GNOME Merge Requests Opened To Drop X11 Session Support (phoronix.com) 99
"A set of merge requests were opened to drop X.ORG (X11) from GNOME desktop," writes Slashdot reader motang. Phoronix reports: This merge request would remove the X11 session targets within gnome-session: "This is the first step towards deprecating the x11 session, the systemd targets are removed, but the x11 functionality is still there in so you can restore the x11 session by installing the targets in the appropriate place on your own. X11 has been receiving less and less testing. We have been defaulting to the wayland session since 2016 and it's about time we drop the x11 session completely. Let's remove the targets this cycle and maybe carry on with removing rest of the x11 session code next cycle."
That was followed by this merge request that would land later on -- more than likely, one cycle later -- for actually removing the X11 session code. Dropping that code would lighten up gnome-session by 3.6k lines of code directly.
That was followed by this merge request that would land later on -- more than likely, one cycle later -- for actually removing the X11 session code. Dropping that code would lighten up gnome-session by 3.6k lines of code directly.
Dropped Your eX? (Score:2)
She was a hex
Cleared your beard
Like the decks
Burma Shave
About time. (Score:1, Flamebait)
X has been the standard on Unix and Unix like systems 1984. The last stable update was in 2012, it has been on life support since then with no real updates. Time to pull the plug.
Re:About time. (Score:5, Informative)
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What are you talking about? Wayland has screen shot support. Its just gated for security. Give it permission, then you have screenshots.
And yes "Cant take screenshots if the user doesnt permit it" is absolutely a feature.
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-Modern computing.
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I might completely trust the software on my own computer if I'd written it all, never connected it to a network, turned it off and stored it in a grounded Faraday cage buried in 5m of concrete.
It wouldn't be very practical that way though, so I'm stuck to managing trust, like everyone else. The principle of least-privilege is vital.
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It wouldn't be very practical that way though, so I'm stuck to managing trust, like everyone else.
You don't understand what you are doing then. You're not "managing trust", you're "managing risk."
Computers run code written by others. That's a fact. (You can write your own full stack, but ~99.9999999% of humans never will.) In that case, the best option is to start from a known low risk (i.e. good) state. If you have to second guess the defaults, that's not a low risk state, it's a high risk state by your own admission. The issue isn't the OS providing the ability to take a screenshot, it's the fact t
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You assume the hacker is competent. It seems like today the vast majority are script kiddies and scammers just going for the easy payoff. And the vast majority of attacks are automated malware just looking for a juicy target. Making life more difficult for them greatly improves your own security.
It may be no more than a minor inconvenience to a competent hacker targeting you personally - but that's a very unlikely scenario that's functionally impossible for most people to defend against anyway, so it's n
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Pretty sad commentary that someone can't trust the software on their own computer...
How about a scenario where you were admin for machines which connected to services which held secrets (whether this be commercial, military, GDPR etc). You might not want users to take snapshots, for obvious reasons.
Whether the default is correct is up for debate - but the ability to prevent someone taking snapshots is quite reasonable.
Re:About time. (Score:4, Informative)
You might not want users to take snapshots, for obvious reasons.
I highly doubt the Military would be wanting to use some untested new fangled crap for "the hacker OS" as a base environment for storing their top secret info. If they are, $DEITY help us.
As for everyone else, why should the option be forbidden to everyone? Why can't there be a system policy option to disable / enable screenshots by default?
Further, there's this new fangled thing called a smartphone. It tends to have a camera that can be pointed at a screen. Unless you are actively monitoring the end-users constantly and making sure they don't whip out a phone, that screenshot permission window isn't going to be very effective at preventing data from leaving with them. A more effective solution would be to MITM all outgoing connections looking for image data. (Which if you have systems with secrets that need "disable screenshots" protection, you should already have in-place.)
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Can it be turned on by default by the distro developers? The one I use is not privacy-centric containerized don't-trust-anyone, so I may never feel the difference if screenshots are authorized by default.
