Yet another new Xserver

I must say, I think these new implementations of X11 rather miss the point.

GTK is dropping support for X11, Qt might follow suit, and Electron use GTK3. Most applications are written to use one of those toolkits. You may have a display server, but the only application pool is moribund.

Gnome and KDE, the two largest desktop environments have declared their intention to no longer support it. You can rely on Xwayland, but it is maintained by the same group that is trying to eliminate X11 in the first place.

If people really want to keep X11 alive, what is really needed is a group of maintainers in GTK and Qt dedicated to maintaining X11 support, possibly forking, if necessary.
 
Sadly, that's a pretty good point. People like me will be quite happy so long as I have xterm and a few other standard clients, a simple window manager like fvwm, firefox, xv, a pdf reader and occasionally openoffice. But I realise that's not most people, who want a full desktop GUI. Without the application base, it's not going to attract a wider group of users. If they took the web browser away, that would start to get more difficult, I'd probably be forced to switch to wayland then.
 
jwillia3 said:
GTK is dropping support for X11, Qt might follow suit, and Electron use GTK3. Most applications are written to use one of those toolkits. You may have a display server, but the only application pool is moribund.
[...]
what is really needed is a group of maintainers in GTK and Qt dedicated to maintaining X11 support, possibly forking, if necessary.
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Thats fine. Once they do finally drop X11 (maybe in a few decades?) then it won't be hard to pick up the slack. Have you seen the work required to maintain it on Win32? Its trivial and X11 / POSIX pathways are even simpler than that.

Certainly don't downgrade to Wayland just because you fear Gtk/Qt may or may not drop it one day.

jwillia3 said:
Electron
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X11 will certainly outlive Electron. This technology is built on-top of so many dubious web platforms.
 
balanga said:
My first programming language was IBM BAL which I really liked, but I could never get the hang of PC assembly.
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My first prog. language was ZX81 BASIC... and a bit later, Z80 assembler. I wish I'd kept my Rodney Zaks Sybex books though, never chuck your old books out! 😂
I loved that machine, and my Oric-1 ❤️ ❤️ ❤️
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Never heard of IBM BAL, is that a mainframe thing?
 
blackbird9 said:
My first prog. language was ZX81 BASIC... and a bit later, Z80 assembler. I wish I'd kept my Rodney Zaks Sybex books though, never chuck your old books out! 😂
Click to expand...

Actually I have a ton of OS/2 books as I believed Bill Gates when in 1987 he said:-

"I believe OS/2 is destined to be the most important operating system, and possibly program, of all time."

I wonder if there is something like an OS/2 museum somewhere that I could send them to.

blackbird9 said:
Never heard of IBM BAL, is that a mainframe thing?
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Yup.
 
Ah yes, that was when the outlaw Billy Gates' company was still hard at work on writing the OS/2 kernel... before the 'big split'.
 
blackbird9 said:
My first prog. language was ZX81 BASIC... and a bit later, Z80 assembler. I wish I'd kept my Rodney Zaks Sybex books though, never chuck your old books out! 😂
I loved that machine, and my Oric-1 ❤️ ❤️ ❤️
Click to expand...
I first learned BASIC on a DEC PDP-8 but then my uncle gave me a trash-80 model-1 and I took to learning Zilog Z80 assembler to work around the speed bottlenecks of interpreted BASIC. Sometimes I miss stuffing machine code in string space and calling it with x=sys(S$)
 
The BBC micro basic was much more sophisticated, that had support for actual inline assembly. Very neat, I think it was about the most advanced BASIC interpreter at the time, at least over here.
 
kpedersen said:
This is close to what I have been working on here:

https://research.thamessoftware.co.uk/glass/
https://gitlab.com/osen/openbsd_drmfb_gnuboy

For much of my uses, I generally do often skip the display server. Once libdrm (a pretty ugly API) had been abstracted, it feels like writing MS-DOS simulations using BGI, Watcom Drawing Primitives.

I did have plans to wrap the old FreeBSD specific vgl(3) API but frankly I like just setting pixels in a block of memory.
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I really wish FBSD had a /dev/fb interface available similar that of Linux.

Having a plain FB that just maps to the best available output driver + mode makes userland's programs jobs much more easier and more secure. IMO low-level things like handling VBE calls belong to kernel, not the X server, and on top of that having a easy to use FB device that is always available allows the userland to do things like: Xfbdev, this was revived in XLibre (thanks stefan11111 et. al.) which is really useful for embedded/ live environments and removes the headache of having to arbitrate the correct frame-buffer driver to just get a simple GUI.
You can also do simple video/image playback right at the TTY with very few lines of code which is quite handy and useful.


About the topic: This article reads more like an AD read for Claude than a actual X server with real world use.
 
baaz said:
I really wish FBSD had a /dev/fb interface available similar that of Linux.
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Indeed. Though (as most good things in Linux) it looks like it has become deprecated and isn't guaranteed to be in a number of default kernels.

I tried to break down the Xorg vesa driver into a standalone library I could tap into but it became so complex. Something about getting a BAR address pulled through from the BIOS. This couldn't be done after the kernel had taken over (can't use realmode INT 0x10), so an aperture driver was needed.

Other than the libdrm stuff I went with, a very elegant approach was mmap from WSDISPLAYIO_MODE_DUMBFB. But, it only seems to work if a DRM driver isn't attached. So EFI+NVIDIA on OpenBSD was fine with this.

TL;DR; Agree /dev/fb is so much simpler and cleaner. Its weird this hasn't become established for all UNIX-like platforms.

baaz said:
Xfbdev, this was revived in XLibre (thanks stefan11111 et. al.) which is really useful for embedded/ live environments and removes the headache of having to arbitrate the correct frame-buffer driver to just get a simple GUI.
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That is actually very cool; I didn't know about this. I have always been interested in TinyX for a similar purpose.

baaz said:
About the topic: This article reads more like an AD read for Claude than a actual X server with real world use.
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Absolutely. But the trade-off is it keeps X11 in the limelight and annoys the Wayland cult. :beer:
 
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