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Comment by mpol | Hacker News Reader

The discussion of phoronix often goes towards flamewar. I hope the discussion here is more civil :)

I can understand they want to test their GPU drivers only against the main Wayland compositors. Xorg is quite another beast to support. For all I know, it might come into the context when most bugs have been ironed out in the GPU drivers.

I do hope people do not take it as general advice. Not all desktop environments have a Wayland compositor, some are quite buggy and many apps don't work yet with Wayland. I am using Xfce and for the next year at least I will be on Xorg. I do hope Wayland gets better, but it has been an undertaking of many years already. The rest of the process won't be much faster I suspect.

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It is difficult to avoid flamewars when the original post itself contains flaimbait like:

    Yes, not every random app and feature you use on Xorg will have a Wayland equivalent. Deal with it. The major players in desktop Linux have decided it's time to move on from Xorg, and if you want to go against the tide you're on your own.

Not to mention that talking about 'the major players in desktop Linux' is completely against what the OS ethos was supposed to be about; he said the quiet part out loud, and people strike back; it is only fair.

I don't think people understand that Xorg is truly dead. Wayland is essentially X12. Everyone who used to work on X now works in Wayland. You should not have an expectation that Xorg will keep working. You should not have an expectation that bugs will be fixed. You should not have an expectation that new hardware will work well with Xorg.

If you want to go against the tide, you truly are on your own. You should expect less and less things to work over time as Xorg's code rots, X backends for GUI frameworks rot, and new hardware and drivers expose X bugs which won't be fixed.

If this doesn't scream "it's time to move away", I don't really know what does. Nobody can force anyone to move of course. But the writing truly is on the wall.

> I don't really know what does.

My desktop not working, or apps being blurred, or slower, or my mouse cursor stuttering, or screen sharing not working, or Java apps not getting the hidpi settings. That’s what drives me away from Wayland, and all of those happened to me.

I don’t think anybody is against Wayland “just because”. When it matures and app support is better, we’ll switch.

I understand that it might not work for you. That's unfortunate. But you shouldn't expect Xorg to keep working for you either. The time where Xorg is a well-maintained project is past us. That's the point.

The only thing that matters is what works better, and that's Xorg.

Is it, though? Wayland has solved a bunch of problems that I had become used to under Xorg to the point of not noticing anymore, and even though I bumped into new issues on Wayland at first (and tbh there are still few open out there), going back to Xorg nowadays feels like going backwards.

Yeah, Xorg is better. It's faster, more stable, uses less power, and has more features, and more environments.

14 years later there's still no rational reason to run Wayland, and I doubt there ever will be.

I mean, it's funny that you say so, because with the exception of "more environments", I've observed the exact opposite :)

I'm a simple user with simple needs, though apparently that's already pushing the limits of what Xorg can deliver: I have a high-DPI laptop scaled 140%, and a secondary high-res/average-DPI display at 100%. Mixing scaling factors has never worked well under Xorg (rendering glitches with ghost lines, applications like drop down terminals not knowing the dimensions of their viewport when opened on one screen and then or the other). And I'm not even getting into the better handling of discrete GPUs or the much smoother scrolling/animations that give it a better polish.

Xorg totally made sense in the context in which it was invented (in the long forgotten era of server-side rendering), but with applications rendering their own widgets and passing pixmaps to the compositor, Wayland is mostly about cutting the middleman and breaking-off with the obsolete/unmaintained/insecure bits. If you grab a distro with the latest gnome/kde, you should be at a point where Wayland really is only upsides.

Nope, yes as of now, no wayland is only the things needed instead of being a useless middleman between processes and compositors, has more “things” instead, what environments?

I do not expect anything from any OSS software I don’t pay for, and for sure I do not expect Asahi devs to work on Xorg. Their stance is clear. Totally fine for me.

I’m periodically re-evaluating Wayland for my own needs, and so far I chose Xorg every time. I need to do work on my ws, so I need to prioritize stableness to features. I don’t care about fancy features and I’d be ok with KDE 3.5.

Ironically, what should work way better on wayland rather than xorg (hidpi, especially with fractional settings) still works better on xorg for me.

I hope people understand that if xorg stops working before Wayland is ready to be a real replacement, Linux is dead.

Android is getting along just fine without xorg.

Desktop Linux was clearly inferred from the context.

I doubt that given how widely used on servers it is.

Linux desktop never even was alive to begin with.

> The time where Xorg is a well-maintained project is past us. That's the point.

This statement continues to sound like its trying to become self-fulfilling.

Xorg releases still happen (I'm not going to get into a debate about what is "well" maintained)

As many people move to Wayland those interested in X long-term should be given the space to do so, and statements like this set out to prevent it.

It's even a case of "protest too much" -- saying it over and over means that probably it isn't true.

Look at the developers who have historically been working on Xorg. Look at the organizations and projects which have historically been working on Xorg. Look at what they're working on now. Look at what Red Hat and GNOME and KDE are up to. They're not working on Xorg, except for parts relevant for XWayland.

The statement "Xorg isn't well-maintained anymore" isn't an attempt at a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's a statement of fact. The people and companies and organizations who used to do the work on X11 are now working on Wayland. The same people and groups are doing the same kind of work, just on a different protocol.

Xorg releases were done almost exclusively by Red Hat, which just recently announced that they won’t support X for their next version. So.. no, it is objectively not maintained.

Apps being blurred are old x apps running in xwayland compat mode, they are not slower at all (full-screen games can circumvent the compositor for a long time now), and the rest are not typical at all.

I don’t care about what’s typical, I care about my own workflow.

What is the “typical” linux desktop workflow, btw? It’s probably an OS used by a bunch of geeks, everybody’s got his own quirks.

> Not to mention that talking about 'the major players in desktop Linux' is completely against what the OS ethos was supposed to be about; he said the quiet part out loud, and people strike back; it is only fair.

He also said[1]:

> We don't have the time

And then he said[2]:

> If you want to change that, better volunteer yourself :)

Rather, I think he's saying the loud part out loud. OSS can have an opinion, and you're free to modify it to suit your own opinion.

[1] https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/110354541574112092 [2] https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/110354734990416348

Disingenuous. If someone turns up willing to volunteer, there will be some other excuse. They do not want volunteer effort to do something they don't want done.

Even fully baked patches will turn out to require "incompatible architectural changes".

In social justice (a key component of how open source projects operate today) we have this concept of "doing the work", which is as much about humbling and decentering yourself and recognizing that there is a community of others involved whom your efforts must support, as it is about putting in the actual effort.

Eric S. Raymond likes to contribute to open source projects in the form of fully realized, thoroughly architected megapatches that totally upend all the assumptions about how a system/subsystem works and behaves, along with a long lecture about why his patch should be accepted which boils down to "I'm ESR, I know how this bit should be designed much better than you, so there". That is the exact opposite of doing the work. Doing the work involves empathy and respect for the needs and experiences of others.

If you want Asahi Linux to support Xorg, you have three choices:

* Accept things as is.

* Fork the project.

* "Do the work". Convince the Asahi maintainers, in terms they are likely to appreciate, why Xorg inclusion is a good idea and who will be assuming the maintenance burden with little to no effort on their part. Then try to merge your patches.

That's a horrible way to communicate something to your users, FOSS or not. A simple email in a mailing list that says they are dropping support for Xorg would have been sufficient.

That's not flamebait, it's a statement of fact.

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