X11 Server Development Pace Hits A Two Decade Low
By Michael Larabel, 30 December 2022
- https/www.phoronix.com/news/XServer-2022-Development-Pace

"It shouldn't be news to you that most of the corporate-backed
developers working on the Linux desktop are no longer investing in
new feature work around the X.Org Server and have shifted their
efforts to a Wayland-focused environment moving forward. In looking
at the Git statistics for the X.Org Server over the course of 2022
it shows how the development has pulled back dramatically and now
at a two decade low for the commits and code changes.
While Mesa's development has been very vibrant this year, the X.Org
Server development pace has continued pulling back greatly from its
late 00's and early 10's highs.
This year saw just 156 commits to the xserver Git master branch,
down from 331 last year and well off the highs of 2,114 as the most
ever back in 2008. This jives with the downward pace over the past
decade of the number of new commits continuing to slide. But it's
not just on a commit basis but in overall code churn, 2022 was
another low for the X.Org Server. With the 156 commits this year,
there were just 3,618 lines of new code added and 888 lines
removed.... Compared to last year with its 331 commits seeing 31.4k
new lines and 179k lines removed." ...

--
__ __
#_ < |\| |< _#

Computer Nerd Kev quoted:

> "It shouldn't be news to you that most of the corporate-backed
> developers working on the Linux desktop are no longer investing in
> new feature work around the X.Org Server and have shifted their
> efforts to a Wayland-focused environment moving forward."

I think that's a good thing ... right? Provided the efforts to waylandize
everything doesn't fizzle out ...

<https://arewewaylandyet.com>

I mean, running Xeyes on a colleague's VAXstation was fun once or twice, and
firing up a gnome session to your own windows desktop using cygwinand XDMCP was
so horribly insecure you'd only do it with the confines of your own four walls,
what do people actually want X11 for now?

Andy Burns <usenet@andyburns.uk> writes:

> Computer Nerd Kev quoted:
>
>> "It shouldn't be news to you that most of the corporate-backed
>> developers working on the Linux desktop are no longer investing in
>> new feature work around the X.Org Server and have shifted their
>> efforts to a Wayland-focused environment moving forward."
>
> I think that's a good thing ... right? Provided the efforts to
> waylandize everything doesn't fizzle out ...
>
> <https://arewewaylandyet.com>
>
> I mean, running Xeyes on a colleague's VAXstation was fun once or
> twice, and firing up a gnome session to your own windows desktop using
> cygwinand XDMCP was so horribly insecure you'd only do it with the
> confines of your own four walls, what do people actually want X11 for
> now?

To keep running the same WM I've been using for decades.

--
Dan Espen

Dan Espen <dan1espen@gmail.com> writes:

> Andy Burns <usenet@andyburns.uk> writes:
>
>> I mean, running Xeyes on a colleague's VAXstation was fun once or
>> twice,...

And xroach.

>> ...and firing up a gnome session to your own windows desktop using
>> cygwinand XDMCP was so horribly insecure you'd only do it with the
>> confines of your own four walls, what do people actually want X11 for
>> now?

Oy. Am I having this conversaion with someone who *has* his "own
windows desktop"?

> To keep running the same WM I've been using for decades.

Yes, that.

--
Mike Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada

Am 04.01.2023 schrieb Andy Burns <usenet@andyburns.uk>:

> what do people actually want X11 for now?

Does it support lightweight window managers like mwm?
I hate environments like GNOME, they are slow and annoying to use.

with <k1me2lF4h4nU1@mid.individual.net> Andy Burns wrote:
> Computer Nerd Kev quoted:

>> "It shouldn't be news to you that most of the corporate-backed
>> developers working on the Linux desktop are no longer investing in
>> new feature work around the X.Org Server and have shifted their
>> efforts to a Wayland-focused environment moving forward."
> I think that's a good thing ... right? Provided the efforts to
> waylandize everything doesn't fizzle out ...

Then comes gcc with new defaults (or whatever) and you are as good as
switched to windopws.

><https://arewewaylandyet.com>
> I mean, running Xeyes on a colleague's VAXstation was fun once or
> twice, and firing up a gnome session to your own windows desktop using
> cygwinand XDMCP was so horribly insecure you'd only do it with the
> confines of your own four walls, what do people actually want X11 for
> now?

