The death watch for the X Window System has probably started - <AUTHOR> https://utcc.utoronto.ca/%7Ecks/space/blog/unix/XDeathwatchStarts <comment><USER2> I would use Wayland, but the most actively-developed tiling window manager, sway, doesn't work with the NVIDIA graphics card I own.

And come to think of it, isn't that a really weird problem to have? On X, the compositor (responsible for actually drawing all the windows on the screen) and the window manager (responsible for deciding how to arrange the windows and what their title bars/borders should look like) can be separate components, so I use i3 to arrange my windows and compton to draw them without tearing.

On Wayland, my impression is that the compositor and the window manager have to be built into the same program, so you run into silly situations where you can run GNOME on your graphics card but you can't run a basic tiling window manager. This also makes it a lot harder to create a new window manager, since you also have to write a compositor and test it on every graphics card.

That last issue could be solved with a reusable library that provided basic compositor functionality for window managers. Except every member of the Wayland community has independently had that idea and written their own, each with a different, incompatible interface and support for different graphics cards. So either we need a meta-library that abstracts away all the different libraries, or we need a standard compositor interface like X had.

<comment><USER3> NVIDIA doesn't support GBM, which is the standard for buffer allocation. Use nouveau.

>The last issue could be solved with a reusable library that provided basic compositor functionality for window managers.

This is pretty much what wlroots is.

<comment><USER4> > NVIDIA doesn't support GBM

If Nvidia don't support it, how much of a useful standard can it really be?

<comment><USER5> NVidia has a horrible history of Linux support.

GBM works just fine, they've simply chosen not to support it.

<comment><USER6> Nvidia has _excellent_ support, I think you are conflating Linux with open source. For decades, Nvidia had (and arguably still has) excellent support for the former, without really caring for the latter.

<comment><USER7> Are you referring to the small decade it took them to support KMS so that their driver behaved even remotely like a modern one?

Or perhaps their marvelous installation methods of running a random script as root that rewrites configuration files, and its configuration interface that likewise also rewrites configuration files in attempts to get multi-monitor setups working that until recently hardly ever worked?

Maybe you are referring to their magnificent support, forcing you to stay on outdated kernels as upgrading would break compatibility and render you without a functioning graphics adapter short of a VGA-resolution framebuffer console?

It could also be their fantastic backwards compatibility, requiring you to keep track of driver series compatible with certain adapters, where every other GPU in existence just works OOB.

I used NVIDIA up until a 2 years back. While you could arguably get things to _work_ , claiming they had excellent support is laughable at best.

<comment><USER8> I think he refers to the fact that Nvidia's drivers provided excellent OpenGL support for multiple years compared to the absolute dumpsterfire that fglrx was. Before Valve decided to pay attention to Linux and thus prod AMD to improve their drivers, if you wanted anything approaching serious 3D performance on Linux, you _had_ to use Nvidia. Anything else would be a waste of money.

<comment><USER7> Fair enough: That was indeed true _many_ years ago.

<comment><USER8> Not that many, fglrx's replacement amdgpu was released in april 2015, that is just four years ago. And it wasn't until later that it got usable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Quoting a quote from the article:

> _The reality is that X.org is basically maintained by us and thus once we > stop paying attention to it there is unlikely to be any major new releases > coming out and there might even be some bitrot setting in over time. We will > keep an eye on it as we will want to ensure X.org stays supportable until > the end of the RHEL8 lifecycle at a minimum, but let this be a friendly > notice for everyone who rely the work we do maintaining the Linux graphics > stack, get onto Wayland, that is where the future is._

The fair warning is appreciated. Anytime we hear something like this in open source (sometimes after the fact), I try not to prejudge, but I definitely pay attention. Linus Torvalds notwithstanding, the parties with the development resources effectively make the decisions. Sometimes such decisions turn out to still be controversial even years after being pushed onto Linux (like GTK3 or Systemd). I haven't yet used Wayland enough to guess how it will turn out.

<comment><USER10> My concern at the moment with Wayland (and Systemd, Pulseaudio, DBus and a few others) is that Linux is loosing modularity.

All these dependencies seem to be getting more or less mandatory. Running a distribution without them is getting harder.

