X.org Alternatives? MicroXWin, Wayland, Y, DFB, Xynth, Fresco, etc. (2009) | Hacker News Reader

X.org Alternatives? MicroXWin, Wayland, Y, DFB, Xynth, Fresco, etc. (2009)

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39 pointswhereistimbo68 comments

Glad to see this; the whole "shut up and use Wayland" attitude of many is offputting. Let's at least see what else is out there.

And from what is out there, since 2009, how many of those are still relevant 14 years later?

How many of Wayland haters have put the effort to make them happen?

Of the 7 non-Wayland systems linked in the opening post, two still have a working web page.

KDrive gave me a TLS error (the certificate is misconfigured) but ignoring it brings me to a web page that states the information is obsolete and hasn't been updated in about 7 years according to the page info. Everybody online talks about KDrive in the past tense it seems.

Y-windows.org works, but the homepage only shows two entries written in 2004. It seems to be the product of a thesis that never received any development.

I think it's safe to say from the listed post, only Wayland survived. I think of all the other alternatives, Mir had the best change at succeeding, but that died half a decade ago.

It's not listed in the OP, but Arcan ( www.arcan-fe.com ) is alive and architecturally compares favorably to Wayland. Only problem is that letoram actively avoids bringing popular attention to the project to the point that he deliberately writes his blog posts on it in a very dense style. I think he's just doing it til 1.0 though.

I really hope Arcan takes off; it's a much more elegant system than Wayland's XML-based crap whose main defense is "just use a toolkit!".

Arcan has been around for a long time. At one time, it showed more promise than Wayland as a successor of X11. Is there a chance that it will come back and succeed? (I'm a Wayland fan. But I had high hopes for Arcan and still wish to see it succeed).

> Wayland's XML-based crap

What is that? Do you mean the protocol definition? Why is that a big issue?

On the contrary, seeing this shows that Wayland is the survivor among many competitors and not something major distributions suddenly pulled out of their asses.

If anything that gives Wayland even more weight as the replacement for Xorg.

There are plenty of examples throughout history where an inferior product won out over the alternatives, usually because of business or politics unrelated to merit.

Thank you, I feel like there's likely a more complex story going on with Wayland; and it feels like Gnome especially is far more interested in "cornering the market and being the only game in town" than "playing nice with everyone in the spirit of e.g. Free Software."

I get that no law requires them to "be nice," but we should definitely talk about it regardless.

~100% of developer effort in the Linux graphical stack is going towards Wayland.

Shutting up and using Wayland is the sensible thing to do.

Before Wayland, 100% of the developer effort went towards X. Was shutting up and using X the sensible thing to do then?

For the end user, yes. What would be the alternative?

Wayland is developed by the same people that have spent their time implementing X.

So one either shuts up and accepts that the X developers know what they are doing, or comes up with an alternative that beats Wayland.

While "entitlement to open source" is a problem, I often think that this reverse idea -- i.e. "make your own or shut up" is just as much of a problem.

E.g. I can criticize a restaurant or a government or a building development.

None of these requires that I start my own restaurant, government, or building development.

Indeed, and when one doesn't like it, can eat at home, run for elections, do a building injunction, and so on.

Or accept what exists and that is it.

Or, you know, just talk about it and openly criticize.

I'm going to go with e.g. the framers of the Constitution and others who actually think this is a good thing.

The framers of the Constitution have put lots of work, suffering, blood and lost lives to make it happen in first place, they didn't just talk about it in newspapers and saloon tables.

And they did so to ensure that only people who did that had free speech, or so that everyone could? Come on now, be smarter.

They did it to free the slaves and unite the country.

If it were for anti-Wayland people mindset, nothing would have changed, they would only complain about it on newspaper readers section.

There is some credence to the "make your own or shut up" argument here on HN.

If we reconsider your "criticize a restaurant" analogy, we are not random folks walking into a restaurant. We are professional chefs criticizing the output of other professional chefs.

In that context, "go start your own restaurant" does actually make sense.

