What is the future of X / X11?

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I don't get why "new" things always have to "replace" the old, tried and tested, things. Can't they co-exist? Install and use Xorg if you need remote access or a more "traditional" Windowing system. Use Wayland (or something else) if you want a fancy desktop for games and 3D graphics. The both serve different purposes and I believe it would be bad to try and combine everything into a "single" application that can do everything.
 
What I think will happen is that wayland will be deprecated at 80% market share, the replacement at 60% and then

That doesn't matter much, because the bulk of this effort consists of moving remaining input and display driver bits (and whatever) out of Xorg into Linux evdev/libinput/drm/mesa infrastructure. Wayland itself is inconsequential.
 
The problem this will create is that one interface of the applications will change. Yes, you can use Xwayland to run X apps, what will you do to make a wayland-only thing like, say, blender or libreoffice (once they switched over) run without it? Over X11?
 
We can't really fight Linux desktop. If they move to Wayland, we have to move as well.

Nvidia seems to agree:
Code:
% ls ~/Downloads/NVIDIA-FreeBSD-x86_64-415.13/obj/ | grep wayland
10_nvidia_wayland.json
libnvidia-egl-wayland.so.1
 
Ahmmm - No.

Nvidia can decide to jump off a cliff, but being able to fly is beyond their power. The same applies to Linux and us, also.
 
I'm not quite sure what are you trying to say. I only mention Nvidia because they are the last holdout there. All Mesa drivers are basically ready.
 
I don't want to subject anyone to my rants but we do have a slight issue at this Uni where the students prefer "brands" over standards. It is why dreaded kiddy "game making" software such as Unity3D is so popular.
A well-known web guy just had an article listing 10 sources of other web experts complaining about the same thing--sort of--in web development. Reddit runts now claim no one uses javascript anymore cause everyone uses <insert framework/library here>.
 
I don't get why "new" things always have to "replace" the old, tried and tested, things.
This is another popular fallacy on amateur forums. If it's old it can't be any good. Another excellent article I read recently talked about how people seem to ignore the fact that so much software from UNIX, written decades ago, still lives today and you don't find that anywhere in today's software which falls out of favor and gets replaced on a yearly basis.
 
In general I am not worried about Wayland. Again, I think it will have died before any real software deprecates X11 support.

That said I am a bit worried about some of the choices in the meantime. For example the Gnome 2 port in the past had shown that as a community, we are quite happy to break many things such as mounting and stability, just in the quest for staying in sync with upstream version. So long as we don't do the same again and are quite happy sticking with an older version of software that works 100% well with X11, then there will be no problems.

What might happen though is we try to keep all the software up to date with Linux / Wayland and hack together quick patches which break a lot of the functionality just so we can keep the version numbers the same. I personally would rather the older but fully working version.

The fact that Gnome 2 was ripped out and replaced with Gnome 3 when there were known issues with that version is in my opinion a reason to never use FreeBSD as a full fledged GUI desktop operating system again.
 
Like all inevitable, Xorg will die forever with all good X softwares.

(1) The MS Windows programmer is like this, like fanaticism. Windows is the best and nothing else is good.

(2) The Pseudo-Unix and Unix programmer will drop the good food, will go to mac donalds daily, because it looks good and tastes good, and get either heart issue or infestion. Then, he will complain.

It is inevitable to go to Wayland and to drop Xorg. It should be like this.

First Linux will get infection, then BSD. Like all junk foods in there: systemd, pulseaudio, all C/C++ with gcc/g++ bloat, modern graphical libraries, ...
 
I'm confused (note that I did't have a clear view of the subject and my opinion is open).
When I read about X11 vs Wayland (or why not X12 ?) I found that X11 is too large to be maintained and is about too much things (printer, fonts, ...). That doesn't sound great for me.
So there is good reasons to replace X11 (or at least add a better tool that co-exists).
Why not Wayland ?
Is it a licence issue ? The development smell bad ? The way is not good ? The goal of the project is incompatible with portability or other important things (security ...)
Could you explicit you grief (as you compare Wayland to bacteria or virus) ?
 
Making (a) new solution(s) is Giving Up. if you give up, you fall in a fail path, which endlessly gets to giving up, and again.
Better to work on what is already existing.
 
Like all inevitable, Xorg will die forever with all good X softwares.
Nah, X, the protocol itself, has been around since the late '80s, I'm sure it's going to survive in some form or another. Xorg is just an implementation of version 11 of X. It's actually X version 11, release 6, which you may remember as X11R6. So, why exclude the possibility of an R7? Or X12?

Could Xorg someday die? Sure, that too could happen. It wouldn't be the first time something like that happened. I'm not sure how long you've been using FreeBSD but there used to be a time when Xorg didn't exist and we were all using XFree86. Like XFree86 before it, Xorg is, simply put, an implementation of a bunch of protocols.

I'm confused (note that I did't have a clear view of the subject and my opinion is open).
When I read about X11 vs Wayland (or why not X12 ?) I found that X11 is too large to be maintained and is about too much things (printer, fonts, ...).
X or X11 (and Wayland) is specifically not about things like printers or fonts. To quote the X Window System Wikipedia entry:
X primarily defines protocol and graphics primitives – it deliberately contains no specification for application user-interface design, such as button, menu, or window title-bar styles. Instead, application software – such as window managers, GUI widget toolkits and desktop environments, or application-specific graphical user interfaces – define and provide such details. As a result, there is no typical X interface and several different desktop environments have become popular among users.