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As for everyone else, why should the option be forbidden to everyone? Why can't there be a system policy option to disable / enable screenshots by default?
It is not forbidden to everyone. It is turned off by default. For data sensitive environments, screenshots should be turned off. It does not have to be a military setting; if you work for a data center for a bank, they don't allow you to have items like paper and pencil when you access data.
Further, there's this new fangled thing called a smartphone. It tends to have a camera that can be pointed at a screen. Unless you are actively monitoring the end-users constantly and making sure they don't whip out a phone, that screenshot permission window isn't going to be very effective at preventing data from leaving with them. A more effective solution would be to MITM all outgoing connections looking for image data. (Which if you have systems with secrets that need "disable screenshots" protection, you should already have in-place.)
For data sensitive environments, they do not allow people to have smart phones. No personal items. No pencils. No paper. I take it you have never worked in such an environment that needs to turn off screenshots.
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I would ensure these machines were unable to forward or send such screenshots through insecure or unauthorized methods.
Just like the data they otherwise contain or use. Sheesh, is that not obvious?
PS - yes, and ban other screenshot methods, like cell phones, from physical access to these machines. Double sheesh.
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I would ensure these machines were unable to forward or send such screenshots through insecure or unauthorized methods.
Just like the data they otherwise contain or use. Sheesh, is that not obvious?
PS - yes, and ban other screenshot methods, like cell phones, from physical access to these machines. Double sheesh.
Of course.
There are lots of ways to harden an environment. You don't have to use all of them (or indeed any of them).
Re: About time. (Score:2)
Um, if your goal is a secure environment, you just add many as needed, at a minimum.
You don't use 'none'.
And if you're intending to prevent screenshots as a security measure, your goal is some measure of security. Hence, using some measures. Pick the nits on this.
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I remember running a MUD at university that other students used to play. One of these students kept being an asshole on the game so he got banned. One time I was sat in front of a big Sun workstation and I noticed he had logged in as another user and was running screen dumps of my session to see what I was up to. So it happens for lesser reasons.
More mundanely, the lack of security in X has been a bane for people developing screen savers and suchlike since there is no real way to lock the screen and prevent
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Come on dude. What century do you live in. Hostile software has been a thing since the 1980s.
The reason that is security gated is because keyloggers and screen stealers are standard tooling for rootkits. By ensuring that permission is given, you foil the rootkit, and potentially expose it in the process. Theres a reason why OSX and (to a lesser extent) Modern Windows get very little malware compared to the bad old days,. Because the virus has to ask permission now.
Re: About time. (Score:2)
In macOS, applications have to be given the right permission to screen capture (screen recording). The user always has the ability to capture their own screenshots, without having to give this permission to everything on the system. It sounds like this Wayland implementation is cack-handed.
Re: About time. (Score:2)
No, you canâ(TM)t. You canâ(TM)t inspect the binaries. You donâ(TM)t inspect the source of everything. You donâ(TM)t know what bugs are present. Even in the best case scenario, where the software there is 100% made with good intentions, you donâ(TM)t know what zero days are out there. Restricting what a process is allowed to do to the set of things you expect it to do is an entirely reasonable sanity check and security measure.
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Even sadder commentary that you're complaining of a security feature being enabled by default as if this is somehow a bad thing.
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Sad maybe, but absolutely standard, practically from the birth of personal PCs.
Back when I was first cutting my teeth on computers in the 80's viruses and trojans were already a thing - an old thing at that - software that you absolutely shouldn't trust, running on your computer.
With everything connected to the internet these days, and the practical impossibility of real security, especially for non-savvy users, malware has become quite profitable, rather than just dicks being dicks to people they'd never k
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Re: About time. (Score:2)
You never could, you just didn't know it.
Re:About time. (Score:5, Interesting)
What are you talking about? Wayland has screen shot support.
No it doesn't. Wayland simply doesn't have it. The compositor has to offer it which means now Wayland applications have to also support all the compositor protocols. So now there's an additional "shit wayland doesn't support" c library which brings back all the library versioning problems which x11 has that Wayland claimed to solve, and of course the claimed simplicity of wayland is out the window because of all the necessary support libraries for it to be even vaguely on a par with X there's actually far more code.
