wayland will be missing a lot of useful features until/unless Wayland protocols are invented or extended to make them work.
I don't do Windows development, but I remember that used to be the rebuttal from game devs that Linux missed the point about all the ease of use features that Microsoft provided.
Although all the other Direct services are dead, have they not been replaced with new versions?
And it was true at the time, thought the rebuttal would be "use SDL then" -- it did provide equivalent functionality, packaged into a single library.
They were replaced not by new versions, but by new or even existing libraries/subsystems, that are not marketed as Direct anything anymore. Just like alsa or pulse are not marketed as SDL or Open anything either.
None of Waylands internal functions between a client and compositor are blocking or synchronous to my knowledge. Generally you fire off a message and will later receive an event back from the compositor, which is happening in an event loop.
There is an exception, which is the explicitly blockling "roundtrip" function(s), but that is meant for special cases only.
Being asynchronous was an design goal for Wayland from the very beginning.
This isn't that different than X though which also has the fire off a message and receive event back. Very few of the functions actually make you want (even in xlib, which wraps the protocol itself to be a bit easier to use from C, the majority of functions still are async - much to the chagrin of newbies trying to decipher error messages)
Async X11 was tried with xcb, and it failed. In the above linked video, this is illustrated in the "Bad IPC" part, with the example of gedit startup (gedit uses gtk and gtk uses xcb) and where it blocks.
He claims gedit does 130 blocking InternAtom calls, 34 blocking GetProperty calls, and 116 property change requests. None of those are actually using the available async functions (or even available XInternAtoms call to batch all those 130 into the main thing).
Since this video is coming up on ten years old, it might have been true at the time, and gtk/gedit have since changed the implementation. But regardless, if the video is accurate, they didn't use the non-blocking calls. If the video is not accurate, it is meaningless anyway.
It isn't really Wayland's calls itself, I prolly stretched too much there, but the main thing is the async discussion usually comes up in the context of running applications remotely, which Wayland simply doesn't support. If you do a loop of XInternAtom (which btw you shouldn't do, even in xlib - notice that there's also XInternAtoms, plural, for that kind of thing which batches them to reduce wait time...) locally, it is unlikely to matter. The time spent there is near zero anyway. But remotely, now you might be looking at several ms per iteration and that adds up fast. Now the blocking aspect can become problematic.
Since Wayland doesn't support this kind of network remote use anyway, the distinction doesn't matter. Local X vs Wayland are both fast.
> It isn't really Wayland's calls itself, I prolly stretched too much there,
Do you mean simply incorrect i.e., that Wayland calls are not all blocking? Or do you mean that in practice there are some important high-level situations that do require a round trip despite the low level purporting to be mostly asynchronous?
> Since Wayland doesn't support this kind of network remote use anyway, the distinction doesn't matter. Local X vs Wayland are both fast.
Wayland can run to remote displays though, right? You could argue it's not complete or well supported or nicely integrated into the core protocol or whatever, but you can literally use it today and probably have a package to do it available in any Linux distro you're using (e.g., waypipe). So it's hard to see what you're getting at. Wayland may not have been made with transparent networking support foremost in the protocol but AFAIK the idea was always that you'd be able to do remoting by forwarding buffer contents with the protocol.
> The core X protocol provides backward compatibility
I had a bit of fun a while back trying to get an old X/11 terminal to work with a modern Linux machine and was somewhat surprised I was able to make it work. Sort of at least. Many display managers didn’t implement the proper protocols, but XDM did and I was able to get it to work at least a few times.
1) no, he complains that X11 has a big core and then extensions. Extensions are fine, but they were unable to kick out parts of the core, because it is the core and something somewhere assumes it is there. So they had to maintain it, despite not being used in practice, except by that little something that nobody can point their fingers at.
2) he talks about obsolete hardware. There's no really a point to support s3 trio, at the expense of support for modern hardware, which works ink wastly different way.
3) That graceful degradation is in practice the same, as just using Wayland. Ever tried to use modern X11 app over network? RDP is vastly better experience, (and RDP support is wip in wayland).
4) This is so wrong so I won't even react to it.
5) Wayland calls do not wait for reply. You rapid fire requests and then collect responses as they come. Heck, you can even get a response you didn't ask for ;)
> That graceful degradation is in practice the same, as just using Wayland. Ever tried to use modern X11 app over network? RDP is vastly better experience, (and RDP support is wip in wayland).
I do, in fact, use modern X11 apps over the network literally every day. Some are better than others - if the programmer made the effort to actually gracefully degrade it can be a considerably better experience than the ones who just shoot a constant stream of bitmaps down the wire (which do work better on rdp, i remember once upon a time, I'd ssh to my linux box and set up port forwarding to a windows box on my lan so i can remote desktop to it, then run Xming from there... which is absurd that that actually worked better), but if you do it well, remote X is very nice to use.