Given that they are all getting pushed by the same group of people at Red Hat, it is concerning as they are effectively gaining control of the Linux userland. And given that their architectural decisions are quite contentious and at odds with many Unix design principles, this is not good.

<comment><USER11> >they are effectively gaining control of the Linux userland.

but they aren't gaining control by some dastardly power grab, they're gaining control because they're the only ones actually putting in the work. They're simply doing what they think is best for their product, while at the same time contributing their work back to the open source world. That is good, that's how it's supposed to work.

The only reason they're gaining control is becuase the rest of the linux userbase has decided that although they might complain about Red Hat's work on hacker news and deride it as "not good", it's actually good enough that nobody wants to use any alternative projects to the ones red hat works on.

<comment><USER12> It seems like a lot of those projects just aren't interested in accepting pull-requests from outsiders.

If they were more willing to compromise and cooperate I don't think they'd catch nearly this much flac.

<comment><USER10> Exactly. And for much smaller organizations and individuals, it is much harder to organize an alternative effort to this set of projects backed up by a big corporation (Red Hat).

I only expect this to happen if Systemd and related efforts become really bothersome. Right now it is a big of a mixed situation. A better init system, and some modern basic userland infrastructure was needed. Systemd has brought some good things, but overall changes are concerning for the reasons outlined in my parent comment.

<comment><USER13> _Exactly. And for much smaller organizations and individuals, it is much harder to organize an alternative effort to this set of projects backed up by a big corporation (Red Hat)._

There are exceptions. Drew Devault and the rest of the Sway team did write wlroots, an alternative compositor for Wayland, so Wayland is less of a monoculture.

But it is true that it requires a lot of manpower, money, and will to develop an alternative to e.g. Wayland. However, I see the current situation more as the glass being half full. Imagine that we did not have Red Hat, and others pulling the weight of Wayland (and other technologies, such as Flatpak), the Linux desktop ecosystem would in many ways be hopelessly behind macOS, iOS, and Windows.

I think this is a better outcome than being stuck with 80ies/90ies graphics technology forever, even if it is not perfect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> One thing that a great majority of commenters here seem to be missing is that Wayland's issues that make it unsuitable to replace X Windows will not just be ironed out in a couple of years (at least not in a way that would be an improvement over X), because it is flawed by design.

The thing is, Wayland developers do not want you to take screenshots or automate input events (injection and interception). Those are both "power- user" and "accessibility" features. So respectively those who like to use the Unix (or other OS) programming environment to its full potential (hackers?), and the blind/visually impaired will have a hard time if Wayland gets forced on them.

It is possible to solve those problems with effort on a per-compositor basis (meaning less choice for users and more redundant programming effort - programs that interact with GUIs will need to have separate code for each compositor!), or with protocol extensions - that, of course, would not be universally accepted. For example, I think no compositor currently give a Wayland user the option to mess with input events (key presses, etc.). This means no hot-keys!

Quoting Red Hat: "Furthermore, there isn't a standard API for getting screen shots from Wayland. It's dependent on what compositor (window manager/shell) the user is running, and if they implemented a proprietary API to do so."

An interesting Reddit discussion: "It has been almost a decade, why does Wayland not have a protocol definition for screenshots?" \- answer - "Because security, dude! Wayland is designed with the thought that users download random applications from the interwebz which are not trustworthy and run them. Wayland actually makes a lot of sense if you don't think of Linux desktop distributions and desktop systems, but of smartphones. But for some reason we _absolutely need_ this technology on the desktop, like we had not enough pain and lose ends over here without it." [7]

See [1] [2]. And my previous comments on the same topic: [3] [4].

Another thing wrong with Wayland is that forced compositing means noticeably (in interactive applications) more latency.

 _Small nitpick regarding the blog post: Chromium depends on GTK3._

[1] [https://wiki.gnome.org/Accessibility/Wayland](https://wiki.gnome.org/Accessibility/Wayland)

[2] [https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Accessibility/Wayland/](https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Accessibility/Wayland/)

[3] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20310200](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20310200)

[4] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20308011](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20308011)

[7] [https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/7lb5l7/new_screensho...](https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/7lb5l7/new_screenshot_alternative_for_wayland/)

<comment><USER15> You cannot take screenshots with wayland??