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for it to be even vaguely on a par with X
I don't think anyone is trying to achieve a system that is on par with X. X has many features and capabilities that can be classified as pointless, unused, or severely obsolete. You won't ever get on par with X because for the most part the huge complex feature set in many cases has insignificant use cases.
Sure there's an odd person here or there with a use case. Some legitimate, some just being resistant to change. In either case many of these examples will not warrant people spending programming time to s
Re:About time. (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think anyone is trying to achieve a system that is on par with X.
And that's the problem.
No one cares about the stuff you're talking about. People care if their system works as well with Wayland as it does with X. And it does not. Hence it is not on a par.
Yes you can screenshot in Wayland. It has a use case, so several additional programs / libraries have stepped up to do screenshotting
So in other words, Wayland doesn't support screenshotting. Various apps and compositors can but only if they use compatible versions of a whole bunch of support libraries. That's like saying X11 supports sound because everything can use pulseaudio or ALSA or Jack and hope they all use the same.
One of the specific fundamental design goals of wayland was to not have the extension versioning "problem" that X has. Their "solution" if you can call it that is to not have the features at all and use the system library loader (which has precisely the same "problems"). So they got to claim to not have the problem because it's someone else's problem and you only hit it if you need essential features for a desktop like screenshots. But it's not wayland! Problem solved!
Re: About time. (Score:2)
That's like saying X11 supports sound because everything can use pulseaudio or ALSA or Jack and hope they all use the same
Well that brings me back to the days of enlightenment and deciding between windowmanager audio or application audio. Because enlightenment only supported oss sound, but gaim required some audio framework that I cannot even remember anymore. Good riddance. This is also why I refuse to use wayland. Get that shit figured out and then I will be a user again
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Wayland consists of a core protocol and some extension protocols. If you want to take a picture, then the compositor has to support some of those extension protocols. Big deal.
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This is as insane and stupid as X lacking support for video synchronization, which has to be snuck in on the side to prevent screen tearing.
I just don't get it. How does this happen? These are not exotic or rarely-used f
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Then the wayland shills immediately started selling "lack of screenshot support" as a feature.
Not a feature, but rather a specific lack of feature that has no place being implemented in the compositor itself. Look you can't have it both ways. Either follow the UNIX way (TM) and have small special purpose tools that do one job and do them well, or embrace X11, and with it you champion the approach of systemd and Windows of having one app try and do everything.
One of the most amazing things about Linux is how it brings out hypocrisy in people who can't stand change.
You want a screenshot? Download one
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> Screenshots
Really? :O
Wayland cant even do that? I had no idea. Oh let me guess, Wayland is just a protocol design and it's the compositors job.
Well, why don't they do basic stuff like screenshots yet?
Do we even need compositors?
I prefer how Plan 9 does GUI's. Thats really cool
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Wayland facilitates screen shotting by means of an extension protocol but it's up to the compositor to implement it and for the screen shot software to talk it. While it took a while for people to settle on the protocol, desktop compositors support screen shotting and it's a non issue. Kind of ludicrous people are still citing it as something Wayland cannot possibly do when it already does it.
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> While it took a while for people to settle on the protocol
Sigh, thats why I'm avoiding wayland. It's like we all went back to the 90's with XDND etc. Besides, I'll only bite when WindowMaker supports it and that will probably never happen.
Maybe on my XFCE systems in another 10 years. Till then I'll site back, watch SystemD get replaced and wait for Wayland to have all the features needed.
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No one is forcing you to change even if your reasons for hating on Wayland are pretty silly.
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> No one is forcing you to change
Yes they are, just like I had to accept systemd. I'm too tired after a work week to figure out how to remove something as embedded as that even if a dream to do so. I too like simple defaults and clicky options even with my degree in CS.
