X11 Extensions Made Xorg Actually Usable 

Brodie "Historian" Robertson. I really dig this kind of topic. You almost always come up with interesting topics. Too many Linux RU-vidrs focus on news, distros and the same old technical programs that are discussed in 1 million documents and videos.

omg since literally 1984 i love these social critique videos about xorg and wayland - they say a lot about our graphical society

It’s not just new features being added, but some old ones dropped as well. The one that comes to mind for me is the X font server capability. Nowadays all GUI apps do their font handling client side (e.g. using FreeType and Fontconfig). There is still the concept of “X fonts”, and the display server still supports text-drawing calls. But I suspect these don’t get a lot of use these days.

9:22 I agree Xorg does everything I need it to do.

I've been following your channel basically since Luke did a shoutout and I've got to say, the recent trend of these "historical" topics and meta-overviews of FOSS is what makes you my favorite Linux youtuber at the moment. Please make more of these (such as explaining Redhat, showcasing blogs etc.) , they are super informative and fun to watch. Cheers !

Let's talk about XKB bug 865: it's actually a bug in the XKB specification - when layout switching shortcuts are pressed, layout is switched immediately on press instead of in release. This means that the layout switching shortcuts cannot be overloaded - when switching on ALT+SHIFT, you can't use ALT+SHIFT+Key shortcuts! This basically means that "modifier-only switching" (which is very popular), destroys a lot of commonly used shortcuts. It wasn't fixed in 25 years. It is still an issue on Wayland.

And X11 was not always free and open source. It was paid software and costed a premium. That's an initial advantage, economically, that Wayland has never had.

My favorite part in books on IT topics is the first chapter: " Development History". Nice vid, Brodie.

1:56 Best to distinguish between the X protocol (or perhaps “protocol family”) versus XLib, which is just one implementation. Remember there is at least one other popular implementation, XCB, which gets rid of various responsiveness/performance bottlenecks in XLib, while still implementing exactly the same protocol.

XOrg is literally 1984 holy shit

Even xrandr didn't go all the way. There is no automatic detection of monitors when they're plugged in or unplugged. I had to write a display script and set a few key binds to manage my monitors in different ways for different activities. It also turns out that my laptop's touchpad changes how fast the cursor moves based on the number of connected monitors, so I had to add some xinput commands into the script as well. EDIT: I use KDE.

I don't remember the time before these extensions, but I do remember having to write xorg config files, hardcoding values for the resolution and refresh rates for each monitor. I am so glad we don't have to mess with that anymore. I think the biggest extension you could have talked about are the GL extensions. X didn't use to have hardware acceleration. And guess what? It apparently conflicts with the much lauded network transparency that X supports. You can't have both at the same time.

I was actually playing on 2 minecraft instances with my nephew on kde using xinput 2 user mode. It was "mostly" just working, especially considering that minecraft had to claim the cursors.

Linux and FOSS history is awesome man, please keep em coming if you can! I know there's a lot of old heads in Linux spaces that know a lot but there's also a sizeable amount of us that have been using Linux for around a year and don't know of all this history. Its great

The best thing that X has over wayland is the way the protocol is handled. In X, protocols are added but they are made optional. If somebody finds it useful they will implement it in their own implementation instead of creating a similar protocol that works slightly different. On wayland on the other hand, they want to keep the core protocol small so they decline protocol additions. This makes kde/gnome/wlroots/gamescope/etc implement their own extensions and multiple compositors end up implementing similar features but they dont have the same api and they work slightly different so it becomes a pain for developers to support them all. That's why there is no "wayland" target to make software for. If you ask if software works for wayland, what you really mean is if the software works for your wayland compositor. You cant create significant software for wayland just by writing core wayland protocol software. These approaches to the protocol are done this by design, which is why it will likely not improve any time soon. To talk about how ancient X11 is, when X11 was first used there was no graphical hardware acceleration hardware so the api reflected that. Then graphical hardware acceleration started to become more popular, but it was in different forms. Some graphics cards could only do hardware accelerated 2D or did 2D much faster than 3D. The new xrender extension reflected that. These days all graphics cards are designed for 3D graphics and when you display 2D graphics it's just 3D drawn in 2D space. xrender on xorg even uses opengl internally, so there isn't really any reason to use those old X11 apis. Although they do use less memory because they just happen to share opengl resources in a single process.