<comment><USER16> Nope! Not unless your DE has implemented their own custom screenshot solution, and your screenshot program has Code to interface with that DE.

<comment><USER17> Don't throw such bullshit. Of course you can take screenshots, and no a screenshot program does not need to be adjusted for each DE.

The screenshot program only needs to interface with the org.freedesktop.portal.Screenshot api, which works on GNOME, KDE and wlroots.

<comment><USER18> The dbus screenshot API does not work on wlroots without a standalone bridge.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Maybe the death watch for the traditional Linux desktop has also started...

Linux distributions have had a decade long slide in their usability and polish. Much of this has been due to an abandonment of its historical UNIX roots in favour of half-baked "modern" replacements.

Being a UNIX replacement with a full X11 server and all the rest was what made it compelling and practical in the first place.

However, it's coming to the point where it's simply getting unusable. And I say this after using Linux on the desktop as my primary user and development environment for over 22 years at this point. If I want actual UNIX, I can run FreeBSD in a virtual machine, or even on the bare metal. Otherwise, I might as well resign myself to fate and use Windows with WSL or VMs for everything else. If I'm going to be forced to use something I dislike, it might as well be something that properly supports all my hardware and I can be productive with despite its annoyances.

<comment><USER20> I come from an environment where we have a reasonable number of Linux workstations; approaching 2000 in the company I work for, and more in the wider field.

> Being a UNIX replacement with a full X11 server and all the rest was what > made it compelling and practical in the first place.

Yes, here as well. We have big apps, small apps, legacy apps, remote apps, all doing real work.

For the enthusiast user base, who mainly live within the distribution's ecosystem, this sort of churn in the platform is exciting and interesting, or feels like progress. The platform is the end result.

For us, the platform is just that -- a platform on which sits a lot of vendor applications and custom tooling assembled over decades with its idiosyncrasies carefully accommodated.

This churn isn't good. Anything short of 100% compatibility is going to prompt a risky re-evaluation of what's out there on the market -- risky because Windows is in the strongest position, not Linux.

Linux is already in a weakened position than it once was as a workstation OS. My colleagues will be enticed by a Windows platform which has an emerging Linux compatibility; and a tried-and-tested build of most of the vendor-driven GUI applications and GPU drivers, too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I can't say it any better than JWZ did over 15 years ago. This is the result of the Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers model and is why Linux will not approach Windows or OSX in usability.

Cannot link to his site:

JWZ dot org /doc/cadt.html

A complete teardown and rebuild of the whole ecosystem (because X succccckkks) is fun! Making something backwards-compatible, or standardized, or polished that "last 90%" so it works on everybody's environment... is not.

<comment><USER22> The CADT development model is very real, but it's not really a good description of the Xorg situation. The most active Wayland developers are not only also Xorg developers but have been so for a very long time. They know their history.

X11 has some fundamental problems. It's not fun using a modern desktop where it is impossible to sandbox individual applications. Firefox frequently processes untrusted data and is run with a dedicated uid, but it is also an interactive application and can suddenly listen in on all my passwords entered in other applications. Virtualized appliations are referred to using dumber protocols like VNC and SPICE which isn't always ideal.

Wayland has some interesting design issues on its own but that doesn't make the developers ignorant. XWayland will stick around for the foreseeable future.

<comment><USER23> > The most active Wayland developers are not only also Xorg developers but > have been so for a very long time

Amusingly, I often hear this argument from Wayland proponents. Do they realize, that those very same developers have failed at maintaining Xorg code base and fixing it's bugs in backward compatible way?

To run a project into the ground and wash one's hands of it... is not worthy of endorsement.

<comment><USER22> It's important to know that there were once many implementations of X11. Xorg is the only one that _hasn 't_ failed. Everything else is unmaintained now.

This may be a matter of different perspective, but from my point of view the Xorg maintainers did a monumental work modularizing and cleaning up the codebase. They kept integrating modern extensions and have kept X11 relevant all this time. Try something pre-Xorg to compare.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> RIP

( I don't doubt for a minute that _someone_ will pick up the slack, but that makes me wonder, who's gonna pay for it? Would you contribute to e.g. a Kickstarter for X Windows? FWIW, I'm not sure I would, meaning no disrespect I've been hoping to ditch X for something better ever since Don Hopkins opened my eyes to NeWS, &c. )

So there's Wayland. What else? Arcan?