Not every chef has the means (e.g. money and time) and/or non-food experience to start a restaurant. Constructive criticisms, and not all criticism is constructive, should always be taken in earnest; that said, there is also a matter of taste: just because one chef puts in extra garlic and another doesn't like that doesn't mean either is "wrong" or "right".

Lol, that's exactly how you get e.g. "Stupid food/we want plates" on reddit.

One of the worst things in computing is this sort of gatekeeping; it's not only "professional chefs" here, it's people who want to democratize more of software building, not reintroduce more silos.

At a certain point if the restaurant or building developer (rarer and harder but still i think government would also apply with scope) isn't filling all my wants or needs, yes you do start your own with all of those things (or someone in the community does to fill the want/need if they recognize it)

A great deal of the things we use were at one time someone or some group wanting something the status quo wasn't providing.

And how do you begin to figure that out?

By openly talking about it with your community, which includes people who may not be the builders.

The pro-Wayland folks appear to believe that this -- talking about and being critical of software that a lot of people may use -- is a bad thing.

As I like to say, suck it up, use Wayland, file bug reports.

Criticizing Wayland is great if you do it with the intent of improving Wayland.

Encouraging people to fuck off back to X is counterproductive because X is a DEAD END. It's like Republican politics: all it does is obstruct useful progress, by design. The maintainers of Xorg have decided that Wayland is the way to go, as have the maintainers of the major toolkits, DEs, and distros. Spreading FUD about Wayland in an attempt to encourage people to stick with X generates more heat than light, and is ultimately useless because no one wants to maintain X or the X code paths; these will eventually break or go away. Wayland is the community-supported option going forward. You can't even count on kernel support for X: the Asahi Linux kernel display driver actively detects if it's being called from an X server, and fails if it is.

When it comes to alternatives to both X and Wayland... good luck attracting the developer expertise and mindshare that Wayland already has. It's like coming up with an alternative to Facebook.

Ha!

I teach college students; they mostly don't use Facebook because there are already literally lots of alternatives, and they didn't come about because of gatekeeping the commentary about the tech. Perfectly wrong example you gave there.

Interesting. Reminds me of what they were trying to do with MicroXWin, Y, DFB, Xynth and Fresco!

> ~100% of developer effort in the Linux graphical stack is going towards Wayland.

If this is true it's a testament to how poorly designed Wayland must be - for it to have such comprehensive support & still be as limited as it is today is quite the achievement.

> Shutting up and using Wayland is the sensible thing to do.

Sadly, you're probably right here. The network effect has indeed shifted toward Wayland - I'm putting up & shutting up with it in my current system; I should probably switch back to Xorg given how bad it is, but knowing I'll likely be going back to Wayland eventually the effort of two migrations seems futile.

The article was written a few years before Canonical announced that they were developing their own display server called Mir. Back then in 2013 it looked as if it could have become Wayland's biggest rival as a successor to X11.

Apparently, Mir is still being actively developed at Canonical, but with focus towards embedded systems. The original plan had been to base it on libraries borrowed from Android, but those have been replaced with parts of Wayland. It looks as if it can also be hosted on top of Wayland or X11.

Official site: https://mir-server.io/

There is a little bit more to that story. Canonical had initially chosen Wayland to be the successor of X11. Then they dropped that plan in favor of the in-house Mir project, citing problems with Wayland. The Wayland developers debunked all of those points, but Canonical just neglected the reply. As I remember it, it was this incident that irked a lot of people and gave Wayland the push to become what it is today. Wayland wasn't as popular before that.

Mir is a Wayland compositor these days

Wayland has struck me for years as being the new IPv6, the tech that the deep technical people tell me needs to come and replace the old thing that "doesn't work any more" and yet never quite takes over.

maybe the year of critical mass switchover will be soon?

Major graphical distributions are now using wayland by default. So the time has indeed come.

I mean, insert any "year of linux on the desktop joke here"

In terms of usage numbers, X is very, very dead. Android uses something that looks a lot more like Wayland than X (or arguably Wayland looks a lot more like Android's SurfaceFlinger than X, but whatever), and ChromeOS is Wayland as well. I'm pretty sure Steam Deck is also Wayland.

steam deck is indeed wayland with their own compositor called gamescope[1] for low-latency gaming (they target the fewest buffer copies as possible). Another nice side-effect it has is hdr support on AMD GPUs.