Wayland will eventually be the only offering. When it is, well I hope its sorted out its shortcomings. Or maybe I'll finally move to Plan9 which has a UI that wipes the floor with X.Org and uses Wayland as a foaming agent
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Yes, because not all compositors want or need that feature duh. But if you run a desktop compositor then you'll have the capability to securely take a screenshot. And the whole point is screenshotting in X11 wasn't secure and it couldn't be made secure.
Re:About time. (Score:4, Funny)
*BSD enters the chat
Re:About time. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:About time. (Score:5, Interesting)
This latest line of pro Wayland advocacy is moronic and very telling about the state of Wayland.
Note how even the line that Wayland is superior has been dropped. Now it's implicitly that wayland is inferior and explicitly that we should switch anyway because no one's working on X. This is just incredible. X11 sucked so hard that with 15 years of work on Wayland and none on X, it's still worse.
The "plug pulling" you advocate appears to be just for the sake of it.
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It's the only way wayland can make headway, because given a choice people keep picking X (a working solution) rather than Wayland (a broken POS).
Its just another form of Embrace, extend, and extinguish without the Embrace, extend.
SystemD did a similar by requiring it to be a dependency for so may DEB's/RPM's.
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Bad form replying to my own, but I removed Wayland from by Fedora 36 install. It de-installed a lot of unrelated software, which I had to re-install.
As long X (session) is still there (I don't use Gnome, generally use the XFCE spin's) and it can be removed by people who don't want it - I don't give a F**K.
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As long X (session) is still there (I don't use Gnome, generally use the XFCE spin's) and it can be removed by people who don't want it - I don't give a F**K.
The trouble is that IBM is now in such a dominant position via RedHat that we might have to give a fuck. IBM broadly speaking don't give a shit about their users because their users are not their customers.
I don't use gnome. The only people I know who use gnome are those who have a strong desire to use the default installed desktop no matter what. Seem
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I like the GNOME layout mostly, but MATE is my preferred DE most of the time. Later versions of GNOME have been kinda bad in my opinion.
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Indeed and not only are they bad, they're systematically removing all forms of configuration so that you must like the defaults. They seem to have the obnoxious arrogance of Apple when it comes to UI design without the resources to get around the worst of it or the fanatical fans who will flat out ignore the rest of the problems.
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If we are honest, what IBM really wants is to make RHEL closed source, they have been chipping away at that goal for years now.
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Ooh I'm shaking in my boots. Feature complete code was last updated a few years back.
There seems to be an irrational obsession with getting updates, as it somehow they are like a "heartbeat" that shows something is living.
News flash. Windows 11 is nothing more than Windows 10 which itself is an unfinished re-write of windows NT. Thats right, its all Windows NT under there, the only changes are the occasionally half-completed and badly designed (not to mention untested) GUI re-write as well as tons and to
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A lot of my stuff is gonna be completely broken if X11 goes away. One thing that will affect me specifically is the loss of x11vnc, which is the only reliable vnc server I have found that is both easy to setup, easily automated, runs on :0, and has a very low latency. Every other one I have tried (tigervnc, tightvnc, realvnc, etc) either refuse to run on :0, will only run on :0 if run manually, randomly don't support , or are forced to generate a new random password every start making them effectively usele
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Gnome has had screen share for a long time. It uses RDP which is faster and more efficient than VNC.
If you want to fire up a complete remote desktop, say on a headless server, there are far better solutions than x11vnc, which is why VNC doesn't get much love these days. Gnome itself can do headless remote desktops with wayland and rdp, and also for X11 desktops there are far, far better solutions than VNC, such as X2Go.
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Gnome's built in RDP reset's it password every reboot because it stores it's credentials in the keychain, but it starts before the keychain does, which causes it to generate a new random password, making it effectively useless.
I read "the systemd targets are removed" . . . (Score:3, Interesting)
. . . and thought at first that GNOME had given up on supporting systemd.
But that hope was dashed.
No problem (Score:4, Interesting)
I suspect that most of the people who want X11 support have moved on from GNOME already. As long as I can still load a GTK app in an X11 session I'm content to let GNOME go another way. I may well convert to wayland sooner or later, but I have multiple reasons for not doing it now. But I also have multiple reasons for not running GNOME now...