[https://arcan-fe.com/about/](https://arcan-fe.com/about/)

On HN: [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22arcan%22&sort=byPopularity&...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22arcan%22&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

> Arcan is a powerful development framework for creating virtually anything > between user interfaces for specialised embedded applications all the way to > full-blown standalone desktop environments. Boot splash screen? no problem. > Custom Interface for your Home Automation Project? sure thing. Stream media > processing? Of course.

> It has been used in a number of both experimental, hobby, academic research > and commerical projects and products alike, in areas ranging from VR > desktops to industrial computer vision systems for robotic automation.

> At its heart lies a robust and portable multimedia engine, with a well- > tested and well-documented interface, programmable using Lua. At every step > of the way, the underlying development emphasises security, performance and > debugability guided by a principle of least surprise in terms of API design.

<comment><USER25> Thank you, I hadn't heard of it before so I'll check it out!

I'm not optimistic about Wayland, since early on they decided not to use an extension language, and that's not something you can have a change of heart about later, and then just nail onto the side.

It would be interesting to see how Arcan uses L ua, which is a great language for that kind of stuff. It's a lot smaller and sleeker and better designed than JavaScript.

The Arcan developers should check out how Factorio modding works! (But then all work on Arcan would halt when for months while they were addicted to Factorio.)

[https://wiki.factorio.com/Modding](https://wiki.factorio.com/Modding)

Lua's main problem is that it isn't JavaScript (i.e. in JavaScript's enviably lucky position of ubiquitous dominance).

If I had a time machine, I'd go back and try to convince Netscape to use Lua 2.1 instead of inventing JavaScript (released December 4, 1995). And hire the Self guys (Dave Ungar, Randy Smith and the crew who eventually made the Java HotSpot compiler) away from Sun, and Mike Pall (LuaJIT) from wherever he was!

[https://www.lua.org/versions.html](https://www.lua.org/versions.html)

>Lua 2.1 was released on 07 Feb 1995. Its main new features were extensible semantics via fallbacks and support for object-oriented programming. This version was described in a journal paper. Starting with Lua 2.1, Lua became freely available for all purposes, including commercial uses.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12574290](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12574290)

[https://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/Charles/A-Conversation- with-...](https://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/Charles/A-Conversation-with-Bjarne- Stroustrup-Carl-Hewitt-and-Dave-Ungar)

<comment><USER26> I get paid to work on Arcan so I don't think factorio would have that big of an impact ;-)

The initial choice of Lua for Arcan was based on its use, at the time (2004-2005ish), in World of Warcraft. The UIs that people were hacking together in WoW even with little to no serious programming experience was way more advanced than what would ever be needed for desktop interfaces so it seemed like a good fit. Even for other projects, Lua is still my goto "safe" keyword for C.

There are more interesting properties though, especially how the VM- bindings integrate with C. Stay away from using too much metatable magic etc. and what you get is an ok "protocol+binding" in one. Substitute the stack for socket read/write, add an identifier to function translation and you can chose between in-process or stronger separation. The reality is slightly more involved, but not by much.

<comment><USER25> Don't be so sure you won't miss work if you haven't yet tried Factorio! ;)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20362179](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20362179)

WoW was what convinced me how practical and powerful Lua really was, too. And that there were people out there that knew how to program it really well.

The WoW "Auctioneer" mod in particular was quite advanced and elegantly written. It would analyze the prices of items in the auction house over time, and help you price and sell your own items competitively. Not just lots of fancy user interface, but some respectable data wrangling and number crunching too.

One important thing about Lua is how cleanly and efficiently it integrates with C code. TCL/Tk also has this virtue, but TCL was a terribly designed (but brilliantly implemented) programming language. While both Lua's design and implementation are quite excellent. It also has a great community, plus RMS never declared a holy war on it, either!

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14944103](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14944103)

[https://vanderburg.org/old_pages/Tcl/war/0000.html](https://vanderburg.org/old_pages/Tcl/war/0000.html)

<comment><USER27> > TCL was a terribly designed (but brilliantly implemented) programming > language.