The seamless integration of windows from multiple computers is a thing to behold. Remote Desktop is great and I like a lot about it, but even the "Seamless" rdp doesn't work as nice as X.
If you don't mind answering, what do you do that uses GUI over network? Not looking to argue or try to claim <something> would work better or anything, just curious what people use it for seriously these days.
One common example is running data analysis/reduction remotely on a big fast box and then looking at the products on that machine via X11 forwarding.
On a fast low-latency connection there is hardly any noticeable difference between running the application locally or remotely (it's just another window locally opposed to another window in another desktop in a window).
I use tons of things on it. When I use my laptop, often I'll run a local browser (though sometimes I run remote browsers too - Chromium's core works actually surprisingly well on a remote X link - but the bigger problem there is that chromium doesn't support multiple instances, so if I left the browser open on the desktop, the cookies and history aren't shared on the remote instance on the laptop which defeats the purpose of reusing the instance anyway, but sometimes the shared passwords still nice to have) with most everything else being run remote.
Among the specific applications are my developer tools, image viewers, music editors, the apps I'm actually working on, etc. Of course, some of these also work fine on ssh terminals and I do plenty of that too, but there's just no need to be limited and I'll run whatever I want to.
The last time I had to use remote X11, it was to run Oracle's dbca. Everything else was possible to do in some other way, usually more comfortable.
RDP does support integration of windows from multiple computers, in a way of RemoteApps. Even if you are running GUI apps inside WSL2 locally, you are using it.
> he complains that X11 has a big core and then extensions. Extensions are fine, but they were unable to kick out parts of the core, because it is the core and something somewhere assumes it is there.
The thing that I find ridiculous about this attitude is that you have two choices:
1) Remove parts of the core that some (mostly old, unmaintained) applications rely on, which will break them. You'd probably have to call it "X12" now, but that's fine: most X11 applications would continue to work with no (or very few) modifications.
2) Throw out the entire system and build a new one from scratch, that literally no applications will work on until new toolkit backends are written and some applications themselves are rewritten or at least fixed up. Those same old, possibly unmaintained apps that would stop working in #1 are still not working, but now it's along with literally everything else too.
> RDP support is wip in wayland
If I had a dollar for every time I heard "$IMPORTANT_FEATURE is WIP in Wayland", I'd be able to get several pizzas delivered.
3) Build a new system that supports the old system reasonably well and doesn't prevent people using and improving the old system until the new one meets their needs.
> If I had a dollar for every time I heard "$IMPORTANT_FEATURE is WIP in Wayland", I'd be able to get several pizzas delivered.
It's true though there have been features missing. It's good thing that they are being worked on though, no? The X protocol and the Xorg implementation are both abandonware, so your comment comes across as positive, because missing $IMPORTANT_FEATURE in X/Xorg is not WIP.
Most of the criticisms in this talk are solved with DRI3. Also this guy makes money with a consultant agency that mainly works on Wayland and indirectly profits from shitting on X11. This is not a neutral source.
Right? I really feel like not enough attention is paid to the question of: Who is paid to work on "the successor to X" and what influences are at work there?
Seems to me that would be an obvious place to look for "why Wayland sucks," given that unfortunately, "paid" sometimes leads one to "exclusivity."
XFree86 worked fine for me since 1994. I sometimes had problems when exiting a video game like Doom or Quake. SVGAlib would give problems but that wasn't X.
It would help if you did not give easily verifiable facts to reveal the inaccuracy of your recall. You may have been using Doom in 1994 but you certainly were not using Quake. If this is an accurate memory, what year is it from?
I installed Linux on my PC in September 1994 at the start of my sophomore year of college. I remember playing Doom during that school year from Sept 1994 to May 1995.
The Quake Wiki says Qtest was released Feb 24, 1996 and I remember playing that the week it was released.
I always felt that X11 on Linux was just as stable as X11 on SunOS, Solaris, Ultrix, HP-UX, IRIX, and AIX.
Yep, my point was my experience in 1999 with XFree86 was with Linux, which was less stable than today per se, before that I only used Xsgi on SGI Workstations, which was proprietary and was already HW accelerated.
Xfree86 is the commonly-used but bastard stepchild of X. X started on DEC, Sun, HP, SGI unix boxes, Linux came later.
Linux is and was awesome, I still recall installing it using boot/root floppy disks, but X was around well before the '386 machine in the corner being used for CD creation was recognized as "Hey, this is actually useful"...
