So what should i call what bitwize does in a comment below where he essentially writes that not being into Wayland is like not being into social distancing and wearing a mask?
> Some Wayland fanboys use this as weaselwords to convince less informed people…
This is some first-class flamebait in really poor taste.
Anyway—from what I understand, Xorg is is nearing the end of its life as an actively developed project. You can see that the release cadence is much slower than it was a couple years ago, it’s gone from something like a six-month cadence to a two-year cadence.
The lion’s share of the development is sponsored by orgs like Red Had and they’ve publicly warned people that this may not continue into the future.
The comments about font rendering technology are relevant. You simply can’t use X font rendering to achieve what is, in 2020, considered to be the bare minimum for text presentation. Up until recently, this was papered over by libraries that could abstract over the differences between old-style X fonts and modern TTF fonts (TTF is almost as old as X!) For various reasons, the backwards compatibility was ditched a few months ago. The abstraction had just grown too unwieldy and had too many special cases.
> Xorg is is nearing the end of its life as an actively developed project.
There are people like Keith Packard who work on it exclusively. Xorg is open source, open source software - especially when it has actual users with technical knowledge - doesn't die because some company wishes so.
> You can see that the release cadence is much slower than it was a couple years ago, it’s gone from something like a six-month cadence to a two-year cadence.
Xorg isn't really a single thing as it was in the past but a collection of libraries - some of these libraries are at a very stable point where they do not need updates, others are shared by some Wayland projects so they should be up to date and others... if they need any update i'm sure someone will do it.
> The lion’s share of the development is sponsored by orgs like Red Had and they’ve publicly warned people that this may not continue into the future.
There is no "they", only Red Had wrote a blog post some time ago that they wont do much new development in Xorg but Red Had doesn't own Xorg nor they control its development.
> You simply can’t use X font rendering to achieve what is, in 2020, considered to be the bare minimum for text presentation.
The bare minimum for text presentation is to render text. You can do that perfectly fine with the core X font API - many people (including me) use xterm and similar minimal software just fine. What you cannot do is render antialiased font using that API (though IMO this is an oversight).
However you can use Xft to do that and as of a couple of months ago you can use it to render colored fonts like emoji, which basically covers most of font rendering use for 99% of applications out there (Xft doesn't handle complex text layout, which is where Pango enters the picture, but most GUI software doesn't use that anyway).
> Up until recently, this was papered over by libraries that could abstract over the differences between old-style X fonts and modern TTF fonts (TTF is almost as old as X!) For various reasons, the backwards compatibility was ditched a few months ago. The abstraction had just grown too unwieldy and had too many special cases.
Pango isn't the library for font rendering (even if it is popular) for X11, it is just one of several choices. Pango removing support for bitmap fonts is only a drawback for those who use the library but it doesn't affect anything else.
No, it just means that its stable. I understand that it's probably habit to justify constant changes to your software projects, but in my experience, it's a good thing to be conservative, and a very good thing to maintain compatibility over a very long span of time.
EDIT: I swear, what is it with people opportunistically virtue-signalling on HN comments? Masks? Really?
Ackshually, what happened was the X11 maintainers jumped ship to Wayland.
Once again, just about everyone who knows thing one about graphics on Linux is on board with the Wayland transition. Just like everyone who knows thing one about virology or epidemiology is on board with social distancing and wearing a mask.
Compatibility comes at a cost—by supporting old users, sometimes you fail to support new users. This is not hypothetical, this is at the core of the problem with BDF fonts.
How does supporting BDF fonts makes a project fail to support new users? It sounds like a problem with the library's architecture, not an unsolvable technical hurdle.
Wayland fans: so desperate for traction that they'll snap up any chance to spread false information. Or maybe this commenter doesn't know the difference between gnome/pango and xorg/xft?
Of course I know the difference. Pango is part of the "new world" in which all text rendering is done client-side. BDF is the old X11 bitmap format, used for X11's server-side text rendering. It makes sense for Pango to move away from supporting it, as hardly anyone uses BDF anymore except for backward compatibility with legacy X applications, and the world is moving away from X.
Matter of fact, rendering everything is moving to client side, hence why X is increasingly unnecessary, and why Wayland is designed the way it is.
Oh, and among "Wayland fans" you can count just about everyone who knows anything about the Linux graphics stack, except maybe for Keith Packard. So yes, getting traction is important, because no one wants to keep maintaining the broken X architecture. Xorg is largely maintained by Red Hat who have put it in "hard maintenance" mode with virtually no new development.
Ah yes, the "new world" that the developers like and that ultimately complicates things for end-users, and obsoletes 30+ years of software in the process.
You want to talk complicating things for end users? Does "XF86Config" mean anything to you? X only got halfway decent when the KMS driver came out, migrating much of the video hardware functionality OUT of X and into the kernel. The X server is thus now largely a state tracker for an obsolete protocol.
Meanwhile, Wayland has pretty much the same graphics server architecture that Windows and macOS had decades ago. It finally brings the Linux desktop architecture in line with the state of the art. There may be a rough transition period, but the faster the Linux community pulls together and rips the X band-aid off, the shorter that period will be.
From day one Wayland struck me as a completely unnecessary effort that could instead have been spent making Xorg better and fixing its problems. If aspects of Xorg are ugly, create new extensions and deprecate the old ones and set a sunset after which those old extensions will be removed. That would be a much easier sell than a 100% new graphics server.
This sort of "lets rewrite, and rewrite, and rewrite, ad infinitum" stuff is a major problem with the open source community. It leads to an enormous amount of wasted effort in an area where effort is always needed to address real problems around usability and hardware compatibility.
X11 is too centralized. Adding more extensions exacerbates the problem—most of those extensions should have been in libraries in the first place, and with Wayland, they can finally be taken out of the server and into individual apps. That, and X11 has too many built-in assumptions which haven’t been reasonable for most users for 20 years (but it sure is nice to run X over SSH on a low-bandwidth link!)
The usability improvements on the Linux desktop happened in spite of X11. The conversation is about font rendering—and why should font rendering be a part of your windowing system? For most apps, it’s not—it’s in Pango, and Pango dropped support for X fonts. All of these changes which already happened have been eroding whatever advantages X11 offered in the first place.
So it’s time to decentralize all the random functionality in X11, and just move it into client-side libraries.
I don't get it. I don't understand why things can't be deprecated and why this requires a 100% new clean slate rewrite that actually loses functionality (the ability to run remote).
The other problem is priorities. There are a million other much higher priority things: better hardware support, better support for laptop power management, endless usability improvements to desktop apps, etc.