What do you dislike about Tcl? I always kinda liked it.

> While both Lua's design and implementation are quite excellent.

The implementation is pretty good, but 1-based arrays are pretty evil. I don't know if I like the way arrays & tables are conflated either: part of me thinks it's clever, and part thinks that it's too clever by half.

It's also pretty verbose.

Something I like about both Tcl & Lisp is that they have a good built-in messaging format (Tcl object notation in the former, and S-expressions in the latter). Lua doesn't really have something similar, which is IMHO unfortunate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I'm really not very sad to see X go. It was old, creaky and insecure. As advanced and cool as it may have been at one time, and as much as I respect the people who worked on it, it's time for it to go.

As for the people complaining about Wayland possibly missing some of X's features, remember that it takes time for something to mature, to accrete features and fixes, and Wayland hasn't had that time yet. If we give it the time and support it could and almost definitely will grow into something even better than X. We can't stay on X forever without incurring even worse results on ourselves than what we'll get when we switch to Wayland.

And another thing. For the people who complain about Wayland in the same breath as PulseAudio and SystemD: this tells is much more about you than about these projects. The only thing Wayland has in common with the other two is that it's new, and that you don't like it. It's more modular and more UNIXy and more open than X, arguably.

<comment><USER29> > As for the people complaining about Wayland possibly missing some of X's > features, remember that it takes time for something to mature, to accrete > features and fixes, and Wayland hasn't had that time yet.

It has been a decade, precisely how long does it need to catch up? I ask because from what I can tell it is still missing features that were standard in Windows Vista in 2008, when that OS switched to DWM and WDDM.

<comment><USER28> If you're talking about screen recording and screenshots, fair point, except that that lack is a result of designing for security.

<comment><USER30> Hum, you can as well reach perfect security by keeping your computer powered off.

<comment><USER28> Haha! Yeah, that's true.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Is there any plan by Wayland to incorporate ssh forwarding? Last I heard it wasn't in the cards, and I think that feature is useful enough; it's probably the only feature I really would miss.

<comment><USER32> I see this a lot and now I need to ask: do you actually use it and find it usable?

Every time I've tried it, it was plagued with problems (fonts, HiDPI issues, different environments) and horrible performance. I mostly had to resort back to NX, which is okish, but not better at all than Windows' RDP or better VNC solutions. So what's the big draw here?

<comment><USER33> It was pretty great when I was a university student using X forwarding within the campus network between my dorm and the CS department (in either direction). Certainly not as fast as local, but extremely usable when not trying to do graphics-centric things. (Even using Eclipse was viable.)

Your mileage may vary by use case and bandwidth, especially over the public internet. But if someone has a similar use case to mine in 2019, it's still probably usable.

<comment><USER34> Even if it's usable, it's probably not a good idea. X windows are not rendered by the server anymore. The client (i.e. the application) renders them and just transmits a full pixmap to the server. Depending on the redraw strategy, you could have a worst-case scenario where 60 frames per second of the entire window are transmitted completely uncompressed (except for the compression that SSH applies). You'll be sailing much more efficiently by using a VNC client.

<comment><USER35> To be pedantic, this is true with "modern" toolkits (like, this cemtury). Applications using Motif or Xt or anything similarly ancient still do server side drawing and they absolutely shine with todays network latency and speed. But most applications moved on from.these toolkits, with good reason.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I'm totally not impressed with the so-called "successor" to X... Wayland.

It _might_ be unrelated, but I just upgraded to F30 and I'm seeing all sorts of weird graphics / screen drawing related bugs using Wayland. And while it looks like somebody is finally making some meaningful headway on a remoting story for Wayland, it's _still_ not truly on par with X in this regard.

So sure, kill X... but we should probably have a replacement that actually works, first.

</comment><comment><USER37> While I appreciate having choices _at some levels_ , for infrastructure it's always good to have everyone agreed. Desktop Linux has been held back by the X11/replacement situation for years (there, I'll say it), and the sooner we can all get (back) on the same page, at least for this one piece, the better.

Many open-source communities are run by perfectionists (and I must count myself among the worst of them). While it's a noble goal to create a gem that will stand the test of time, it's disheartening to see proprietary products move faster by making a decision, even a lousy one, and then shipping it and making it work.