Anyghing else besides gnome?

--
Torvalds' goal for Linux is very simple: World Domination
Stallman's goal for GNU is even simpler: Freedom

Dan Espen wrote:

> Andy Burns writes:
>
>> what do people actually want X11 for now?
>
> To keep running the same WM I've been using for decades.

I fall into the category where Gnome (my distro's default) as a WM doesn't annoy
me enough to use anything different, I did use XFCE for a bit, and now I don't
know which do/don't work with wayland ... that's what I meant by "fizzle out" if
your favourite WM doesn't support wayland, eventually it's going to find it self
beached without X11 to run on top of ..

Marco Moock wrote:

> schrieb Andy Burns:
>
>> what do people actually want X11 for now?
>
> Does it support lightweight window managers like mwm?
> I hate environments like GNOME, they are slow and annoying to use.

From that "are we wayland yet" link I posted, no

Enlightenment (experimental),
GNOME,
KDE Plasma,
MATE Desktop (partial)

Not sure if wayland sees it as their job to port mwm etc to it, or the other WMs
jobs to port themselves to wayland? Guessing the latter, which if they don't
might see the death of them in the long term?

Am 05.01.2023 schrieb Andy Burns <usenet@andyburns.uk>:

> From that "are we wayland yet" link I posted, no
>
> Enlightenment (experimental),
> GNOME,
> KDE Plasma,
> MATE Desktop (partial)
>
> Not sure if wayland sees it as their job to port mwm etc to it, or
> the other WMs jobs to port themselves to wayland?

Ok, so Wayland isn't and alternative for me at this time at all.

> Guessing the latter, which if they don't might see the death of them in the long
> term?

X11 isn't dead, there are just not that much commits as in the last
years. If all works fine, errors are fixed and the distributions still
ship X11, I can stay with it.

On Wed, 4 Jan 2023 22:48:48 +0000
Andy Burns <usenet@andyburns.uk> wrote:

> Computer Nerd Kev quoted:
>
> > "It shouldn't be news to you that most of the corporate-backed
> > developers working on the Linux desktop are no longer investing in
> > new feature work around the X.Org Server and have shifted their
> > efforts to a Wayland-focused environment moving forward."
>
> I think that's a good thing ... right? Provided the efforts to waylandize
> everything doesn't fizzle out ...
>
> <https://arewewaylandyet.com>
>
> I mean, running Xeyes on a colleague's VAXstation was fun once or twice, and
> firing up a gnome session to your own windows desktop using cygwinand XDMCP was
> so horribly insecure you'd only do it with the confines of your own four walls,
> what do people actually want X11 for now?
>

I tunnel X11 via ssh to run X11 apps on the server. Vendors were supplying their installation and/or configuration tools as GUI apps that ran on the server. They were usually Java apps.

Marco Moock <mo01@posteo.de> writes:

> Am 05.01.2023 schrieb Andy Burns <usenet@andyburns.uk>:
>
>> From that "are we wayland yet" link I posted, no
>>
>> Enlightenment (experimental),
>> GNOME,
>> KDE Plasma,
>> MATE Desktop (partial)
>>
>> Not sure if wayland sees it as their job to port mwm etc to it, or
>> the other WMs jobs to port themselves to wayland?
>
> Ok, so Wayland isn't and alternative for me at this time at all.
>
>> Guessing the latter, which if they don't might see the death of them in the long
>> term?
>
> X11 isn't dead, there are just not that much commits as in the last
> years. If all works fine, errors are fixed and the distributions still
> ship X11, I can stay with it.

I sure hope so. Especially since Wayland hasn't shown any of the
improvements they touted. As far as I can see the Wayland effort
reduces function, offers no benefits, and is therefore a total failure.

