phoenix - A modern X server written from scratch
git.dec05eba.com
  • UnfortunateShort@lemmy.worldEnglish
    334·
    1 day ago

    I don’t get why people cling to X so desperately. You get no benefits and downsides on top. Wayland is becoming the default for all major and even some smaller DEs, so good luck avoiding all of them and backporting features so Wayland native apps don’t break.

    I’m not saying you shouldn’t do stuff like this for fun. You can do anything for fun. I don’t get why of all things you would do that for fun, but go ahead

    • MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip
      42·
      10 hours ago

      Some people see no benefit in every compositor has to reimplement everything from scratch model Wayland does.

      • vivendi@programming.devEnglish
        41·
        5 hours ago

        That’s complete horseshit. There are lile 3 major implementations of Wayland and 2 exist because the other one wasn’t ready at the time. There are other hobby implementations, but they all work together. Just like how different network stacks can all talk TCP to each other and be fine. Nobody calls TCP fragmented because there are different network stacks…

        There are also smaller projects.

        Also, the model of a protocol allows Wayland to be deployed on truly exotic operating systems. As long as the top level is compliant, shit just works.

        • MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip
          1·
          5 hours ago

          but they all work together

          Lol, no. Wlroots stuff doesn’t work on Sway and vice versa, then there’s a few extra limited-scope imlementations with the same problem and Weston is reference only.

          And TCP doens’t need to duplicate keyboard/mouse input and it builds on UDP to handle low-level stuff. SSH is a better example.

    • badmin@lemmy.today
      23·
      8 hours ago

      Give me a compositor with at least some of the capabilities of Awesome, AND the ability to apply custom shaders to windows like picom does, and some none alpha-quality VNC solutions, then I make seriously consider a permanent move.

      So it’s going to be X11 for at least 2-3 years to come for me. And this is based purely on practical and workflow reasoning. It’s is also a logical, technical, and fully informed choice, unlike the entirety of your comment.

      • vivendi@programming.devEnglish
        3·
        5 hours ago

        I am running Wayland on an IVB GT1. Your hardware is not possibly shittier than this AND capable of handling modern tasks. Also wayland just needs the infrastructure of doing accelerated draws which if your GPU doesn’t support then it won’t work with X anyway unless you’re running truly exotic 2D accelerators from the 90s

      • corbin@infosec.pub
        3·
        6 hours ago

        I installed Debian on a 2009 Toshiba netbook recently with an Intel Atom N280, KDE worked about the same (not well) in both the X and Wayland modes.

  • muhyb@programming.dev
    161·
    2 days ago

    Someone’s not happy with either Wayland or X11 being deprecated. I’m glad projects like this exist though.

    • Badabinski@kbin.earth
      8·
      1 day ago

      After reading the linked page, it appears that at least some of the security issues are addressed:

      Applications will be isolated from each other by default and can only interact with other applications either through a GUI prompt asking for permission, such as with screen recorders, where it will only be allowed to record the window specified or by explicitly giving the application permission before launched (such as a window manager or external compositor).

      I’ll probably continue to push forward with Wayland, but I suppose I’m pleased that someone is taking a crack at trying to improve X11. The author also mentions potentially using this as a lightweight and safe replacement for xwayland.

  • A_norny_mousse@feddit.org
    74·
    1 day ago

    Is this the same guy who forked Xorg and immediately began pushing anti-woke messages?

    Anyhow, why Zig? Surely they didn’t rewrite the whole fucking X server in a different language?

    • Lvxferre [he/him]@mander.xyz
      13·
      1 day ago

      I’m fairly certain dec05eba (from Phoenix) and metux (from X11Libre, the fork you’re talking about) are different people: metux is still committing to X11Libre, both projects are hosted in different platforms (self-hosted vs. github), and their writing style is completely different.

        • A_norny_mousse@feddit.org
          51·
          9 hours ago

          *sigh* Thanks, I guess. The comment is short but completely unambiguous, even in context. I was hoping to be proven wrong, but they clearly belong to the same gang.

          I just went down a 30min rabbit hole - mostly to figure out what really went down with Enrico Weigelt (metux). Chronologically, and extremely shortened:

          1. In 2021 he was spreading antivax disinfo. L Torvalds told him off
          2. Somebody else forked X to Xlibre already in 2020
          3. metux apparently took it over in 2024. That is also when he added the anti-DEI line.
          4. Only after that did Freedesktop kick him out.

          We can easily imagine what other toxic stuff he spouted to make freedesktop go down hard on him, but in his mind it’s all because “Big Tech” wants to kill X.org, and he is X.org’s knight in shining armor.

          His own spins on the narrative are sickening, petulant, and all-too-familiar. I refer you to the History.md of his fork. I found a couple of interviews, and he just repeats the same shit, down to the phrasing, notably: “The journalist who must not be named”, vaguely hinting at even more conspiracy. I guess he means Liam Proven from The Register, who wrote at least 3 articles about him and his fork.

          Here’s an excerpt from some other article, which tries to praise the project while staying neutral, but really just spells out what is really going on here:

          The README of Xlibre does not mince words. It claims that X.org has been infiltrated by “toxic elements” aligned with Big Tech. It accuses them of intentionally stalling X11 to eliminate it as competition to Wayland. And, most controversially, it declares that Xlibre is free of DEI—Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion—policies and the Codes of Conduct that have become standard in many modern open source projects.

          That one line sent shockwaves.

          Within 72 hours, Red Hat purged Weigelt from the X.org repositories. His GitLab account was banned. His merge requests were closed en masse. Canonical, Ubuntu’s parent company, went further, announcing they would remove X11 (edit: I guess this means Xlibre - if not, this is unrelated to Weigelt’s tantrums) support entirely from future releases. What had begun as a technical fork became a cultural lightning rod.

          Cultural my ass.

          Thanks again; so far I had refused to get into this topic, now I know beyond any reasonable doubt that it’s bullshit.

          And BTW, I am using X.org (regular) myself. I never felt the need to switch, and I never felt the need to take part in all those Xorg/wayland discussions. But for completely unrelated, uncultural and unpolitical reasons I have recently considered switching to wayland myself.