this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2023
378 points (100.0% liked)

Technology

37695 readers
308 users here now

A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.

Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.

Subcommunities on Beehaw:


This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (9 children)

What features is it missing? They started decoupling GPU drivers from the X server a long time ago (about a decade), that's why Linux has DRM, and what enabled making Wayland. At this point the only feature needed of Xorg, is a compatibility layer between X clients and Wayland.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (8 children)

Multi high and differing refresh rate HDR monitor setups require Windows or OSX to use to their full potential.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (3 children)

X/X11/Xorg supports 48-bit color by default: https://linux.die.net/man/3/xcolor

The protocol is also framerate agnostic, other than having a V-sync option.

If you have a multi-monitor setup, with different characteristics for each monitor... well, the original X11 design was to have a separate terminal (computer) per monitor, with each terminal doing its own stuff to display an application's image.... so that's why nowadayws we have Wayland as a middleware between drivers and X applications.

If the drivers and/or Wayland aren't supporting some of Xorg's features, that still leaves Xorg feature complete.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

No.

Xorg doesn't support any of that. Multimonitor is nonexistent if you want to use it on a desktop, Xwayland still suffers from the lack of multimonitor (fractional+integer) scaling, and it tears horribly if you don't want to use inefficient and annoying vsync (Wayland's is fine).

Xorg is feature complete for its time; not for this time. The opposite goes for Wayland. Technically it's a "feature" that any application can keylog on Xorg, that doesn't mean that they should be free to do so without limit on Wayland too. If that means Wayland isn't feature complete and Xorg is, then so be it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I used to run a multi-monitor desktop setup with Xorg, via the nVidia drivers. Two identical monitors, single framebuffer, no scaling, no tearing, single vsync.

That was quite a while ago, and it worked great. Then I discovered I could run an nVidia and an AMD card, both at the same time, on Windows 7, so made the switch... but still.

"feature" that any application can keylog on Xorg

Isn't that still a "feature" of all PC desktops? https://github.com/Aishou/wayland-keylogger

XKCD 1200

Some good ideas here, but Windows/Linux are still lagging behind: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25971395

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I used to run a multi-monitor desktop setup with Xorg, via the nVidia drivers. Two identical monitors, single framebuffer, no scaling, no tearing, single vsync.

One monitor, one framebuffer, an old use case that for some doesn't even exist now, inefficient and slow tearing prevention, laggy vsync.

That wasn't a multi-monitor desktop setup. That was a hacked together multi-display, single-screen setup.

Also why would you link an LD_PRELOAD attack? That's not Wayland-specific in any way. Any other protocol and library is vulnerable to that too. But let's point out one major issue with that: the LD_PRELOAD needs to be loaded in before the compositor in order to be relevant. With X, you can do that at runtime. Let's also read the README from the repository:

This program is in no way meant as criticism of the Wayland project. It simply demonstrates that creating a secure desktop requires more than just a few server-side restrictions.

Wayland isn't the only software we need for a secure desktop; it just handles making the display secure. For libraries and application sandboxing, you want Flatpak, and we're making progress on dynamic permissions there.

So? What's your point? Nothing here is a Wayland-specific argument. Your setup wasn't functional, it was fundamentally a hack, and one that not-NVIDIA/Intel/AMD hardware doesn't support. Your argument is falling flat on its face.

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (5 replies)
load more comments (5 replies)