Misc. BSD/UNIX X11/X.Org: The beginning of the end

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http://phoronix.com/scan.php?page=ne...idding-Old-X11

GNOME's Mutter Loses Some Of Its X11 Dependence
Written by Michael Larabel in GNOME on 10 September 2017 at 07:31 AM EDT. 16 Comments
GNOME -- One of the interesting Google Summer of Code projects this year associated with the GNOME project was on reworking the Mutter compositor from requiring X11/XWayland code-paths for starting the Wayland compositor.

https://armin-gnome.blogspot.ba/2017...c-wrap-up.html

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Today Marks 30 Years Since The Release Of X11

The X11 window system turns 30 years old today! X11 which still lives on through today via the X.Org Server on Linux, BSD, Solaris, and other operating systems is now three decades old.

It was on this day in 1987 that Ralph Swick of MIT announced the X Window System Version 11 Release 1. As explained in the announcement compared to earlier versions of X, X11 offered "This release represents a major redesign and enhancement of X and signals it's graduation from the research community into the product engineering and development community. The X Window System version 11 is intended to be able to support virtually all known instances of raster display hardware and reasonable future hardware, including hardware supporting deep frame buffers, multiple colormaps and various levels of hardware graphics assist."

X11 has been extended many times over the years and with a wealth of extensions not envisioned back in the 80's, but it's still living on. Of course, a codebase of 30 years does bring with it a lot of bugs and security issues have especially come to light in the past few years with the xorg-server.

Wayland continues making more inroads as more compositors begin nearing parity to their desktop support under X11, but the X.Org Server is still expected to live on for years to come for X11 application compatibility for software that may never see native Wayland support, other operating systems lacking all the infrastructure at this time for Wayland, etc.

Happy 30th birthday X11!

[drhowarddrfine]

Wayland vs Xorg Performance

Result: Overall they perform the same with no advantage one over the other.

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Originally Posted by drhowarddrfine

Wayland vs Xorg Performance

Result: Overall they perform the same with no advantage one over the other.

I think general extrapolation of performance is not justified by this test result. It just happens that this specific version of that specific Wayland compositor is approximately the same in the terms of performance than Gnome/X.Org session.
I also think that for OpenBSD community for which security, stability and simplicity (from the point of the developer) are values worth working for, performance should not be mentioned as an only argument for Wayland.

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Here are some talks about Wayland compared to X.Org:
The Real Story Behind Wayland and X - Daniel Stone (linux.conf.au 2013)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIctzAQOe44

GStreamer Conference 2014 > GStreamer on Wayland Overview
https://gstconf.ubicast.tv/videos/gs...land-overview/

Hello Wayland, Goodbye X11 - The year of the Linux desktop! - Carsten Haitzler - FOSSASIA 2017
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zsz7Shbnb9c

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KDE Plasma 5.12.0 released.

There is also an important change of policy: 5.12 is the last release which sees feature development in KWin on X11. With 5.13 onwards, only new features relevant to Wayland are going to be added.

We have put a lot of work into making Wayland support in Plasma as good as possible, but there are still some missing features and issues with particular hardware configurations. Therefore, we don't yet recommend it for daily use. More information is available on the Wayland status wiki page.

https://www.kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.12.0.php

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GNOME 3.30 Mutter Relieves Wayland Code From Depending Upon X11/XWayland

While GNOME's Wayland support has been in great shape with the Mutter compositor, it has depended upon X11/XWayland code even when starting with pure Wayland support. That's now changing and there is also now the optional "--no-x11" flag for starting the compositor without X11 support.

Going back to 2015 has been this bug report about how the GNOME Wayland session will still spawn XWayland even if no X11 applications are needed with parts of the event loop still depending upon X11. Thanks to a big Mutter rework, that is no longer the case.