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They might as well close up shop anyway, their whole mission is alienating the nerds that made them possible in the first place. I would not even think about suggesting someone use their DE when they have many better options.
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That would be a total disaster !!!
The best thing about is GNOME is it keeps those developers in one place. $DEITY forbid they start ruining other projects !
Re: No problem (Score:2)
I use screenshot CONSTANTLY. Should be easy enough to go to the GPU to get one, what's the problem?
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I use KDE now because GNOME is so awful. KDE's screenshot tool Spectacle has every feature I need except speed, it is kind of woefully slow to launch. It's got a built-in delay! Whether you want it or not. Other than that it's pretty great, though.
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I left GNOME when GNOME 3 came out. I took one look and puked.
Then I saw the app launcher idea and puked.
Some people like the HCI design rules that were crafted over many decades of designing Human Computer Interfaces.
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I guess there will be distros that will stick to X11 and list not using Wayland as a feature. (I don't have a qualified opinion about SystemD.)
what did yinz say? (Score:2)
I suspect the headline was written by a Pittsburgher. Most of the rest of the English speaking world expects a "to be" on their passive infinitives...
Does Wayland support drawing tablets yet? (Score:2)
Re:Does Wayland support drawing tablets yet? (Score:5, Interesting)
This is more or less the story of Wayland: it's simpler than X by simply not supporting anything, so anything "out of scope" is some random janky bolt on which may or may not work with any given compositor, so now the choice of WM affects what you can use.
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That's the point isn't it? Supporting things that have no role in the compositor is precisely aligned with this principle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Unlike X's throw in everything and the kitchen sink approach.
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That's the point isn't it?
Who knows?
Supporting things that have no role in the compositor
No one gives a shit about whether it's a compositor. The goal is to make a good working windowing system, which includes desktop use cases. It's failing at that. The unix philosophy isn't "do one part of the required thing well".
Re: Does Wayland support drawing tablets yet? (Score:2)
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If you used Plasma, I could give you a list.
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Um, what about tunneled X sessions? (Score:2)
I'll admit to never having understood the differences between windowing environment, desktop and session manager on Linux - seems like there's 3 layers and I doubt I even have the names right.
But I occasionally have to work a headless Linux machine with an X session tunneled through SSH. Does TFA mean that won't be available any longer?
Re:Um, what about tunneled X sessions? (Score:5, Informative)
If you mean you ssh to a remote machine and run a single X11 application over ssh, then yes that still works because Gnome and other desktops start up Xwayland to act as a host for the remote (or local) X11 programs. So it's pretty transparent. Just ssh to the headless machine, and run your X program the same as you have always done.
Are you getting a full desktop in a window, or just an individual program?
To answer your question, a session manager is what starts up a set of programs that a desktop environment needs. For example, you need a window manager running, a program to give you desktop icons (usually the file manager), and perhaps a dock, system tray, panel, etc, and to shut all these things down when you want to log out. The gnome session manager can start up X11, and launch all those components. In the future, the session manager will start wayland only.
You can run a Linux X11 desktop without a session manager, provided you're willing to start everything up manually. I used to do that back in the 90s. You can even run without a session manager at all. All you really need with X11 is a window manager.
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Oh right, the days where I'd login to my shell, then run "startx" to start the window manager and a few basic apps like an xterm. That really wasn't a problem. OTOH, I use KDE so Gnome can go do whatever they want.
Re: Um, what about tunneled X sessions? (Score:2)
Great answer, thanks!
Force adoption by removing options (Score:4, Funny)
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What better way to show the benefits of your GUI than by removing the ability to run anything else
Reminds me of the debates about not supporting multiple init systems. Develoment time is not simply doubled by supporting 2 systems, it grows significantly more than that. You need to debug not only the interfaces to both systems but also implement ways to switch between them and debug that too. It gets very complicated.
