What is the future for X windows development in antiX?

[Colonel PanicMember]

Hi there,

I’ll be the first to admit I’m showing my ignorance here, but I gather that most of the Linux distro world now, such as Fedora and Ubuntu, is moving towards Wayland and Wayland in its turn depends on systemD, which antiX is of course committed to eschewing.

I also gather though that XLibre is not yet considered a mature project. So, where in the future do you see antiX going as far as window display managers are concerned?

If it were down to me I’d stick with XOrg and distros that use it, but that may cease to be an option one day.

Thanks in advance,

CP

• This topic was modified 1 month, 3 weeks ago by Colonel Panic.
• This topic was modified 1 month, 3 weeks ago by Colonel Panic.
• This topic was modified 1 month, 3 weeks ago by Colonel Panic.

[anticapitalistaForum Admin]

Good questions.
Some of my thoughts/comments (You caught me on my break)

* Wayland does not depend on systemd. Debian might make it a dependency, but upstream has not.
* None of the default window managers used by antiX (IceWM, JWM, fluxbox and herbstluftm) will work with ‘pure’ Wayland and there doesn’t seem to be any plans for them to do so.
* There are some window managers that work with Wayland and do not require systemd, but I have not spent any serious time looking at them.
* antiX is all about window managers. If we find one that works well with Wayland, we might adopt it. We’re not interested in desktop-environments.
* Despite the politics of the main people developing XLibre and the politics of almost all distros that support it (I want to make it clear that I’m 100% opposed and ‘on the other side’), it does seem to be working well on antiX and at some point could replace Xorg.

Current antiX-26 with Xorg default and no systemd/elogind will be supported until the end of this decade (or thereabouts).

Philosophers have interpreted the world in many ways; the point is to change it.

antiX with runit - leaner and meaner.

[Brian MasinickModerator]

@anticapitalista, interesting that this came up; I was experimenting with a few distributions this week in addition to my almost daily updates of antiX and the other distributions that I keep available.

I had tried the open replacement for the Mandriva / Open Mandriva called Mageia. Since “Mandrake” was one of the early distributions I once used, I figured this wouldn’t be difficult to use or figure out. That proved to be true, BUT the installation tool ticked me off because they chose to replace the GRUB configuration with their own, causing me considerable grief; my usual tricks to restore it back weren’t working.

I finally resolved the problems because 1) I keep a refind configuration handy, plus my main laptop’s system console allowed me to eventually get back in, so I could RUN antiX 23.2 and 26 BUT replacing the Mageia GRUB with my antiX 26 GRUB wasn’t working.

At last I reinstalled all of the appropriate antiX 26 GRUB 2 packages I had installed previously; that seemed to get the environment back, but it still wasn’t letting me reinstall GRUB 2 directly, so I used our “friend” MX Linux and utilized their tool to reinstall the antiX 26 as the controller of the boot loader. Then I got RID of Mageia!

Now I’m running and experimenting with one of the recent Puppy configurations that has been built over the past two months and it has Wayland configured. It looks like this instance is running in a Busybox configuration. It’s quite interesting, but antiX it is NOT!

Anyway, I’m with you; no reason to run any of this unless we absolutely have no other alternative. Perhaps we may choose to retain the status quo and squirrel away the X environment we have (and the sources) in case we end up having to maintain it ourselves some day – like several other things the team has taken on over the years.

I try these other systems to get a “feel” for what’s going on around in the distro community. There’s nothing that comes close to managing the experience like we do. The various Puppy experiments are sometimes pretty interesting, but at the end of the day, right here is where I prefer as my “home environment”.

--
Brian Masinick
Alternate "Search B":
This search page

[Colonel PanicMember]

Thanks to you both for your replies. This is certainly nice to know;

“Current antiX-26 with Xorg default and no systemd/elogind will be supported until the end of this decade (or thereabouts).”

As far as I know, there is still no easy way to change a keyboard mapping on Wayland equivalent to setxkbmap gb in XOrg. I think this and possibly other things too would have to change before I would want to move over to Wayland.

• This reply was modified 1 month, 3 weeks ago by Colonel Panic.
• This reply was modified 1 month, 3 weeks ago by Colonel Panic.

[Steve DoeMember]

I try these other systems to get a “feel” for what’s going on around in the distro community. There’s nothing that comes close to managing the experience like we do. The various Puppy experiments are sometimes pretty interesting, but at the end of the day, right here is where I prefer as my “home environment”.

I get the impression that the Barry distribution is heading in the right direction… have you tested their different variants? Also, the Wayland integration for older hardware looks very promising in terms of resource efficiency and usage. I think it would be interesting to keep an eye on the evolution of Wayland or… whatever project emerges in that area.