--
Dan Espen

[Crossposting to comp.os.linux.misc . ]

On Thu, 5 Jan 2023 11:33:39 +0000
Andy Burns <usenet@andyburns.uk> wrote:
> Dan Espen wrote:
>
> > Andy Burns writes:
> >
> >> what do people actually want X11 for now?
> >
> > To keep running the same WM I've been using for decades.
>
> I fall into the category where Gnome (my distro's default) as a WM doesn't annoy
> me enough to use anything different, I did use XFCE for a bit, and now I don't
> know which do/don't work with wayland ... that's what I meant by "fizzle out" if
> your favourite WM doesn't support wayland, eventually it's going to find it self
> beached without X11 to run on top of ..

I was under the impression that one of the plans for Wayland was to be able
to run X server on top of it so that all X11 applications would continue to
work. Has this plan been abandoned ?

[Crossposting to comp.os.linux.misc . ]

On Wed, 4 Jan 2023 22:48:48 +0000
Andy Burns <usenet@andyburns.uk> wrote:
> Computer Nerd Kev quoted:
>
> > "It shouldn't be news to you that most of the corporate-backed
> > developers working on the Linux desktop are no longer investing in
> > new feature work around the X.Org Server and have shifted their
> > efforts to a Wayland-focused environment moving forward."
>
> I think that's a good thing ... right? Provided the efforts to waylandize
> everything doesn't fizzle out ...

For context , the opening post of the thread gave the link
https://www.phoronix.com/news/XServer-2022-Development-Pace which says
Of course, it's not that X.Org Server is feature-complete and great as
there still are issues around HDR support, synchronization improvements,
and other enhancements that could be made along with better tackling the
X.Org Server security,

..I do think that the X server is great. I don't think that something as
wide ranging as this can ever be "feature-complete" , there will always be
some feature someone wants.

Anyway , I don't know what the features in the quote mean. I could look them
up but I'm not that curious. As long as bugs get fixed (assuming there are
any left) , that's fine by me.

I remember looking into Wayland a while ago. Anything it aimed to do and
supposedly the X server does not do (well) , I did not care about or thought
it was a very minor issue or didn't even know what it meant ! For example ,
one issue was storing fonts in the server. An entirely minor issue. Another
was that certain drawing primitives are better done in a library like Cairo.
Perhaps but that's a long discussion in its own right like how "better" is
defined and measured.

So I decided that I'm not interested in Wayland.

> <https://arewewaylandyet.com>

No vim on that page.

> I mean, running Xeyes on a colleague's VAXstation was fun once or twice, and
> firing up a gnome session to your own windows desktop using cygwinand XDMCP was
> so horribly insecure you'd only do it with the confines of your own four walls,

What's wrong with an ssh connection ?

> what do people actually want X11 for now?

I watch movies , look at images , surf the internet , read PDF and postscript
files , type text (like this one) and run terminal emulators. I use the great
and minimal ratpoison window manager. I don't use a desktop environment as
such. I play the occasional game too but I haven't done that in a long time.
The X server works fine and I'm of the opinion "if it works , don't fix it"
especially for something as complicated as this. I also know the X
programming interface. I assume there is something analogous for Wayland and
it may be great for all I know but I don't have unlimited time and the X
server interface already does what I want.

--
vlaho.ninja/prog

Spiros Bousbouras wrote:

> Andy Burns wrote:
>
>> <https://arewewaylandyet.com>
>
> No vim on that page.

Well it doesn't need to be, since multiple terminal emulators are there.

Spiros Bousbouras wrote:

> I was under the impression that one of the plans for Wayland was to be able
> to run X server on top of it so that all X11 applications would continue to
> work. Has this plan been abandoned ?

I think that still exists, XServer sits on top of Wayland, apps tolk to XServer,
believing it's Xorg, but when that first crept into Fedora, it seemed to break
the tradional way of X remoting by

export DISPLAY=host:0.0

On Thu, 5 Jan 2023 19:29:39 +0000
Andy Burns <usenet@andyburns.uk> wrote:
> Spiros Bousbouras wrote:
>
> > Andy Burns wrote:
> >
> >> <https://arewewaylandyet.com>
> >
> > No vim on that page.
>
> Well it doesn't need to be, since multiple terminal emulators are there.

It does because various things work more smoothly if vim makes its own
connection to the X server. For example writing and reading from the *
register (for anyone not familiar , do :help quotestar in vim) or pasting
or recognition of unusual key combinations.

