How long will Xorg live?

Despite the bajillion amount of Linux distros in existence; BSD is probably one half of the X.org user base in mindshare. I'd say X.org will still be around for a while.
 
msplsh said:
Or... FreeBSD doesn't swim upstream and just does work to make Wayland by default-able.
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It is not typical that FreeBSD needs to do work to support 3rd party ports; it is the other way round.

Besides, FreeBSD has already inadvertantly done the required work half a decade ago. It already has a working libdrm capable subsystem. It is what Xorg modesetting uses and what most Wayland compositors use (they are more similar than most people believe).

FreeBSD won't swim upstream. It doesn't need to swim at all; it is up to 3rd party projects to be ported to it and like most of the guys in the Wayland ecosystem, their work is lethargic because they rather talk rather than do (that, and the scope of individual Wayland compositors is unsustainable and developers know it!).
 
Why not X12? It is strange that thousands (or millions) of programmers are working on any projects most of them insignificant or unnecessary but there are no people for X11 improvements or development of X12.
 
6502 said:
Why not X12? It is strange that thousands (or millions) of programmers are working on any projects most of them insignificant or unnecessary but there are no people for X11 improvements or development of X12.
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Indeed. To be fair, I do see Xenocara as an "X11R8" just because it is a tidy up (even if much of it is build system).
For most guys, who want to keep decent software working, that is enough.
 
It's already been two years since the last post in this discussion. I wonder how are things as of today.
To be fair I'm kinda worried about all this since there are quite a lot of "unmaintained" applications that are still running well on X11 and will probably never be ported to Wayland. Looks like the Linux community have already put a deadline to abandon Xorg altogether, looks like it will be from 2027 to 2030.
As someone stated previously, most of UNIX developers are Linux users, so FreeBSD will eventually reach a crossroad:
Would XWayland be the way to go? As for the FreeBSD project goals, are you guys more prone to adopt wayland, adopt OpenBSD's Xenocara, develop your own or extend X11R6 support by your own means? Or this is still a topic that you want to discuss in near future?
 
caiot5 said:
Would XWayland be the way to go? As for the FreeBSD project goals, are you guys more prone to adopt wayland, adopt OpenBSD's Xenocara, develop your own or extend X11R6 support by your own means?
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XWayland will likely outlive the current 1st generation of Wayland compositors (Sway, Weston, labwc, etc). But ultimately the fact that Wayland lacks a fundamental library works well for non-Linux platforms. We just need to make sure Gtk, Qt have a suitable X11 backend. Not a massive task considering that those libraries were designed with X11 in mind (the way they handle events, etc), Windows and macOS have a much harder task but still manage well.

I am hoping we go the Xenocara route. We can finally clear out decades of Linux shite and get it modernized.
caiot5 said:
Or this is still a topic that you want to discuss in near future?
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People will be discussing this well after our grandkids lifespan I feel.
 
I don't think Xorg will go away any time soon. It's sad to see Linux and Red Hat start pushing it away for their own selfish reasons. I used to learn Linux on CentOS 5-6 and study for RedHat certificates... that is no longer the case.

Like someone else said before, its bad that X11 apps get abandoned, but new X11 packages will replace them. I am running Xorg with DWM and just a few other packages, and I am very confortable.
 
kpedersen I agree that Xwayland will be there for the foreseeable future but I'm curious what do you mean with "Wayland lacks a fundamental library" . I run FreeBSD 14.2p3 with a pure Wayland window manager (labwc - no Xwayland at all, it's disabled in config) and I'm not having any issues not only with GTK/Qt apps, also fullscreen games work just fine (I'm talking about Sauerbraten, Chromium B.S.U, LbreakoutHD and a few others, I know - I'm old :) ), accelerated video playing is perfect, suspend/resume works reliably 100% of the time and so on.

I started using FreeBSD less than one year ago, I used Mate and XFCE for a while than I switched to labwc in January because it was so similar to openbox and I never looked back.

About Xenocara: nice idea but I'm not sure it will be worth the effort, I feel that FreeBSD should concentrate more to increase compatibility with the newer stuff, otherwise it will be left behind. Just my 2¢, of course.
 
I am intensively mastering sway. At the same time, I am stuck on the manual from i3. It is better to suffer today and smoothly switch to Wayland than immediately over the cliff... There is a lot of material, everything is mastered and everything is clear. Perseverance is needed. And a new tiling paradigm of thinking. But I have already started the sway. Now it's time to set up and buy a high-quality and convenient keyboard for tiling. You will have to spend money on the keyboard.
 
fmc000 said:
I'm curious what do you mean with "Wayland lacks a fundamental library"
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There is no libX11, libXt, etc. No kind of "framework" for how the display system should be used. These provide some benefits (consistency, etc) but can be very large refactors if you want to add support to a new GUI library. Lots of hooks.

This means that Wayland will never govern how toolkits work. I don't know if you have had a play with libwayland-client? It basically maps a pixel framebuffer and that is it*. This makes toolkit portability between display systems much easier, any platform can map a pixel buffer (The X11 ecosystem can do it in about 5 different ways).