1: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/gamescope

> In terms of usage numbers, X is very, very dead

Thats wishful thinking. Citation needed.

Citation was in my post if you read it more carefully. Android+ChromeOS is easily the 90%+ of the "Linux" market that cares about having a GUI, and even omitting Android then ChromeOS is still more market share than desktop linux is ( https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide )

How that is supposed to prove your point? You could argue using similar numbers that GNU coreutils is dead.

My company is doing commercial linux and i spent most of my worktime today debugging some XRDP related issue. Everything still Xorg. No idea what you are talking of.

Every major distribution has been using Wayland by default with GNOME desktops for years. KDE is finally reaching a state where Wayland can be the default presently, though it took a little longer.

Other desktops are either lagging way behind or are essentially unmaintained and not trying to upgrade.

This is more like Python 2 vs Python 3... Wayland will win because "new is better" to the mob. After it takes over, it'll be worse performance for 4-5 major releases, and you'll never get back all the features.

All the old apps will hobble along with a compatibility layer, because for some reason it's better to remove all the clutter from X11 to write a new clean Wayland, and then re-introduce all the X11 clutter into a shim so that old apps can run.

It really is better though. Keeps old apps working. Allows new apps to target the superior system directly.

Don't kid yourself about "superior" - only Wayland developers and fanboys care about the simplicity or cleanliness of Wayland's implementation. Wayland's killer feature for an app developer is "vertical sync"? The majority of new apps will just use a web interface or stick to X11 because it runs on the old Xorg and the new Wayland shim.

As a user and programmer, I care about the implementation of the software I use. I might want to hack on it someday.

Personally, I'm holding out until I can restart GNOME without logging out/losing my running applications. Previously, there were issues with it and nvidia drivers, but I think that's fixed now.

I'm running it by default on a laptop, and other than it being tricky to set global keyboard shortcuts, it works perfectly fine.

To switch I just need to know one thing: what is the i3 of Wayland? Tiling window managers changed the way I use my computer forever and I can't go back to anything else.

Sway I believe is the one I see most recommended when coming feom i3

Sway or hyprland

see also: https://arcan-fe.com

About 20 years ago I used some early version of KDE on Linux as my desktop environment and it was great - comparable and even better than Windows that times. Nowadays I still struggle to use any kind of Linux GUI first of all because of poor fonts rendering. Don't get me wrong - it's pretty OK, but comparing with MacOS or Windows - ah, still to bad. Have been waiting for improvements for decades.

I see so many complaints about font rendering on Linux but I don't really understand the issue and what you're experiencing. I use a window manager, no desktop environment and zero configuration for fonts other than what comes with the distributions minimal/server release.

Have I just been using Linux so long that I'm ignorant of what's possible on other systems? What am I missing?

I very rarely notice it, but this very article to me is displayed in Bitstream Charter (I think because it contains one character somewhere that isn't present in Georgia) and Bitstream Charter is awfully bad for some reason, probably because I have it in PCF format.

My package manager describes it as A serif typeface designed by Matthew Carter for low resolution devices.

You are probably blessed with not having this font installed on your system, which prevents your browser from choosing it instead of Georgia.

I rarely encounter this problem though, I suppose there aren't many fonts that are only available as bitmap on most systems, and even fewer of them get used by websites.

https://itvision.altervista.org/why.linux.is.not.ready.for.t...

There is a section on font rendering, here is a copy.

  Font rendering (which is implemented via high level GUI libraries) issues:
  
      ! ClearType fonts are not properly supported out of the box. Even though the ClearType font rendering technology is now supported, you have no means of properly tuning it thus ClearType fonts from Windows look ugly.
      Quite often default fonts look ugly, due to missing good (catered to the LCD screen - subpixel RGB full hinting) default fontconfig settings.
      Font antialiasing settings cannot be applied on-the-fly under many DEs. This issue is impossible to solve unless there's a common GUI library/API which is shared between all tooklits and desktop environments.
      !! The way Wayland works, fonts under Wayland sessions may look blurry.