Two eggs are in the fridge. The first egg says: "Brrr...it's cold in here, isn't it ?" ...and the second egg goes: "AAAAAH ! A TALKING EGG !"
😮 antixforum.com/search-forums

[Colonel PanicMember]

Steve Doe wrote:

I try these other systems to get a “feel” for what’s going on around in the distro community. There’s nothing that comes close to managing the experience like we do. The various Puppy experiments are sometimes pretty interesting, but at the end of the day, right here is where I prefer as my “home environment”.

I get the impression that the Barry distribution is heading in the right direction… have you tested their different variants? Also, the Wayland integration for older hardware looks very promising in terms of resource efficiency and usage. I think it would be interesting to keep an eye on the evolution of Wayland or… whatever project emerges in that area.

I have a lot of respect for Barry; he’s very much someone who ploughs his own furrow. I liked the early Puppy distros (2.00, 2.14, 3.01, 4.20 and .21), but lost interest in the later ones.

Teenpup (based on Puppy 2.14) was great though; I remember watching a *video in Youtube on a public computer with just 128 MB of RAM. Unfortunately it won’t boot on anything but a pre-2010 computer (I’ve tried), otherwise I’d probably still be using it.

The various Lighthouse Pups were also good.

And Pizzapup, which I used happily in about 2008-9 and was also based on Puppy 2.14 – you’ve got me started now 🙂

* Hawkwind, playing “Silver Machine!”

• This reply was modified 1 month, 3 weeks ago by Colonel Panic.
• This reply was modified 1 month, 3 weeks ago by Colonel Panic.
• This reply was modified 1 month, 3 weeks ago by Colonel Panic.

[Steve DoeMember]

Colonel Panic wrote:

Thanks to you both for your replies. This is certainly nice to know;

“Current antiX-26 with Xorg default and no systemd/elogind will be supported until the end of this decade (or thereabouts).”

As far as I know, there is still no easy way to change a keybpoard mapping on Wayland equivalent to setxkbmap gb in XOrg. I think this and possibly other things too would have to change before I would want to move over to Wayland.

Wayland dont have the history of Xorg, but wait a bit with AI that helps productivity, there will be serious projects that will emerge quickly.

Already this crazy project https://github.com/joske/yserver in a few months vs Xorg which is more than 20 years old?

I think the moment of glory will be when there will be a more massive adoption of ordinary Linux users (I dream of it), so it will boost the development of Linux for the desktop.

EDIT : After all, that was the goal for Linux from the very beginning , Linus T.wanted to see his project conquer the desktop world, which has not yet happened. And it is rather ironic to see that a segment of the Linux community is resistant to that idea ; they simply want to keep Linux for insiders and bearded techies—out of fear, or I’d say because they don’t want to see the average Joe or Jane bothering them in their little world. I hope to see it happen in my lifetime—I’m optimistic—but resistance to change is strong.

• This reply was modified 1 month, 3 weeks ago by Steve Doe.
• This reply was modified 1 month, 3 weeks ago by Steve Doe.
• This reply was modified 1 month, 3 weeks ago by Steve Doe.

Two eggs are in the fridge. The first egg says: "Brrr...it's cold in here, isn't it ?" ...and the second egg goes: "AAAAAH ! A TALKING EGG !"
😮 antixforum.com/search-forums

[Brian MasinickModerator]

Steve Doe wrote:

Colonel Panic wrote:

Thanks to you both for your replies. This is certainly nice to know;

“Current antiX-26 with Xorg default and no systemd/elogind will be supported until the end of this decade (or thereabouts).”

As far as I know, there is still no easy way to change a keyboard mapping on Wayland equivalent to setxkbmap gb in XOrg. I think this and possibly other things too would have to change before I would want to move over to Wayland.

Wayland doesn’t necessarily have the history of Xorg, but wait a bit with AI that helps productivity, there will be serious projects that will emerge quickly. Already this crazy project https://github.com/joske/yserver in a few months vs Xorg which is more than 20 years old? I think the moment of glory will be when there will be a more massive adoption of ordinary Linux users (I dream of it), so it will boost the development of Linux for the desktop.

Keep in mind that these “crazy projects” such as yserver or even the longer history of Wayland are very unlikely to appear in antiX. @anticapitalista made that pretty clear (at least to me).

I experiment with other things on occasion to scratch my curiosity, but then I’m right back in antiX; in fact after today’s exercises I’ve been back – first with antiX 26, and now, just before I sign off, I’m ending today with antiX 23.2 Full Runit.
Both have been very solid for me and I intend to keep them as my core systems for as long as possible.