One of the great things about Linux is choice. The developer's choice to do what ever the fuck they want, and your choice to use whatever you want (or have what you want developed). It's not
RH (Score:3)
Both GNOME and Wayland are developed mostly by Red Hat, removing alternative is their classic way to assume control
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Also: X11 is arcane, X11Free is long since abandoned and was never considered a well written api.
Re:RH (Score:5, Informative)
Also: X11 is arcane,
Nah. It has some pretty odd corners its picked up over the years but it's pretty good.
X11Free is long since abandoned
What are you talking about here? XFree86 was forked into xorg which subsumed X.org (the old, pre XFree86 industry group) due to license shenanigans. There was no X11Free.
and was never considered a well written api.
X11 is not an API, it's a wire protocol. xlib was the most popular (near universal) C API to generate protocol calls until XCB was created which for many toolkits superseded xlib.
It is not perfect but it's a pretty good protocol/API. Decently well designed in a number of ways. It's been widely considered "bad" by people who bandy around arguments like "sucks" "bloat" and "brain damage" without any technical arguments but those aren't interesting or correct.
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Re:RH (Score:4, Interesting)
It is kind of awful. Or at least significantly subpar. I use to work on twm, tvtwm, and fvwm, or an xtrek, nettrek, and xtank. Not like "I used those to do work", but I contributed code to them (or was a primary maintainer). For example it is "my fault" that many X11 window managers use (or have modes to use) the m4 macro preprocessor on their config files. I won't say I'm a world expert in X11, but I have done more then my fair share of work in and around X11.
X11 was an ok, but not awesome design to support what was common in the early 1990s. It didn't keep up with changing hardware or users needs/expectations. Font handling for example was poked at a few times and then largely left to rot. I would take MacOS's or iOS's graphics subsystem any way of the week and twice on Sunday for most jobs. Rendering fonts and curves is far simpler, anything dealign with alpha transparency is easier, and so on.
For a recent project I have been controlling a laser cutter. I ended up using macOS's graphics layer to render fonts as BezierCurves and combining them with other BezierCurves (most of macOS's rendering layer deals in BezierCurves, and you can get it to cough them up in many contexts), and I collect the curves into collection of CutPaths withe various nongraphical attributes (laser frequency, power level, and number of passes). I form them into tiles, space the tiles on a surface (the tiles are "mostly" rectangular, but I have some support for fitting non-rectangles when it is really needed to pack things onto a single sheet of material). I convert the Bezier curves into things the laser turret handles and burn my projects. X11 would be utterly unsuited to the task. Now to be fair most of what I get from macOS isn't hard to do directly with my own BezierPath code, making curves out of straight line rectangles and line segments is easy enough, ellipses are harder then you would think, but with an assist mathematica it is a solvable problem. Doing text layout is a stone cold bitch though. Before deciding to lean on macOS for bezier paths I took WebFotns which are a collection of SVGs which aren't too hard to turn into Bezier Curves. However even after writing a significant amount of code to parse web fonts, and then lay them out character after character they look awful in some combinations. It turns out kerning and ligatures were invented for a reason, and the reason is because text kind of sucks without it. That might be acceptable in some contexts, but if you are layering text onto things it mostly isn't a debugging "SLOT A" it tends to be the important decorative embossed text. X11 might actually do some of it, but not in a way that lets you extract anything other than pixels. Not a curve. Plus borrowing macOS's text system I can do things like "lay this text out across this other curve not straight lines. Or "lay this text out in this rectangle, but exclude these other sub areas in the rectangle..."; X11 doesn't do any of that.
Those seem like minor things, and to a certain extent they are minor. On the other hand basically anything you look at in X11 has a similar deficit. Except being able to shove graphics operations over a network connection. Other windowing systems basically go pixel diffing of virtual frambuffers and send compressed diffs along. If that doesn't work well for a particular task you are screwed. X11 shoves graphic primitives over the wire, this is much better for some applications. You can also do the virtual frame buffer diffing thing with X11 if that works better for your application.