Edit following worksonmine response:

I pasted the part related to font rendering here for convenience, but note that the article is much more complete and has a page-long preface explaining the context, and answers to the most common objections. The article is not a suggestion that you should use Windows instead, in fact the author also has a "Windows 10 sucks" article.

> ClearType fonts are not properly supported out of the box. Even though the ClearType font rendering technology is now supported, you have no means of properly tuning it thus ClearType fonts from Windows look ugly.

How is Windows font not rendering properly in Linux a Linux problem? Do we blame Windows for not supporting Linux specific software? Even so it seems to be possible to enable.

> Quite often default fonts look ugly, due to missing good (catered to the LCD screen - subpixel RGB full hinting) default fontconfig settings.

Highly opinionated, just change it, and the source is a slashdot comment from 2012? Really?

> Font antialiasing settings cannot be applied on-the-fly under many DEs

Okay, use one that supports it if that's the problem.

> The way Wayland works, fonts under Wayland sessions may look blurry.

Haven't made the switch yet, so can't say much about it.

All of these are very weird gripes and I'm even more confused that people don't use Linux because "fonts". Are these really the problems that make people stay on spyware OS?

Can you give some specific examples that bother you? I honestly just don't notice much of a difference these days with font rendering in Linux + X11 vs Windows/MacOS.

I do usually select different fonts/sizes instead of relying on distro defaults though.

Is it the rendering or the selection of fonts?

KDE 3.5 was its peak for me. KDE 4 changed everything around completely, in a worse way (like no more multiple task bars, no more easy launcher icons, introduction of hard to disable CPU hogging background processes like baloo, less configuration, degradation in contrast of scrollbars in the theme choices, etc...).

KDE3.5 was forked at the time and still exists as Trinity Desktop https://trinitydesktop.org/

If you haven't, try KDE 5 as well. I also found KDE 3.5 to be an amazing desktop and was then very disappointed by KDE 4, one of the worst software released I've used. But it was pretty much abandoned relatively quickly and KDE 5 is once again an excellent environment.

For me it is the opposite, I can't stand the font rendering on windows.

I prefer the way text looks on my Linux install over the way it looks on MacOS or Windows.

Modern font rendering seems OK to me but I have given up on trying to figure out how to get a web browser to scroll without tearing

You need a compositor.

You would need to select a font that supports FreeType instead of ClearType. Here's a good thread on it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31528605

Anecdotally, I use PopOS as my daily driver and the fonts and DE are beautiful. I prefer it to the Mac workstation I use for work. When I flip my KVM I'm often reminded of the contrast. I use open source ligature enabled FreeType fonts and they are all exceedingly sharp.

http://freetype.org/

You know what is my pet peeve with Linux guis? Mouse movement. Why is it that despite spending a collective week of work hours on it and testing every single acceleration band speed setting it still feels like my mouse is imprecise and slow at the same time I use windows for a while and then go back to Linux?

Could it be that you have mouse acceleration turned off on Linux? Mouse acceleration makes the mouse pointer move further if you move the mouse faster. It's an option to turn on/off on KDE, and it's the way GNOME is set up unless you install GNOME Tweaks.

I've tried, with and without, I tried various settings (there are quite a few mouse acceleration related settings). But I could never find something that even approximated windows speed of movement and precision at the same time.

I wish someone finds out why this is at some point. I'm a 90% Linux 10% windows user and I've been for many years. I've accepted the inferior mouse experience on Linux (not just one mouse, all mice I ever had on a number of pcs and laptops), but I hope it gets sorted at some point.

I liked Fresco - but CORBA was kind of going the wrong direction it turned out in time. I'm still not convinced on Wayland. Does it solve X's security issues?

https://berlin.sourceforge.net/

oh and this for X11 security issues as it's a nice summary : https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/4641/why-are-pe...

Of the problems in that SO link, I believe only "Isolation between apps" is an ongoing concern; Xorg (at least) hasn't listened to the network by default for a long time (as noted in that answer), but these days it doesn't run the X server as root either. That said, AFAIK yes Wayland does an excellent job of limiting the access that programs have.

XFree86

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