X.Org is now pretty much an ex-org: Maintainer declares the open-source windowing system largely abandoned
- Reference: 1604057412
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/10/30/x_server_lead_maintainer_declares/
- Source link:
Jackson's [1]post confirms suspicions raised a week ago by Intel engineer Daniel Vetter, who [2]said in a discussion about enabling a new feature: "The main worry I have is that xserver is abandonware without even regular releases from the main branch. That's why we had to blacklist X. Without someone caring I think there's just largely downsides to enabling features."
This was picked up by Linux watcher Michael Larabel, who [3]noted that "the last major release of the X.Org server was in May 2018... don't expect the long-awaited X.Org Server 1.21 to actually be released anytime soon."
The project is not technically abandoned – the last code merge was mere hours ago at the time of writing – and Jackson observed in a comment on his post that "with my red hat on, I'm already on the hook for supporting the xfree86 code until RHEL8 goes EOL anyway, so I'm probably going to be writing and reviewing bugfixes there no matter what I do."
[4]
Diagram of the X server architecture
X.Org is the reference implementation of the X Window system first released in June 1984 by its author [5]Robert W Scheifler at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); it was, as you would expect, the successor to the W windowing system developed at Stanford University – so named because it ran on an OS called V. X version 11 (or X11) came out in September 1987, which is why Jackson wrote: "X works extremely well for what it is, but what it is is deeply flawed. There's no shame in that, it's 33 years old and still relevant, I wish more software worked so well on that kind of time frame. But using it to drive your display hardware and multiplex your input devices is choosing to make your life worse."
Problems with X include security issues (lack of isolation between windows) and that it gets in the way of graphics acceleration. "Most of the complexity that the X server used to handle is now available in the kernel or self-contained libraries (KMS, evdev, mesa, fontconfig, freetype, cairo, Qt, etc).
"In general, the X server is now just a middle man that introduces an extra step between applications and the compositor and an extra step between the compositor and the hardware," [6]said the documentation for Wayland, the protocol that replaces X in modern distros. Some distros still use X.Org by default, including Ubuntu. Wayland is also included, but users have to specifically select it.
Jackson said the future of X server is as "an application compatibility layer", though he also said that having been maintaining X "for nearly the whole of [his] professional career" he is "completely burnt out on that on its own merits, let alone doing that and also being release manager and reviewer of last resort."
He also mentioned related projects that he says are worthwhile such as Xwayland (X clients under Wayland), XWin (X Server on Cygwin, a Unix-like environment on Windows), and Xvnc (X applications via a remote VNC viewer).
When a response to Jackson's post complained about issues with Wayland – such as lack of stability, poor compatibility with Nvidia hardware, lack of extension APIs – the maintainer said that keeping X server going was part of the problem. "I'm of the opinion that keeping xfree86 alive as a viable alternative since Wayland started getting real traction in 2010ish is part of the reason those are still issues, time and effort that could have gone into Wayland has been diverted into xfree86," he said.
The hope then is that publicly announcing the end of the reliable but ancient X.Org server will stimulate greater investment in Wayland, using Xwayland for the huge legacy of existing X11 applications. ®
Get our [7]Tech Resources
[1] https://ajaxnwnk.blogspot.com/2020/10/on-abandoning-x-server.html
[2] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/merge_requests/533#note_670522
[3] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=XServer-Abandonware
[4] https://regmedia.co.uk/2020/10/29/xorg.png
[5] https://www.theregister.com/2008/02/15/caroline_sun_amazon/
[6] https://wayland.freedesktop.org/architecture.html
[7] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: The Joy of X
Next to "the story of O"?
Here's to everyone who has contributed to X over those 33 years
Most of what I use my computers for is dependent on their efforts, so I am enormously in their debt.
Don't much fancy running GIMP in a terminal.
Then there's running an X session remotely.....
.....as in doing maintenance on a headless machine over the network....like this:
*
$ ssh -X -C -l your_name_here -p your_port_here remote_IP_address_here
*
I'm still not clear how this is supposed to be accomplished in the new spiffy Wayland-only world. Can anyone help me out?
Re: Then there's running an X session remotely.....
Apparently 'waypipe' is supposed to be able to do this. I mean yes it works by throwing bitmaps around, but in practice so does most X work now. (Except Emacs, which is probably a major reason to keep XWayland around. XWayland doesn't work with everything, but Emacs doesn't use the modern stuff like systrays etc that XWayland doesn't like, so you should be OK.)
OpenBSD is using Xenocara
https://www.xenocara.org/
Not a fork, but shows that the loss of X will be felt outside the Linux universe . . .
Nobody likes X11
I recently built an application that interfaces a windows clipboard with an X11 clipboard.
Windows side - "push contents to clipboard, pull contents from clipboard".
X11 side - "Send a request to the window that owns the select, wait on a conditional mutex for the message to come in on the X11 message handling thread, read the data length and type from that message, tell the other window to delete it, request the data again, wait on the conditional mutex again, now you may read the data (but don't forget to delete it). Oh, hope that the other program doesn't crash or change selections partway through this process."
So...
Re: Nobody likes X11
To be fair, Windows clipboard being usable by anyone and their mother is a bug, not a feature.
Re: Nobody likes X11
Yes. Damn that clipboard in Windows. Being all "functional" and "intuitive".
