xorg-server 21.1.0 released

Posted Oct 28, 2021 13:07 UTC (Thu) by sheepdestroyer (guest, #54968)
Parent article: xorg-server 21.1.0 released

At last!

I really could not wrap my head around the unwillingness from RedHat to support the maintainer who used to make X releases while Wayland is still not ready to replace it. As if they are lacking resources, or X is not important part of the DE stack as Wayland doesn't cover all it's features...

I personally still can't use Wayland on my machines as Barrier/Synergy (for sharing mouse/keyboard/clipboard between them) can not work with it.

According to developers on Barrier's Github issue regarding Wayland support, it seems to be a huge effort through the whole stack to make this type of software at all possible under Wayland. Talk about an oversight...
Efforts would also apparently need to be replicated in all Desktop Environments. :/

Someone made a small client poc that doesn't cover all features of Barrier/Synergy and runs on wlroot compatible compositors, but I understand that wlroot is not a standard that Gnome/KDE will implement/base themselves upon...
Is there any upside to the most popular DEs implementing wayland themselves instead of having a standard one like wlroot for everybody and minimizing effort duplication?

So in this state, I'm unwillingly stuck on X with no end in sight.
I am then VERY GRATEFUL to Povilas Kanapickas to volunteer (!) for this essential job. IMO he should be paid.

https://github.com/debauchee/barrier/issues/109
https://github.com/symless/synergy-core/issues/4090
https://github.com/quoing/wlr-synergy-client

xorg-server 21.1.0 released

Posted Oct 28, 2021 14:54 UTC (Thu) by Liskni_si (guest, #91943) [Link] (3 responses)

> IMO he should be paid.

Yesterday in a Hacker News discussion [1], Povilas mentioned that this 21.1 release wouldn't have happened were it not for a successful crowdfunding campaign for the improvement of the touchpad experience on Linux. So he did get paid, and he also mentioned [2] that if there's widespread interest in having Xorg maintained into the future, this interest being demonstrated by continued funding, this release might in fact not be the last release after all.

I'm not sure, however, what exactly needs to be done at this point to ascertain whether there is real interest.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29017498
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29019612

xorg-server 21.1.0 released

Posted Oct 28, 2021 22:59 UTC (Thu) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link] (2 responses)

There's definitely interest - if not outright societal need - for keeping xorg alive, because the new world's "GPU or perish" requirement is going to render a lot of perfectly serviceable hardware e-waste otherwise. Linux/BSD has thrived on being accessible to demographics that proprietary platforms would rather see priced out of existence.

xorg-server 21.1.0 released

Posted Nov 29, 2021 8:38 UTC (Mon) by daenzer (subscriber, #7050) [Link] (1 responses)

> [...] the new world's "GPU or perish" requirement [...]

There is no such requirement. Wayland clients can use SHM for sharing buffers with the compositor. Weston has a pixman backend, even gnome-shell is usable with llvmpipe.

xorg-server 21.1.0 released

Posted Nov 29, 2021 18:56 UTC (Mon) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

If you say so. After seeing how unusably slow the X11 modesetting+glamor combination was on i915/i945 I was worried this was going to become the new normal.

xorg-server 21.1.0 released

Posted Nov 7, 2021 13:03 UTC (Sun) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> According to developers on Barrier's Github issue regarding Wayland support, it seems to be a huge effort through the whole stack to make this type of software at all possible under Wayland. Talk about an oversight...

Or is it a breach of Wayland's security model?

Saly, security is now much more important, and by design "traditional" X is a prolific source of local root escalation attacks. Wayland was, in part, designed to prevent that, but unfortunately that breaks a lot of other stuff too.

Cheers,
Wol

xorg-server 21.1.0 released

Posted Nov 29, 2021 8:33 UTC (Mon) by daenzer (subscriber, #7050) [Link]

> I really could not wrap my head around the unwillingness from RedHat to support the maintainer who used to make X releases [...]

Adam Jackson stepped down because he didn't want to continue, not because of Red Hat.