Thats was really interesting thank you. I'm of the age where I fought with trying to get the mouse pointer to not me a chessboard square on XFree86. Fun times.

I really like the new outro. It really shows the average ubuntu user!

X was super sluggish on a 4Mb 386SX but worked really well on my 16Mb P90 :-)

My biggest issues with X, either having to extend it or missing extensions are: 1. External event handling, like timers. I did it but it was unbelievably ugly. 2. Text drawing of arbitrary scaled text. Yes, it exists, but not well integrated. 3. Text arbitrary rotations. Still basically an unsolved issue. 4. Image rotations/scaling. Pretty much a do it yourself project.

Xfce is on xorg. When xfce works on wayland I will switch. I like xfce!

While development has stopped for Xorg, a project isn't technically dead until no one uses it anymore. Many distros still use Xorg because it is rock solid stable at this point. Plus many of us don't want to use Wayland because companies like Nvidia and Valve don't support it yet. So Steam still does not play 100% nice with Wayland. If you game on linux like me and many others, you avoid using Wayland because of issues with both Steam and certain games as well. Side note: Linux finally surpassed MacOS in terms of usage on the Steam usage survey.

Non-Xinerama multi-screen would have worked much better if DEs properly supported sending active windows/applications to different "X11 Screens". There wasn't any particular reason why this wasn't implemented other than the fact multi-head setups were pretty unpopular. Gtk+ actually supported it, but GNOME didn't, the situation was no better on the KDE side. There were definite benefits to doing this this way, for example: - one screen may support 3D acceleration, while another doesn't - different refresh rates/tearing vblank issues are avoided - different DPI values - separate workspace and presentation screens - etc, etc

I remember the shape extension. Which was a very long time ago. :-)

Good channel Brody keep going

around 15 years ago i tried playing complex opengl games using x' network transparency and was really surprised how well that worked 😮

I don't know if it's just me, but I feel like the development of Wayland have really accelerated in recent years. I guess because it's becoming the default that people decided they have to deal with it, and more than the Wayland people gets involved. Well, the end result is that a lot of tools that are good for xorg and wayland, or at least just wayland, become ready to use at around the same time. With xwayland video bridge being out, IMO it's useable if not outright feature complete for most users, it's just a question of how to make a neat package for the users, getting certain devs on board (like those that uses older Qt5 to use Qt6), and the edge cases left.

Another legitimate reason to still be using Xrog is if you're still using a stand alone X Window Manager and there is no drop in replacement Wayland compositor for your current config file. Writing new config files take time and most people don't want to do it, so they will continue to use Xorg until there are drop in replacements for Wayland.

I would love to try Wayland, but XFCE hasn't been fully ported to it yet. Once it is I'll give it a shot. I've tried both gnome and KDE and I just can't be bothered to put up with them.

I've been using KDE Wayland daily for over 2 years now w/ a freaking hiDPI display requiring fractional scaling and I got it to work the way I want without much effort. At this point, I am under the impression that those who claim that it's still "unusable" are either trolls or suffering from user error.

Wayland on Nvidia isn't even that bad anymore in my experience. I make a point to try it out every time a new version of Fedora comes out, and as of Fedora 38 I'm now using Wayland+KDE full time with my 3060 Ti and haven't really run into many issues (other than Firefox's PiP not staying on top of other windows, but that's fixable with KWin rules at least). I don't doubt that there are still bugs to be fixed, but it's not like X11 has any shortage of those either.

Perhaps with KDE Plasma 6 I will give Wayland a serious try - but at present there are things even in Plasma 5.27 or specific programs that do not work as expected in Wayland but work perfectly fine on X11. And then there are DEs like LXQt or Xfce…

Ok, I got the outro track. It's credited on the bottom of the screen :D :palming my face.exe:

I've been using Wayland via KDE for the past couple days and honestly it's not half bad. Some things (most notably Alacritty) are a little slower to start up, but I don't know if that's a flaw with Xwayland or if it's just my imagination. Tbh unless I come across something that's really bad I'm probably just gonna stick with Wayland from here on out.

Regarding keyboards, weren't there a lot more options available in the 1980s/1990s than there are now? Pretty much all keyboards now are based on the IBM PC standard, even Mac keyboards, but that wasn't always the case.