--
How do you know that a martial artist is a hipster ?
He uses latte spoons as weapons.

On Thu, 5 Jan 2023 19:33:01 +0000
Andy Burns <usenet@andyburns.uk> wrote:
> Spiros Bousbouras wrote:
>
> > I was under the impression that one of the plans for Wayland was to be able
> > to run X server on top of it so that all X11 applications would continue to
> > work. Has this plan been abandoned ?
>
> I think that still exists, XServer sits on top of Wayland, apps tolk to XServer,
> believing it's Xorg,

Then why did you say in <k1nqskFauepU1@mid.individual.net>

if your favourite WM doesn't support wayland, eventually it's going to
find it self beached without X11 to run on top of ..

? Applications needing X11 will still be able to find it.

> but when that first crept into Fedora, it seemed to break
> the tradional way of X remoting by
>
> export DISPLAY=host:0.0

This seems minor.

--
vlaho.ninja/prog

Marco Moock <nn263@uni-heidelberg.de> writes:

> Am 04.01.2023 schrieb Andy Burns <usenet@andyburns.uk>:
>
>> what do people actually want X11 for now?
>
> Does it support lightweight window managers like mwm?
> I hate environments like GNOME, they are slow and annoying to use.

Been using twm -- about as lightweight as you can get -- under X ever
since I fired up my very first Linux (Caldera) and discovered it
defaulted to KDE. Shudder. Replaced KDE with twm, soon switched to
Slackware and never looked back.

Used uwm with Unix for a decade before I had Linux. You could do neat
stuff with windows that had no borders.

--
Mike Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada

Dan Espen <dan1espen@gmail.com> wrote:
> Marco Moock <mo01@posteo.de> writes:
>>
>> X11 isn't dead, there are just not that much commits as in the last
>> years. If all works fine, errors are fixed and the distributions still
>> ship X11, I can stay with it.
>
> I sure hope so. Especially since Wayland hasn't shown any of the
> improvements they touted. As far as I can see the Wayland effort
> reduces function, offers no benefits, and is therefore a total failure.

Indeed I don't see why I'd want to switch to Wayland. On a
technical level X11 had various extensions to get around the fact
that the protocol wasn't designed for applications to interact
directly with the graphics hardware of the machine that they were
running on. As early as the mid 90s there was a proposed
replacement for X being worked on by some of the X developers,
called Fresco which would have been more like Wayland in design,
in order to get around this problem. However at the same time the
various work-arounds were getting better, while retaining
compatibility as well. So they were a better practical solution
than Fresco would have been then, and Wayland is now.

Fresco:
http://web.archive.org/web/20100729173932/http://fresco.org/index.html

The root problem is that all these extensions make make it very
hard to understand all the processes going on in the X server. It
also means that separate display drivers are required for the X
server itself, and for applications communicating with graphics
hardware themselves via OpenGL. So X was simply hard work for
developers to make big changes too, and Wayland is a more lazy
option for them that does what the average user wants without so
much complexity. As the article points out, the active X developers
were/are mostly working for large companies, so they probably
worked out that Wayland would be cheaper to maintain in the long
run than X.Org.

But that's from a developer's perspective. As a user I don't
actually want anything new from X, or even anything that it didn't
do ten years ago (new graphics drivers are nice, but I'm happy
enough even with the general-purpose VESA or framebuffer drivers).
Remote windows can be useful, and SSH makes it very easy to get
around the security problems with that when they're relevent. All
those extensions just work, and in spite of all the complexity it
all runs more than fast enough on modern computers (probably
because the developers had to make everything work on computers
from 20-30 years ago), so Wayland really doesn't have a leg to
stand on from a user's point of view.

The only trouble is that eventually (probably not for quite a while
though) popular graphics toolkits like GTK and Qt might stop
supporting X11 and go Wayland-only. Most of the programs I use are
old and will be stuck requiring an X server (either displaying
directly, or into a Wayland window) forever anyway, but there are
sure to be some new ones that I want to try without needing to
switch to Wayland for them. To that end a few years ago I looked
into whether it's possible to run a Wayland "compositor" that
displays as an a window in X. The answer was yes, and indeed this
was a feature of one of the project's example compositors, although
I couldn't find the exact code due to various poorly-documented
reorganisations and re-namings (_definately_ the same developers
who used to work on X.Org :) ). For now there's no point because
everything supports X still anyway, but this convinced me that it
shouldn't be that hard to build a system to run Wayland programs on
X, and I expect someone else will have developed that long before I
find that I need it myself.