--
Brian Masinick
Alternate "Search B":
This search page

[sybokMember]

My comments on that:
* Xwayland would help keep some applications but it seems not the desktops environments (DEs) which I assume includes window managers (WMs).
* Additional issue: there are many “implementations”/compositors (pretty much every DE has its own), including many DEs might create a bloat; fortunately, some stick to the same, e.g. ‘wlroots’.
* There are emerging alternatives:
– Tiling WM Sway (https://github.com/swaywm/sway ; uses ‘wlroots’)
– dwl (uses ‘wlroots’)
– Waybox (inspired by Fluxbox) repository does not seem to be much active lately…

May be @abc-nix could share his experiences and POV.

systemd dependencies could propagate, see e.g. this post.

[anticapitalistaForum Admin]

@sybok – all valid points, but I really don’t see the point of xwayland.
I see Wayland succeeding if and when xwayland is no longer needed.

To me its a binary choice – adopt Wayland as Wayland is designed to be or stick with Xorg (or its fork XLibre).

Personally, I have no intention of using Wayland, but there are many things included in antiX that I don’t use and have no intention of using.
We’ll see how things develop.

Philosophers have interpreted the world in many ways; the point is to change it.

antiX with runit - leaner and meaner.

[sybokMember]

@anticapitalista:
I am unsure about future of Xorg and|or its forks; hence, IMHO (which might change), Wayland is the future, especially once maintenance of Xorg is dropped and the knowledgeable developers move to other goals that pay the bills.
I regard Xwayland compatibility layer as a temporary measure until (most of) the applications fully support Wayland; this [Xwayland] I expect to be dropped after some time as well.
One more reason to tentatively consider Wayland for the future.

As you wrote, we’ll see… (provided we’re still here)

[melodieMember]

Hello,

anticapitalista wrote:

Wayland does not depend on systemd. Debian might make it a dependency, but upstream has not.

* None of the default window managers used by antiX (IceWM, JWM, fluxbox and herbstluftm) will work with ‘pure’ Wayland and there doesn’t seem to be any plans for them to do so.
* There are some window managers that work with Wayland and do not require systemd, but I have not spent any serious time looking at them.
* antiX is all about window managers. If we find one that works well with Wayland, we might adopt it. We’re not interested in desktop-environments.
* Despite the politics of the main people developing XLibre and the politics of almost all distros that support it (I want to make it clear that I’m 100% opposed and ‘on the other side’), it does seem to be working well on antiX and at some point could replace Xorg.

As I am also working with a window manager and no desktop environment, Openbox, as you know, which is also not compatible with Wayland, I have been pointed to and stumbled upon the Labwc project.

The guys working on the project are very nice, friendly and welcoming on their IRC chat. The configuration files from Openbox can be reused directly with Labwc. And there are quite some documentation. So, at some time in the future I’ll start testing and checking what needs to be adapted.

If someone is interested to have a look, and, or, to test, here is the link to their project, https://labwc.github.io. The configuration files I have been using for more than an decade are available in a new repo, at Sourcehut.

[wildstar84Member]

Most classic (ie. old) window-managers aren’t being converted to run on Wayland afaik, hense the main reason I’m not interested in using it (I <3 my current, customized WM). However, Wayland “window-managers” are called “compositors”, so I wouldn’t think that antiX supporting Wayland would necessarily negate it being a “window-manager” (instead of a “desktop environment”) distro. There have been some recent posts here (https://www.antixforum.com/forums/topic/antix-wayland-light/) that provided a small list of packages he installed in his snapshot to get Wayland fully up & running in antiX. I told him he should release his snapshot and name it “antiW”.

Regards,

Jim

[olsztynMember]

melodie wrote:

As I am also working with a window manager and no desktop environment, Openbox, as you know, which is also not compatible with Wayland, I have been pointed to and stumbled upon the Labwc project.

The guys working on the project are very nice, friendly and welcoming on their IRC chat. The configuration files from Openbox can be reused directly with Labwc. And there are quite some documentation.

This is how I have been using Wayland on antiX since about two yeaars ago. Ported directly my customized Openbox configuration to Labwc. LXDE, then LXQT panel running under Wayland. Labwc worked very nicely. Using Foot as terminal natively but Xwayland was needed for compatibility with many applications and tools.
However for some antiX specific system tools, such as Live tools I had to flip to XOrg antiX session.
Wayland appeared to work better on some my laptops than Xorg, but continued dependency on Xwaayland for many apps has not disappeared over time and flipping to Xorg session for some system functions has been a nuisance to use it full time, so eventually I dropped such Wayland idea until it becomes easier to use.

Live antiX Boot Options (Previously posted by Xecure):
http://antixlinuxfan.miraheze.org/wiki/Table_of_antiX_Boot_Parameters

[Colonel PanicMember]

Thanks for all the further replies. Have to admit I don’t really know enough
to say anything further except to say that if (as I’ve read) a major reason
for the widespread adoption of Wayland is that XOrg is subject to screen tearing,
I haven’t really noticed a lot of that with XOrg recently..

I’m happy that antiX is sticking with XOrg, at least for the foreseeable future.

[Author]

Posts