4:15: Yeah, there are sadly only a few window managers that have it implemented well. Some very niche ones with only a few hundred users and compiz. That is one of the features that could make me switch my window manager again. I settled on FVWM for now cause it has overall brought me many things I was missing before (or at least functions to make them possible) but there are a handful of things it is lacking and that exist somewhere (sometimes not on anything X11 tho). Ideally, I would start my own window manager project but eh... the time and complexity.

Linux nightmare: (EE) No screens found

Wayland is not ready for daily use in NVIDIA, it's buggy in Hyprland and KDE for me, and I don't have the money to replace a card I bought 5 years ago (I don't love NVIDIA, but I couldn't know to not buy NVIDIA and buy AMD for linux when I wasn't even using linux then). Expecting me to get a new card to use Wayland isn't good user experience, and "ready for daily use". XWayland scaling too. Wayland is ready for daily issue, if you do a lot of trickery to get it to work, specially on NVIDIA. Xorg isn't great either and has bugs too, but Wayland on NVIDIA is unusable for many. It depends on the card, but I'd argue "ready" means as high of a compatibility X has

I use Wayland on Nvidia or actually hybrid GPU laptop with Nvidia. My card is on an older side: GTX M970. Because of that, drivers seem to work pretty well and stable for it, because it doesn't support many new features, so it ignores part of the code that could still be problematic on Wayland. From what I saw, many users of newer Nvidia cards have more issues on Wayland. For me it is as stable as X and in some cases even more. I even decided to keep Wayland for gaming, because if there is some overhead, it's not perceivable, even on low FPS side. So if I'm playing a modern game that has 20-45 FPS, one would think that I there is a vast difference between Xorg and XWayland, but it turns out, if it's there, you can't notice it, because there could be some couple of FPS lower here and there, but on average, it's still 20-45 FPS. For me it's fine, especially that it is a modern game with the highest settings, on a 10 or more old years laptop GPU. Even with sharing screen through Meet or Zoom, with XWayland bridge, it seems to work better than on Xorg, or at least more robust... Since Plasma 5.27, Wayland is my default and I love it.

Been using wayland for a year now on nvidia. When you mentioned nvidia on wayland I phisically flinched.

so err, I'm not trying to be rude; why do you focus so much on wayland vs xorg? is it a topic that brings in lots of views or are you on the dev team? im asking because recently it seems like there is a trend to bash xorg? idk but it seems like an unnecessary thing because eventually wayland will take over, just, after the (fewer by the day) legit reasons for staying on xorg are resolved🤷‍♂️🤷‍♂️ this is not really meant as a criticism, your videos are informative and I think also entertaining!

0:17 it’s just wrong. Wayland is INCREDIBLY usable for desktop day-to-day stuff

I'll be happy when Cinnamon starts to support Wayland.

I'm so angry that nvidia is not cooperating with Wayland since it's way less screen tearing for me but if my pc goes to sleeping I basically have to restart it as ~80% of graphics are gone

Start the video and looks at the whiteboard: No, I have not. Take that back. TAKE THAT BACK!

I think I'll switch to Wayland as soon as the Unity desktop supports them.

It's not even that the X developers didn't realise something would be needed, it's more like this use case didn't even exist yet because either no one had considered it yet or if they had it was in the form of wildly optimistic futurism requiring hardware that could have been barely constructed back then. Remember even at the time say z buffering for visible surface determination for instance was considered an expensive technic even for offline 3D rendering so yes you are not going to get say compositing out of the box. Not when most $20000 work stations could barely afford the 128kB needed for the 1 mega pixel monochrome yes that's right monochrome, that is to say literally each pixel is either fully on or fully off, not even grey scale. Also bear in mind that to even be able to output values fast enough to keep up with the sweep of the electron gun often required fancy things like VRAM. VRAM is like DRAM but capable of reading an entire row into an internal buffer. DRAM also does this, but throws away all but one of the values in the row. VRAM allows you to clock out all individual, consecutive values in the row sequentially one by one on a special extra port. It was expensive because it didn't have the insane volume of DRAM.

Brodie, even today it's not common to have up to 8 GB of ram and 2 monitors. At least where I live.

honestly i was accidentally using Wayland for a few weeks when i switched to Ubuntu studio only problem i had was some VSTs not displaying lol it's perfectly servicable for normal use imo

I have been using wayland 24/7 since the start of the year and don't even notice. It has become a none issue for KDE users.

