Re: questions and sundry gripes about X11 multihead (it's a rant)

Le Sun, 29 Dec 2013 23:51:03 -0600 (CST),
Brent Busby <[email protected]> a écrit :

> After years of assuming I'd probably never set my system up with 
> multiple monitors, I've decided to go ahead and do it.  I've watched 
> with some interest as various new schemes for doing it have emerged
> over the years (Xinerama, and now lately RandR), but I've always
> assumed that if nothing else, good old Zaphod mode would always be
> around, since it's built right into the way X11 numbers $DISPLAY
> (0:0, 0:1, 0:2...etc.). It's been around so long, it's older than
> Linux itself.
> 
> Lately, I've been reading a lot of listserv and newsgroup posts from 
> developers telling various people in forums that if they want Zaphod 
> mode, they're more or less strange odd creatures who ought to be
> ashamed of themselves.  The driver developers don't want to support
> it anymore. It's not so much a problem in the X server as in each of
> the individual video drivers for the various cards.  I've probably
> read seven or eight different threads like this now, so it's odd that
> the common trend in all of them is that each of these users is told
> no one else but them uses it.  (Apparently a lot do.)
> 
> Anyway, Zaphod is what I want.  I don't care that it won't let me
> drag windows between monitors.  That's precisely the advantage of
> it.  Many applications are written with such an assumption of a
> single display that it's best not to disappoint them.  I don't want
> to worry about what a fullscreen game will think of my multihead
> setup.  I don't want to see dialog windows (or anything else really)
> popping up, half on one monitor and half on another.  I don't want to
> have to setup the arrangement of my desktop so that it's arranged to
> not look rediculous at the point where the two monitors divide the
> screen.  It's all just simpler if we have two screens that are
> completely separate, and the only magic object that's able to move
> between them is the mouse pointer.
> 
> X11 has been able to do this since the 80's.
> 
> But now we're in a brave new world where "nobody wants to do that" 
> (other than seven or eight people on various forums, and those are
> just the ones who complained).  I suppose I shouldn't be surprised.
> They say we have Wayland in our future too, which we're assured will
> have some kind of way to run apps on a remote desktop that will
> certainly be at least as good as running a VNC app on Windows (oh
> joy).  While we're at it, why don't we get rid of this multiple
> desktops thing that most X11 window managers support -- nobody does
> that on Windows either, so surely that's probably another thing that
> nobody on Linux really uses.  We should definitely find all the
> window managers that support that and strip that feature out of them
> for everyone's own good.
> 
> Ok, I suppose I should quit ranting.  It's just been a trend now for
> the past five years or so that I've been seeing upstream developers
> making "improvements" to Linux that are so basic to the
> infrastructure that no distro can fight them (PolicyKit, Wayland,
> goodbye Zaphod, udev, etc.). 

Each software you are talking about here is a particular case.
*kit is a mandatory dependency of gnome and a few other desktops/window
managers. I just don't install them, so I don't have *kit into my
system. You can do that even on Debian.

udev have much to do with the kernel. It is still possible to make an
udev free system and manage a static /dev, and I know at least 1 user
that managed to do that on a desktop PC. Also, an udev free system must
be the way to go for many simple embedded systems, but that's another
subject.

Wayland is another issue. Due to the complexity of X and of all its
extensions, wayland's compatibility layer will be a never finished
job, which will break hundreds of good working software. Because of
that, I think wayland may be a good move for the mobile or game market,
but than for the desktop, X will remain in use for a long time, at
least by experienced users. Or many of these experienced users will
be looking for alternatives. Some already have done it, or are in
the process to do it.

Another concern with wayland is windows managers. Most of them will
just stop to work with wayland, and this is not an incomplete
compatibility layer that will make them to work. My main concern here
is fvwm, which is not only a wm, but also a tool-kit for the Xlib which
let its users do whatever they can think about with it. I don't see
anything like that coming with wayland. So for me, wayland is just not a
viable alternative, and I am not the only one in that case.