[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC-98
[1] https://hackaday.com/2023/12/26/the-strange-world-of-japans-...
If you were a Japanese enthusiast who wanted to have a "real UNIX" on readily available hardware, NetBSD and FreeBSD were relatively more accessible
The main killer feature for me is how easy it is to run graphical applications over the network using X. I run a FreeBSD desktop with virtualized Linux, OpenBSD and Windows systems. the ability to run applications like they are on the host system is something I have not yet seen how to do with Wayland.
waypipe works. Instead of doing `ssh -X user@host <command>` I do `waypipe ssh user@host <command>`.
Could be faster, but it does work.
Sending rendering commands over a network is only decently fast if you have simple windows and no pictures. As soon as you want anyhting fancier, even as simple as opening a high res photo, the video streaming approach becomes significantly better.
X's model can have one advantage, when the machine running the X client doesn't have rendering resources locally at all (so that local rendering + video streaming would take too long for the CPU, despite the network advantage). But that is an even rarer use case.
The RDP protocol also sends graphics commands (mostly). It works really well on Linux with Xrdp/rdesktop. The idea of sending a video stream over network sounds good but somehow the implementations always manage to screw it up (especially on high bandwidth networks). I just did a quick test by directly streaming video over WLAN and it performed way better that VNC. I was able to stream a videogame smoothly on 30FPS, which is pretty impressive considering this was done in a very unoptimized way (netcat, TCP instead of UDP, etc.)
Which is another reason xorg isn't going to disappear, since large labs absolutely need computer A to display a resource-intensive program running on more-powerful computer B
Besides, we are talking local virtual machines in my case. Any performance issues so far has been negligible.
I totally disagree. Obviously it just depends on your use case, but most user interfaces are almost completely static and sending vector commands is going to be a win over raster in almost any condition. Low bandwidth? Vector wins. High RTT link? Vector wins. Dual 4k screen? Not a problem with vector, but difficult with video and disastrous with raster.
One may argue whether the current implementation in Xorg is useful or not, but conceptually, I see vector as definitely the way to go. Vector even allows you to do some predictive interpolation, while raster -- good luck.
Maybe sending HTML+javascript over the wire is the solution, ala Display PostScript except more fashionable these days. Thinking about it, one could argue that's exactly what we have these days with the web...
As long as Chromium and Firefox plus the GUI mode of Emacs works under X11, that is all 90% of users need/use.
I really, truly suspect Wayland is the future
We have had like one hundred X11 replacements between 1990 and now, and at least half a dozen have caught on with the open source community
What makes Wayland different is that it has attracted multiple vendors supporting it. Most notably IBM/Redhat, Intel, AMD, and, to a lesser extent, nVidia.
I am posting this message from an X11 environment, because I need X11 for a lot of things, home and work both, but, I can at least imagine a world where Wayland is the new default. That is not something I could say about the last hundred attempts to replace X11.
Edit: Again, this is just a suspicion. A notion. I neither hope for Wayland's success nor failure. I just keep my finger to the wind.
from the same blog: Wayland is also approaching healthy on NetBSD and has active contributors
There is no reason to get bent out of shape. NetBSD as a project has commitments to desktop support and seems to be living up to those commitments very well.
Without a Wayland story, the BSDs will really end up dying, at least as desktop systems.
bitwize on Aug 31, 2015 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10149015
> It's written against an obsolete windowing model for a deprecated window system.
bitwize on Jan 9, 2016 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10869618
> Since X is now deprecated tech
And tons more: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=3&prefix=true&que...
Maybe give it a rest and let others have their toys without flying off the handle with comments that say or contribute nothing.
And it's not even applicable here; there's literally a linked post about how Wayland is being worked on in this article's first sentence. But I guess the volunteers of NetBSD aren't working hard enough or something.
That is what it is! It's fine! if Wayland is the future, so be it, but it won't be because X11 got deprecated again. X11 has been deprecated plenty of times before!
Wayland may very well take over the unix and most especially linux desktop story, but that is not a done deal, yet. My last two? three? jobs all explicitly required X11 as a thing, so if giant enterprises are not picking up wayland, the deal ain't done, yet, you read me?
As an fvwm2 addict, I do not relish that day.
The problem is that said feature bloat is also exactly what makes it attractive to desktop users. I'm not saying that Wayland has no use; it can reliably cover ~90% of all computer tasks and if you're just setting up some sort of kiosk/server with one application, I think it's hard to not pick Wayland since you can just grab a thin renderer and avoid all the extra crap that comes with XOrg.
But for desktop, the weird/random things XOrg allows you to do are what makes it the undisputed king to this date.
It's not what's best that wins. It's that what covers the widest amount of usecases that does, regardless of any amount of bizarre rituals that you need to do to get it working (and only if you have feature parity does less weird rituals take over in priority). Wayland already lost that race before it even started since feature parity with XOrg is a non-goal.
Other examples of this concept in action: Any old-school Microsoft project (really, just all of MS Office), the entire HTTP frontend stack, SQL, PDF.
Works for me, and has for literal decades.
> ...without active maintenance...
This update to xorg-server was stabilized on April 14th, and it looks like library changes required me to rebuild and reinstall it like two days ago:
$ eix -I xorg-server
[I] x11-base/xorg-server
Available versions: 21.1.13(0/21.1.13)^t **9999(0/9999)*l^t {debug +elogind minimal selinux suid systemd test +udev unwind xcsecurity xephyr xnest xorg xvfb}
Installed versions: 21.1.13(0/21.1.13)^t(03:15:55 PM 05/03/2024)(elogind udev xorg -debug -minimal -selinux -suid -systemd -test -unwind -xcsecurity -xephyr -xnest -xvfb)
Homepage: https://www.x.org/wiki/ https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/xorg-server
Description: X.Org X servers
Weird. Looks like they're running Board of Directors elections. [0]
[0] <https://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-devel/2024-March/thread.ht...>
Just so you know: The X.Org Foundation also oversees Wayland.
X.org the foundation is electing a board of directors. They're also all-in on Wayland.
Is it? Seems to work just fine. Not all that is new is good. Not all that is old is bad.
Good news then, FreeBSD already has working Wayland and NetBSD is working on it. Granted, I think OpenBSD stands out without a Wayland plan, but maybe I'm wrong there.
check this out - https://www.openbsd.org/papers/eurobsdcon2023-matthieu-wayla...
Not sure about other desktop environments as I don't use them.
(It fares better compared against x11 instead, but not as much-better as one might guess—either way, it’s been a sloooow moving project)