</comment><comment><USER38> Omae wa mou shindeiru.

If the future of X is uncertain, then X is already dead. No one wants to base their OS on something without a clear maintenance and development roadmap.

<comment><USER39> Except for those who pave the way. Not all OSes are products.

<comment><USER40> I'm not sure that use of X11 could be considered "paving the way"

<comment><USER41> I think they might have meant "pave _their_ way". Like they said, not all OS's are products and some people have specific use cases in which X11 is the only viable option, whether that's personal or experimental.

I wouldn't know what those use cases might be. That's just my interpretation of the comment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Back to the drawing board!

Methodology of Window Management

F R A Hopgood, D A Duce, E V C Fielding, K Robinson, A S Williams

29 April 1985

This is the Proceedings of the Alvey Workshop at Cosener's House, Abingdon that took place from 29 April 1985 until 1 May 1985. It was input into the planning for the MMI part of the Alvey Programme.

The Proceedings were later published by Springer-Verlag in 1986.

[http://www.chilton- computing.org.uk/inf/literature/books/wm/...](http://www.chilton- computing.org.uk/inf/literature/books/wm/preface.htm)

</comment><comment><USER42> I'm also a heavy user of an X-only window manager (xmonad). Learning about this makes me wonder if I should start learning how to work with another window manager so I'm not caught off guard when something stops working.

<comment><USER43> Do you know about Waymonad? It's supposedly Xmonad for Wayland and uses wlroots like sway.

<comment><USER42> I've heard of it, not sure how mature it is these days. Maybe I'll give it another look

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> My take home from this thread now with a few weeks to reflect is that if we want a real window manager that is maintained, then it will have to be a community effort. This will be hard because training an involvement with x11 has been left entirely to Red Hat too long. It will be a lot of work and money to transfer knowledge from the few who do know it.

With this in mind, are there other projects that are at risk due to stewardship by a single corporation? How can we prevent this in the future?

<comment> iso-8859-1 > How can we prevent this in the future?

Software is dependent on hardware. If the hardware changes, as it did since X11 was invented, the software stack has to change too. You cannot prevent progress in technology.

Xorg is in a better state now that it has ever been. Therefore it makes no sense to consider Red Hat some villain that adopted Xorg and ruined it. And had Red Hat not been there, Wayland would still have been invented.

Xorg developers switched to Wayland. Why? Because they know it is the future. There is no need to train Xorg developers.

<comment><USER44> To be clear, I am not in any way faulting RH for this, the excellent state of X11 is indeed due almost entirely to their technical and financial support. This should be celebrated.

My point is that having such support can lead the community to assume that such support will always be there an neglect the need to maintain a robust multi-party collaboration around such vital projects.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Slightly off-topic, but is anyone here using Wayland with a touchpad?

The last time I tried libinput, the behavior was horrendous compared to a synaptics.

2 finger scrolling had a ~2mm threshold before it activated and wouldn't compensate for the lost distance once the scroll started, making it feel very unnatural.

I couldn't find an option to enable true palm detection either. There was an option to disable the touchpad for a fixed time every time the keyboard was used, which is abysmal compared to how it works normally (ignoring taps and drags if they start too close to an edge).

It's hard to believe that this is the current state of things, but I did search for a way to set it up with no success. Is there a way to get those to work?

<comment><USER46> I've been using Ubuntu with Gnome on Wayland for the past year or so on my Dell XPS 13.

I actually ended up switching to Wayland, because of how much better the touchpad worked with it. To be fair though, Dell has an entire team dedicated to supporting the XPS 13 Developer Edition, so the drivers are highly curated compared to most devices.

<comment><USER45> My experience was on an XPS 9570, not sure if there's a large gap in driver / support.

Out of the box synaptics was pretty bad, but after tuning the palm detection zone size and a couple timings (long press, etc) it feels amazing. When I don't have to test convoluted UIs, I can go days without plugging the mouse.

Don't you have the small "lag" when two fingers scrolling?

<comment><USER46> I've been super happy with the touch pads performance out of the box, I literally haven't modified any settings related to it.