(or why not X12 ?)
That's a million dollar question. Indeed, why not?
 
why x/x11/xorg should survive if debian will drop it soon ? It is like. sorry, we have no maintainer... we must drop the package.

x12 is visibly interesting replacement. It may yeah. Any X/Xorg/X11 needs to be replaced urgently. (Pseudo)-Unix programmers are really bored.
Maybe they should "clean up" and fix back all debian based distributions from the poettering mess. Lucky bsd did not adopt sysD.

All other distros will replace their xvesa with x/x11 in 20 years, because it just worked (not ideal, but worked).
xwayland will come and like poettering, after some time xwayland with be wayland, and users will use wayland. xwayland is for a given time only as stated.

In computer sciences, programmers re-invent the wheel all over again and again. It is maybe a sort of law of moore.
 
Xorg's mission is to support obsolete hardware, that must be installed every time, to not break that purpose. In that sense, Wayland can replace it more efficiently.
 
Xorg's mission is to support obsolete hardware, that must be installed every time, to not break that purpose. In that sense, Wayland can replace it more efficiently.

Your comment implies that we should not care about any kinds of hardwares, but focus on selected, specific, modern ones.

However, BSD is free, and if we be consistent and congruent, we must support old hardware as well.

>* Free opensource software means for **EVERYONE** without making differences. *<
 
Xorg's mission is to support obsolete hardware, that must be installed every time, to not break that purpose.
Sure, that might be Xorg's mission. But you could fork Xorg. Don't forget Xorg is a fork of XFree86. It's been done before.

I like the principles of X:
  • Do not add new functionality unless an implementor cannot complete a real application without it.
  • It is as important to decide what a system is not as to decide what it is. Do not serve all the world's needs; rather, make the system extensible so that additional needs can be met in an upwardly compatible fashion.
  • The only thing worse than generalizing from one example is generalizing from no examples at all.
  • If a problem is not completely understood, it is probably best to provide no solution at all.
  • If you can get 90 percent of the desired effect for 10 percent of the work, use the simpler solution. (See also worse is better.)
  • Isolate complexity as much as possible.
  • Provide mechanism rather than policy. In particular, place user interface policy in the clients' hands.
The first principle was modified during the design of X11 to: "Do not add new functionality unless you know of some real application that will require it."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System#Principles

Apparently Wayland is trying to fill a need, something X currently can't provide. So, why not extend X? Based on the principles of X changes aren't excluded. Heck, there are real applications that require new functionality (first principle), so there's no reason to keep it exactly like it is now.
 
Your comment implies that we should not care about any kinds of hardwares, but focus on selected, specific, modern ones.

However, BSD is free, and if we be consistent and congruent, we must support old hardware as well.

>* Free opensource software means for **EVERYONE** without making differences. *<
Hardware and implementations from the 70's, I believe.
 
Xorg's mission is to support obsolete hardware, that must be installed every time, to not break that purpose.
Your comment implies that we should not care about any kinds of hardwares, but focus on selected, specific, modern ones.

I'm not familiar with any of the technical details, but why would keeping support for obsolete hardware exclude the addition of features useful for modern hardware?
 
The enemy of a good X would be a better ?. As long as we have no alternatives for X for a GUI on FreeBSD, the whole question is senseless. I would be more interested in a roadmap of Wayland on FreeBSD. Does it exist at all? Then, eventually we may perhaps talk about alternatives to X on FreeBSD, whether better or not is another question.
 
I vaguely remember that Wayland had less layers, and was more direct because of that, so in a sense was supposed to be efficient. Something like desktop applications more directly communicating with the display server.
Yes, I know - see: Is Wayland becoming ready for prime time on FreeBSD? Until now, nobody answered my actual question. Please feel free to tell us some instructions, on how to build a FreeBSD desktop without X.org but with Wayland.
I believe you can, but it won't be a functional desktop. It may hardly have any applications. Gnome may work with it, but it will bring in bloat, which will likely bring in or require most Xorg dependencies anyway.
I saw instructions for doing it long ago, but it may not have reached ports at that time, so it was do at your own trouble. I'm not going to search for obsolete instructions from years ago, that there are chances are it was deleted or hard to find.
I'm not familiar with any of the technical details, but why would keeping support for obsolete hardware exclude the addition of features useful for modern hardware?
I think it builds on old protocols from the early 90's or maybe 70's from the first opensource window managers, that make it less efficient. But Xorg is kind of efficient for what it is: it's not bad.

I'm not entirely sure. This is stuff I remember being mentioned or that I read about a few years ago. It is often difficult to find old stuff, while it is easier to remember it, and that's a lot of information, that easily gets buried or lost, and often becomes obsolete.

If Wayland can do some things better, and can work with Xorg. I don't see why not. The Xorg updates that include Wayland dependencies, don't harm my desktop. It might be a little more efficient, and a little more smooth, but that's difficult to judge.
 
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