So I don't expect that I'll ever need to switch to Wayland. I'm
not all that concerned about X.Org not getting any new features, or
applications eventually dropping X11 support. The only issue might
be how X ties in closely with the Linux kernel (expecially now that
it uses the Kernel's DRM interface, which is bound to change over
time). So if development gets entirely abandoned, eventually it
might not compile/run on modern Linux at all. But I recently
succeeded at getting the last release of XFree86, from 2008, to run
on modern Linux, as well as on ARM, after performing a long list of
minor code fixes. So I expect that an X server will remain
runable on Linux for me, at worst after an approachable amount of
individual work.

--
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#_ < |\| |< _#

In comp.misc Spiros Bousbouras <spibou@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 4 Jan 2023 22:48:48 +0000
> Andy Burns <usenet@andyburns.uk> wrote:
>> Computer Nerd Kev quoted:
>>
>> > "It shouldn't be news to you that most of the corporate-backed
>> > developers working on the Linux desktop are no longer investing in
>> > new feature work around the X.Org Server and have shifted their
>> > efforts to a Wayland-focused environment moving forward."
>>
>> I think that's a good thing ... right? Provided the efforts to waylandize
>> everything doesn't fizzle out ...
>
> For context , the opening post of the thread gave the link
> https://www.phoronix.com/news/XServer-2022-Development-Pace which says
> Of course, it's not that X.Org Server is feature-complete and great as
> there still are issues around HDR support, synchronization improvements,
> and other enhancements that could be made along with better tackling the
> X.Org Server security,
>
> .I do think that the X server is great. I don't think that something as
> wide ranging as this can ever be "feature-complete" , there will always be
> some feature someone wants.
>
> Anyway , I don't know what the features in the quote mean. I could look them
> up but I'm not that curious. As long as bugs get fixed (assuming there are
> any left) , that's fine by me.

X is such a big project that I think there'll always be something
that someone could convincingly argue needs improvement. But in
terms of practical effect I don't see much making a real difference
in the last decade or so. Except of course hardware drivers for
newer graphics cards. If anything the most noticable difference is
that newer X servers are slower to start up on the same hardware,
so by that measure I'd rather they didn't do more work on it
(besides bug and compatibility fixes).

--
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#_ < |\| |< _#

Computer Nerd Kev wrote:
....
> So I don't expect that I'll ever need to switch to Wayland. I'm
> not all that concerned about X.Org not getting any new features, or
> applications eventually dropping X11 support. The only issue might
> be how X ties in closely with the Linux kernel (expecially now that
> it uses the Kernel's DRM interface, which is bound to change over
> time). So if development gets entirely abandoned, eventually it
> might not compile/run on modern Linux at all. But I recently
> succeeded at getting the last release of XFree86, from 2008, to run
> on modern Linux, as well as on ARM, after performing a long list of
> minor code fixes. So I expect that an X server will remain
> runable on Linux for me, at worst after an approachable amount of
> individual work.

did you post those changes someplace?

not that i'd ever need them myself but perhaps someone else
would be able to use them.

ant

ant <ant@anthive.com> wrote:
> Computer Nerd Kev wrote:
> ...
>> So I don't expect that I'll ever need to switch to Wayland. I'm
>> not all that concerned about X.Org not getting any new features, or
>> applications eventually dropping X11 support. The only issue might
>> be how X ties in closely with the Linux kernel (expecially now that
>> it uses the Kernel's DRM interface, which is bound to change over
>> time). So if development gets entirely abandoned, eventually it
>> might not compile/run on modern Linux at all. But I recently
>> succeeded at getting the last release of XFree86, from 2008, to run
>> on modern Linux, as well as on ARM, after performing a long list of
>> minor code fixes. So I expect that an X server will remain
>> runable on Linux for me, at worst after an approachable amount of
>> individual work.
>
> did you post those changes someplace?