(*its basically the lowest common denominator approach, MS-DOS can even do it)

fmc000 said:
I feel that FreeBSD should concentrate more to increase compatibility with the newer stuff, otherwise it will be left behind.
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Newer? Xenocara and Weston were released the same year (~2008). Besides, being "left behind" is what makes FreeBSD a far better OS than Linux for many common use-cases. Let the kids test the prototypes, we can wait a few decades until its stable. Its really not a problem.
 
kpedersen said:
There is no libX11, libXt, etc. No kind of "framework" for how the display system should be used. These provide some benefits (consistency, etc) but can be very large refactors if you want to add support to a new GUI library. Lots of hooks.

This means that Wayland will never govern how toolkits work. I don't know if you have had a play with libwayland-client? It basically maps a pixel framebuffer and that is it*. This makes toolkit portability between display systems much easier, any platform can map a pixel buffer (The X11 ecosystem can do it in about 5 different ways).

(*its basically the lowest common denominator approach, MS-DOS can even do it)


Newer? Xenocara and Weston were released the same year (~2008). Besides, being "left behind" is what makes FreeBSD a far better OS than Linux for many common use-cases. Let the kids test the prototypes, we can wait a few decades until its stable. Its really not a problem.
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Appreciate your answer, I'm not a developer and I really doubt that I would be able to identify any of the issues that you are describing with regards to Wayland.

Anyways, I am trying to be pragmatic and I see that the Unix world is moving to it, FreeBSD included. DWL, labwc, wayfire all work very well in FreeBSD, KDE is getting better and hopefully also gnome will one day.

Xorg is basically a dead project with only a few security fixes added per year, the next Gtk release will drop support for it and I won't be surprised if the next Qt will do the same. Sure, the old apps will probably still work but I have the feeling that the effort that will be required to guarantee that will be too much.

Just look at the ports count, how many of them can't be compiled anymore because of incompatibility with the new library releases? It can only get worse with Gtk (but I agree that it will probably take many years).
 
I mainly tried GNOME on Wayland, but 8+ years my 1000Hz mouse would move inconsistently with high CPU/GPU load. I've seen gamers praising Wayland before GNOME 42 where this was particularly bad, which has me questioning the whole thing. Fedora's very interested in getting rid of it (silently botching it F41 by not having dependencies right, straight-up disabling it right before F42 released as an undocumented changed and had to revert it); they've claimed X a maintenance burden. Yet they're providing a desktop OS to other people.

All the other Wayland-specific issues aside (that are still there today; Fedora had to revert that X disable), the mouse cursor thing is a major issue for me. I do 6/11 no-accel UT99 and osu! and know mouse accuracy :cool: Xorg's been perfect with it that I've never seen it be an issue since 2016. Windows has been fine with it too forever even 11. High CPU/GPU should not affect mouse cursor movement! And yet, the most mainstream DE is still guessing at it 2025 as if it's an afterthought (and still doesn't sound like it solves the main issue; priorities do whatever they want when there's a lot of em, so the cursor might be allowed to move with 7.1 HRTF 200 fps destructive physics going on in a game depending on what's more important to an algorithm, per-frame; fun prediction :p)

I'm not sure what GNOME's deal is, but I have a feeling Wayland doing libinput -> evdev is slower than using evdev on Xorg anywhere. I don't like the idea of having slower input because of theoretical security benefits (I hear keylogging between apps on X used a lot, but maybe don't run malicious apps to begin with? I trust what I run :p). With not being able to disable compositors certain DEs and forced Vsync/reduced tearing emphasis I'm also not sure if Wayland sessions can beat properly-tuned Xorg set-ups.

I had to figure out MESA_LOADER_DRIVER_OVERRIDE=zink MESA_VK_WSI_PRESENT_MODE=immediate for some OpenGL games because they'd run at 40 FPS on Wayland for some reason, but translating to Vulkan and disabling its Vsync has them run at high FPS fine; meanwhile I can run them native OpenGL no problem on Xorg.

And although this might be a bit harsh for free software and volunteers (even though GNOME/RH/IBM/Canonical/SUSE pull in big bucks and fund), I feel there's something odd with taking an easier development path at the expense of worse performance from a coding standpoint; but this is mainly aimed at projects intentionally disabling Xorg/X11 with consumer software (GNOME with GTK, particuarly Fedora, any Linux distro primarying GNOME by association). Like, can't everyone just wait until Wayland is good before trying to force it onto others? (it'll be good when it's not noticed any-app vs Xorg)

I'm still pretty sure Wayland should be marked experimental on desktop today if you're offering a mainstream experience to other people.
 
The entire desktop driver and user space ecosystem is controlled by Linux upstream. If the GTK and Qt Projects ever decide to drop their X11 backends; we have no choice but to follow suit. This will get worse should Firefox/Chrome do the same. IBM, thus Oracle/Canonical/Suse are stewarding this direction.

We have no control or say so in this matter. Unless FreeBSD has it's own Driver/Display Server/Toolkit stack.

Or, just get a mac.
 
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