Re: Nobody likes X11
I agree that clipboards are great. But they can also be an unholy mess of complexity. Currently got some problems in MacOS when copying and pasting from Word to MailMate. If you inspect the clipboard it can be a real eye-opener!
Re: Nobody likes X11
You can solve that problem by adding a bit to make clipboards private but sharing between Windows is a key part of GUI functionality.
Re: Nobody likes X11
Nobody likes X11?
Don't be daft, it's friday.
... an application that interfaces a windows clipboard with ...
That is the problem, not X11.
O.
I remember writing in X Windows on our Unix workstations at university and also having a version on my Linux install - I think I've still got the CD for that somewhere.
yes, hours of "fun" trying to make it run, but I concede it improved a lot over the years
Network transparency
Does Wayland provide network transparency yet, or are we still back in the world of Suntools (or possibly faking it by some equivalent of VNC)?
Re: Network transparency
Does Wayland provide network transparency yet, or are we still back in the world of Suntools (or possibly faking it by some equivalent of VNC)?
Oh, I'm sure the Wayland folks will tell you they're SERIOUSLY thinking about starting to add that functionality in the next 5 or 10 years, if they aren't busy with something else, and besides, just WHY are you doing something foolish like that anyway, and they can't figure out how to run X11 as a SystemD service...
Re: Network transparency
My impression has been that the Wayland development culture is quite juvenile in character. They have rejected contributions which provide missing features, as for instance equivalent xrandr functionality, and they seem more interested in exactly who does and does not get to share the secret decoder rings or have access to their private tree fort. After over 12 years of development, and *still* not a replacement for X, expect another maybe 10 years for the missing functionality to become available.
Re: Network transparency
Wasn't that the whole point of X - that it is a windowing system for working across a network? Admittedly not a feature widely used by home users, but massively useful for many others.
and if not on Gnome3
So does Wayland work with Cinnamon, Mate, LXDE, XFCE, etc? OK, they might on the desktops I don't use on my systems, but last I looked Cinnamon and Mate were still X11 only.
Re: and if not on Gnome3
Out of interest I just tried the latest release of KDE under Wayland. It does run (for sufficiently slow values of 'run') but every action produces a stack of error messages in the log.
The power of open-source
I would just leave the code lying around somewhere. Someone is bound to pick it up in the future and restart development. THAT'S the power of open-source: anyone can take the code and start adding stuff or refactor it. If the project's dead you can usually apply to become the maintainer.
Scarlet herring?
> When a response to Jackson's post complained about issues with Wayland – such as lack of stability, poor compatibility with Nvidia hardware, lack of extension APIs – the maintainer said that keeping X server going was part of the problem.
IME lack of stability has been more closely related to design flaws rather than amount of development effort.
Xwayland stacked on Wayland really just feels like a re-implementation of Xorg which doesn't really phase me. Either way I am reliant on X11 for my WM and many tools I use and products I develop.
Hopefully the "new stuff" it is more maintainable for the current generation of developers and we can just carry on using X11 like nothing has changed ;)
Xweston is basically a single fullscreen Xwayland window so you can ignore the rest of the "difference"
Perhaps one day we will look into replacing X11 with something completely different. Especially since as it is now, RDP is a little better across the network which is fairly annoying because the network feels more like the UNIX-like domain. But for now, X11 reigns.
Either way, Xwayland will likely be a nicer experience to Xsun.
OK
"Xwayland stacked on Wayland really just feels like a re-implementation of Xorg which doesn't really phase me." "Xweston is basically a single fullscreen Xwayland window so you can ignore the rest of the "difference""
So I just posted how I hope X.Org keeps on being at least considered non-abandoned, until Wayland finished getting better. I guess if this is available, as long as the performance is acceptable that'll work for me; if wayland keeps refusing to add some functionality, I can get by with Xwayland or Xweston, and the functionality will sit in that layer (may not help with xrandr, but I'm not using that personally.)
I sure hope X.Org doesn't die off yet
I sure hope X.Org doesn't die off yet! As thx1111 alludes to above, Wayland is yet another X.Org replacement that's got about 90% of the functionality... that old saying "It takes 90% of the time to get 90% done, and another 90% to get the other 10%?" Well, Wayland's been "almost" ready for like 5-10 years, but they just say "You don't need that other 10% functionality" rather than even trying to add it.
For example... I run a remote app or two daily. Wayland doesn't support running an app over the network. OK, so I should use a remote desktop? a) I just want one app... b) Due to the discussed better security, it doesn't support running a remote desktop either! (That would involve being able to read the whole screen, which Wayland disallows for security reasons, and effectively inserting keystrokes and mouse movement, also disallowed for security reasons.) God forbid they give you an option to run an app as a privileged user or something to be able to do those things.
No equivalent to xrandr, because they decided you don't need it. (If people want it, why not add support? Maybe not literally xrandr command, since that "x" is for "X", but some way to adjust the screens!)
As already discussed, it still has poor support for certain video cards -- which you'd think would mature, except Waylands already been out for 5-10 years. It's premature to eject X.Org for this reason alone. It's also apparently unstable for some.
X.Org is quite mature (both in the sense of "old" and in the sense of having many many bugs worked out of it over the years) so I don't expect necessarily extremely active development since they're not adding major new subsystems to it right now. But it's apparently still getting patches and updates; hopefully, if redhat decides X.Org is dead, someone else will take over at least hosting it and collecting/vetting the patches.
The Joy of X
is on my bookshelf.