X11 could have used an X12, but never got one. It should really be about X17 by now. That doesn't mean it is worse then Weyland, but trying to defined it like it is an awesome piece of software as opposed to something old and creaky that kind of gets by isn't really helping address the issues X11 has, and by extension the drag it has on everything built on top of it.
Re:RH (Score:5, Interesting)
It is kind of awful.
I disagree...
For example it is "my fault" that many X11 window managers use (or have modes to use) the m4 macro preprocessor on their config files.
No, but that's nothing to do with X11. And nothing about Wayland prevents compositors from using M4 to preprocess their config files.
Font handling for example was poked at a few times and then largely left to rot.
True, fonts aren't awesome. Though these days, you use a non X11 font system, generate bitmap glyphs then composite them using the RENDER API.
anything dealign with alpha transparency is easier, and so on.
X11 has had alpha compositing since 2000, though since you mentioned xtrek, twm, xtank etc I suspect your experience may have predated that.
X11 would be utterly unsuited to the task.
We're comparing to Wayland here, though, in essence, which drops even more. You need to do all the rendering yourself then hand over some pixels. Given that you can pick up an SVG rendering library and go nuts.
That doesn't mean it is worse then Weyland, but trying to defined it like it is an awesome piece of software as opposed to something old and creaky that kind of gets by isn't really helping address the issues X11 has, and by extension the drag it has on everything built on top of it.
Swings and roundabouts. MacOS (the one you're comparing to) leans a lot harder in the direction of higher level drawing APIs, something which X11 doesn't really do since the DPS extension was removed. On the other hand, OSX doesn't separate out the window management layer, so you can't replace that like you can with X11. I wouldn't say OSX is clearly superior as a result (can't stand it myself!).
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I didn't mention m4 because I think it is a big deal, or that you can't use it elsewhere, it was an attempt to show "I actually know something about use of X11, it isn't something I head of but know it is old so I'll pile hate on...or even I used it and didn't like it so I'll pile some hate on", it is something I used at a deep level, made code for, and enjoyed.
I know X11 has some alpha compositing extensions, I didn't know they really made it into widespread use.
I also wasn't really attempting to compa
Re: (Score:2)
I know X11 has some alpha compositing extensions, I didn't know they really made it into widespread use.
Oh yep, there's quite a few new bits and bibs which have been added.
I wouldn't say OSX is uniformly superior, but it has some a vast number of areas it is head and shoulders above.
I'd say primarily one which is drawing API. Comparing the windowing subsystems specifically here. The X one is old and apart from pixmap pushing isn't much used. Mostly people now use a different drawing API to render to a pixma
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I love focus follows mouse.
Me too. It's annoying to use a computer not set up that way - "Whadda ya mean I have to click to make this window active!". If the cursor is in a window, then that's where I want the action to be, automatically.
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Both GNOME and Wayland are developed mostly by Red Hat, removing alternative is their classic way to assume control
False. Red Hat isn't developing Wayland. It may have been started by an engineer who worked at Red Hat, unrelated to any Red Hat projects, and that engineer left Red Hat to work for Intel literally less than a year after starting development of Wayland. It was developed completely independently of Red Hat and is now under the stewardship of freedesktop.org which has nothing to do with Red Hat.
Stop spreading misinformation.
Meh (Score:1)
I ran from Gnome to a better DE years back when Gnome 3 came out.
Never looked back.
Wayland is barely ready for prime time as it is, like Gnome 3 was back then.
When WindowMaker and XFCE require Wayland, I might look inot it. Till them I'm keeping my network transparency.
Yes I use WindowMaker. It's great, no nonsense, light, stable and so much better looking than most of what I see. I like buttons, edges, shadows, CORNERS. I like floating menus and where there is white-space, instead of spreading stuff out
3.6k lines? (Score:4, Informative)
Multiuser? Nvidia? Tablets? Color profiles? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Multiuser? Nvidia? Tablets? Color profiles? (Score:4, Insightful)
Meh those are all out of scope.
That's waylandese for "you're holding it wrong".