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

Le Mon, 30 Dec 2013 10:52:14 -0600 (CST),
Brent Busby <[email protected]> a =E9crit :

> On Mon, 30 Dec 2013, Dominique Michel wrote:
>=20
> > Each software you are talking about here is a particular case. *kit
> > is a mandatory dependency of gnome and a few other desktops/window=20
> > managers. I just don't install them, so I don't have *kit into my=20
> > system. You can do that even on Debian.
>=20
> For now, you can still fight it, but I have a feeling it's going to
> be like DBus (which I don't hate, but it still makes a good example
> for this):  It will become so integrated into the way Linux works
> that eventually, you just won't be able to live without it.  Most
> things like that I don't fight because I know you can only do it
> for so long.

It is another issue on Debian. It's called systemd. It make the kernel
cgroups totally unusable with cpu.rt_runtime_us. systemd insist to take
control of it, put whatever it think is good to have into the rt
cgroup, and the machine just freeze without warning.

>=20
> > 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.
>=20
> You can fight it, but is it worth it?  My main annoyance with udev is=20
> that it makes copying the image of an installed Linux machine to
> another machine more complicated than it really needs to be, due to
> the way it retains and depends on information about a particular PC's
> hardware that get configured at install time.  I've learned to work
> around it, but it's annoying.  Still...you can't fight upstream.

That's right, but on the long run, the users will decide. It is a few
years ago, GNU/Linux was the fastest growing OS on the desktop market.
Today, that's not true any more, and I think mainly because users get
tired of break_my_good_working_system.tm idiotic stuffs. It begun with
the kde3 to kde4 move. Instead of fixing existing bugs, they replaced a
lot a advanced applications with pale copies of them, and a few years
later, many of these pale copies never get updated with the
functionalities of the older versions. As example kaffeine. This app
was the perfect TV application for an average desktop user coming from
windows. Nothing to setup, it just worked. The GUI was a little bit
buggy, but full with features. It remain almost nothing of these
features in the new versions.

Also sometime upstream are like the French in politics. It work in
practice, but they ask: What say the theory? A good example of that is
the animated png support in linux. A patch exist, but nobody care about
supporting it into its software, that just because it is not in the
norm, it is only an extension. It was a kde3 application that was able
to open such files, it was one of the most advanced pic viewer on Linux.
Now, this app is dead and if I want to open such files, I must run
e-uae, and load some AmigaOS from the eighties into it. Tell that to a
linux newbie coming from windows, this give that:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=3D1383411

>=20
> > Wayland is another issue. Due to the complexity of X and of all its=20
> > extensions, wayland's compatibility layer will be a never finished=20
> > job, which will break hundreds of good working software. Because of=20
> > that, I think wayland may be a good move for the mobile or game=20
> > market, but than for the desktop, X will remain in use for a long=20
> > time, at least by experienced users. Or many of these experienced=20
> > users will be looking for alternatives. Some already have done it,
> > or are in the process to do it.
>=20
> Just having big distros like Fedora and Ubuntu pushing it will
> fracture the Linux platform even more than it already is. It's true
> that there will still be X and users who use it, but everyone will
> have to deal with a world where the first question about your Linux
> install will be, "Do you run X or Wayland?"  And from there, the fun
> begins...

What they are currently doing in Wayland is only half of the job. See
above.

>=20
> > Another concern with wayland is windows managers. Most of them will=20
> > just stop to work with wayland, and this is not an incomplete=20
> > 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.
>=20
> Totally agree.  I love FVWM (and WindowMaker), and I think the
> ability to change to a whole different kind of desktop if you want is
> one of the greatest features of X.  I have a feeling Wayland users
> are going to end up with a desktop that's theme-able (in the way you
> can theme a Windows desktop), but not completely replaceable with any
> of twenty wholly different desktop/window managers.  Some people will
> say that's an improvement, since I've been hearing for years that
> Linux should have only one desktop, but the problem with those
> arguments is that everyone making it thinks their favorite window
> manager should be the one. Choice is good as long as it doesn't break
> things that used to work, so I think having a choice of lots of
> desktops is a great thing.
>=20
Sure. What I think about wayland is simple. They want to integrate the
wm into the server, which is a good idea, but that will break a lot of
things. At the same time, they don't want to further integrate these
with the tool-kit, mainly because folks from mainstream QT and GTK will
not accept that, and are arguing this is not effective on multi-core
processors. They can say what they want, but only 1 core at 8MHz was
necessary to provide a full premptible OS with real multitasking and a
wonderful GUI for that time on the Amiga. Which on a 4 cores
processors, let 3 cores free to make something else.

And more. With the hardware, we can see a new tendency slowly emerging
on the mobile market: multi-core processors with dedicated cores. 1 low
frequency and low power core for the standby, 1 dedicated core to deal
with the hardware, 1 generic core to deal with the GUI, and a DSP core
to deal with all kind of calculations inclusive multimedia. DSP cores
and their multiple data buses have obvious speed advantages over the
best optimised C code on general purpose cores, that for any kind of
calculation. And back from the eighties, the algorithms are well known
and have proved to be very efficient.

Because of that, I really hope, and think, this trend will reach the PC
market as well. And that day, some smart guys will make a Wayland v.2
with the tool-kit integrated into the wm integrated into the server.
And every thing will break again. -:)

Dominique