Were the developers of Wayland maintaining X when they started Wayland or did they become the maintainers later on?

Wayland would almost be usable on my Nvidia system if it werent for xwayland text input being laggy. Here's to hoping they either fix that or everything I use supports native wayland at some point. All that said though it's nice how far it's come over the years.

You noted that extensions added features no one could conceive of being an issue later, but... even if they could conceive it, there wasn't enough hardware to implement them. To my understanding X was initially a notoriously heavy beast, with a reputation for supporting all sorts of superflous nonsense at the expense of RAM and CPU time. Adding even more to it might would've killed it outright. (Of course, modern usage is also exactly the opposite of the design intent. We were supposed to use graphical terminals connected to a remote server. You can't have a personal computer, they're just too expensive!)

I only hope the situation of every compositor developing and doing their own thing improves on Wayland without much collaboration. Portals and wl-roots is good i'm just not sure if it's enough.

yes x is dead , problem is majority of programs people use are written around x, and might if you are lucky have some basic support for wayland. It doesn't help imo that there are so many f'ing toolkits programs are being written for, but you also have different version (GTK 2, 3, 4, 5) , QT 4 5 and 6, etc. I admit that I am using xorg instead, but it is just not practical yet to switch over. Only gaming I do involves console emulators, but I don't know how well they work in Wayland, plus yea, NVIDIA . I am not using an AMD card.

Guys where do I donate to Wayland? Cause I'm confused.

everyone talking about GNU/Linux, but when are we appending display server to it? I run GNU/Linux/x86/X11/systemd/KDE btw.

I hate X. If it wasn't for all the incarnations that X has been, then X wouldn't be shoehorned into every product name. Damn near every X thing has XanX in theirX naXme and it's all X's fault This is highly unlikely to be true, but it's a bugbear of mind that came to mind.

I miss Xfree86, LILO, SysV, and Netscape Navigator for Linux.

Wayland has been "usable" since the first release of Weston. Did it have all of the features of xf86-Xorg other 30 years? No, but most of those features don't even work or modern systems either. Also, xinerama is pronounced "zinerama"

I've basically only used Wayland for the 2 to 3 years of me using Linux xD (except for a short time where I used XeroLinux)

If you have tried to use x2go in the last 4 years, it is impossible. It is never usable and never realtime. I abandoned it. Xorg is dead or dying. Once xfce gets with wayland, then I'll switch over.

Hi Brodie! Can I suggest something? Can you make a video for the next April Fools day, where you completely seriously explain the history or rant about something like your usual videos, but it's completely made up gobbledygook? Like "The forgotten X12 protocol" or "PowerPC-only Microsoft Linux OS from 2001? This existed!"

you look pixelated on my 2K monitor, you should upload in 4K :P

I tried this secondary cursor thing in X so I can run multiple cursors with multiple mouse in the same desktop. It crashed a few seconds later.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to make comments on Brodies videos.

i used x on my pc befora i got my 3060 ti because with the 1060 wayland was absolutley broken but with the 3060ti it works much better but not as good as on my all amd laptop where x is a clear downgrade in touchscreen/touchpad gestures and performance but on my desktop with the 3060 ti it sometimes freezes only one screen but the ssystem is still perfectly useable the only way to resolve that problem is by rebooting (logging out and back in also works sometimes)

How to solve the Wayland debate: Rename it to X12

It would be cool to have non-Xorg X11 server, just to confirm if the problem is Xorg or X11

Would you say it’s X’s job to just give it ya?

i'm still on x because i use awesome, hyprland doesn't look mature enough yet and other options don't look that appealing, i don't want a full DE like gnome and kde eating my limited resources

Obligatory XKCD: 963

1984??

If you are shilling us with moving past X, how about we move past systemD as well?

Sweeet

Day 20 of requesting a state of nouveau video

I gave it a try because of all the wayland videos you've been posting lately, and even on Gnome I just coudn't get over the inconveniences. Yes, it's usable, but why would I make my life harder if X11 works perfectly fine and better. I really want to use it, but I think I'll wait to see the Cosmic implementation, because this is not it yet.

Wayland is crap. Doesn't work with xfce.

Hello wonderful person reading this comment

First

the reality is, the more people use Wayland and come across issues AND report them, the better it can be, if only some people use it and only some of them people report issues, it's just going to take longer to become "good".