Sort of. The modified file are here along with my custom input and
display drivers (which can be disabled in the build configuration):
https://github.com/gtoal/pitrex/tree/master/xc

See "Building / Installing" in the pitrex_README.txt file for how
to build from that, or using the patch file that I also provide.
Since I wrote that I've also built it on Linux 5.10 with GCC 10.

Only the "static" server build runs, the modular server doesn't, so
don't change "#define DoLoadableServer NO" in config/cf/host.def.

GLX causes a segmentation fault, so avoid OpenGL (3D) programs. I
might look into that eventually.

Both those problems might only happen on ARM, I haven't tried
building it on PC. Also only the framebuffer driver has been tested
(besides my own hacked "dummy" driver) because that's the only one
that makes sense on a Raspberry Pi.

> not that i'd ever need them myself but perhaps someone else
> would be able to use them.

Most useful is probably the Xfbdev TinyX server mentioned at the
end of that README, especially on computers like the RPi Zero which
are slow to load Xorg. Xorg removed TinyX many years ago.

--
__ __
#_ < |\| |< _#

On Thu, 05 Jan 2023 18:31:13 +0000, Spiros Bousbouras wrote:

> [Crossposting to comp.os.linux.misc . ]
>
> On Wed, 4 Jan 2023 22:48:48 +0000
> Andy Burns <usenet@andyburns.uk> wrote:
>> Computer Nerd Kev quoted:
>>
>> > "It shouldn't be news to you that most of the corporate-backed
>> > developers working on the Linux desktop are no longer investing in
>> > new feature work around the X.Org Server and have shifted their
>> > efforts to a Wayland-focused environment moving forward."
[snip]
>> what do people actually want X11 for now?
>
> I watch movies , look at images , surf the internet , read PDF and postscript
> files , type text (like this one) and run terminal emulators. I use the great
> and minimal ratpoison window manager. I don't use a desktop environment as
> such. I play the occasional game too but I haven't done that in a long time.
> The X server works fine and I'm of the opinion "if it works , don't fix it"
> especially for something as complicated as this. I also know the X
> programming interface. I assume there is something analogous for Wayland and
> it may be great for all I know but I don't have unlimited time and the X
> server interface already does what I want.

What do I want X11 for? For remote display. I want to be able to run a
program on the server and have it display on my desktop. Wayland isn't
client-server so it's a non-starter that I don't consider viable for me.
And, no, I don't want to run a whole desktop on the server and vnc to that.

In comp.misc Andy Burns <usenet@andyburns.uk> wrote:
> Spiros Bousbouras wrote:
>
>> I was under the impression that one of the plans for Wayland was to be able
>> to run X server on top of it so that all X11 applications would continue to
>> work. Has this plan been abandoned ?
>
> I think that still exists, XServer sits on top of Wayland, apps tolk to XServer,
> believing it's Xorg, but when that first crept into Fedora, it seemed to break
> the tradional way of X remoting by
>
> export DISPLAY=host:0.0
>

That is because modern versions of the XServer have disabled TCP listening by default.

$ cat /etc/X11/xinit/xserverrc
#!/bin/sh
exec /usr/bin/X -nolisten tcp "$@"

You need to remove the '-nolisten tcp' from /etc/X11/xinit/xserverrc
That should do the trick.

Computer Nerd Kev <not@telling.you.invalid> wrote:
> into whether it's possible to run a Wayland "compositor" that
> displays as an a window in X. The answer was yes, and indeed this
> was a feature of one of the project's example compositors, although
> I couldn't find the exact code due to various poorly-documented
> reorganisations and re-namings (_definately_ the same developers
> who used to work on X.Org :) ). For now there's no point because
> everything supports X still anyway, but this convinced me that it
> shouldn't be that hard to build a system to run Wayland programs on
> X, and I expect someone else will have developed that long before I
> find that I need it myself.

I agree that running Wayland on top of X is the best way to proceed.
But wouldn't running several instances of Wayland on top of X introduce
a lot of overhead?

What is the memory footprint of running each Wayland session?