Are you referring to this bug[1] in Chromium? I think these are growing pains associated with transitioning to Wayland, but this really doesn't bother me too much. I will say that the scrolling is otherwise very smooth and almost perfectly everywhere else in the UX.

[1][https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=712737](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=712737)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> I hope they manage to standardize the majority of protocols. Last time I've checked GNOME wasn't happy but the other projects were, surprisingly, cooperating heavily.

There are very interesting projects using Wayland. [https://github.com/search?o=desc&q=wayland&s=updated&type=Re...](https://github.com/search?o=desc&q=wayland&s=updated&type=Repositories)

</comment><comment><USER48> _" Why I'm not going to switch to Wayland yet"_[1] argues that:

"for simple things using the compositor's screen shot tool is fine. But what if I don't like the screenshot tool for my compositor of choice? My experience with the GNOME screenshot tool (granted this was pre-wayland) was that it wasn't as good as, say, shutter, which has a lot of options, let's you easily crop and edit the screenshot from inside the screenshot tool etc. And then swaygrab doesn't even (currently) have an option to capture a rectangular region."

There are some other things this article mentions which are important to me, like Wayland's lack of color picker tools and xdotool functionality.

Wayland seems just way too immature for me to use for now. X works great, does everything I want, and I see no compelling reason to switch.

[1] - [https://old.reddit.com/r/wayland/comments/85q78y/why_im_not_...](https://old.reddit.com/r/wayland/comments/85q78y/why_im_not_going_to_switch_to_wayland_yet/)

<comment><USER34> The wlroots developers are working on protocol extensions to make stuff like screen grabbing work consistently across WMs: [https://github.com/swaywm/wlr- protocols](https://github.com/swaywm/wlr-protocols)

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> So what are the BSDs planning on doing? Do OpenBSD/FreeBSD just plan on maintaining their own forks of Xorg, or are there plans to try and port Wayland to these operating systems as well?

<comment><USER50> FreeBSD user too, I'd like to know that as well. Not going to lay blame on RedHat for doing what is in their own best interest, but do find it troubling that the *nix world has had a major piece of software made redundant on the decision of one company/maintainer.

As an end user my perspective, perhaps incorrect, is that since the late 90s development of application and system software has become increasingly siloed with less diverse views and the involvement of fewer stake holders.

I suppose that would happen based on math alone (more linux end users with no interest beyond a working web browser) but I worry where that path might lead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> A tad concerned about this because my system still heavily relies on X and there really isn't an alternative for my applications (yet). Wayland isn't supported for many applications.

<comment><USER52> Does XWayland not solve your issues? It's a pretty good (seamless) compatibility layer. Of course, it still involves running an X server, but applications can switch to Wayland one at a time and you can use both simultaneously.

<comment><USER17> Imho XWayland is "too good". There's little incentive for software like Chrome to port over to Wayland if it runs on it seamlessly via a compatibility layer.

<comment> the-rc Nitpick: Chrome, or at least ChromeOS, already uses Wayland, in order to run Android and Linux apps.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Are there any major x11 features that wayland lacks other than remote operation over a network? I think at one point it locked the refresh rate to 60hz, has that been changed?

<comment><USER54> HiDPI. It's somewhat unusual for a top end laptop to have 1920x1080 screens these days, and Wayland doesn't support 4k very well. You can upscale, but it looks like garbage, or it has a 2x mode, which draws image and such slightly too large, or you can deal with everything being tiny.

For gaming, the latency is bad and always on vsync is horrible. They've fixed the 60Hz lock though, fortunately. This only applies to gaming though.

My primary issue with Wayland isn't quite so much that it lacks these things, it's that they seem to be of the opinion that there's only one way to do things, and any other use of the visual display system is wrong. I just have this weirdly oppressive feeling about my inability to configure it the way I want it, the same feeling I get from using Windows. Just... let me be me. I get that this is a non-technical complaint, and that it ultimately boils down to "it gives me the heebie jeebies" which isn't an argument, but it's still how I feel about it.

<comment><USER3> A lot of what you're saying seems due to a particular Wayland compositor, not to Wayland.

<comment><USER55> That is the problem right? Whenever there is a functionality that you could get with X11 by tweaking configurations files you have to write you own complete new Display Server in Wayland to have that functionality.

This is especially true for people that prefer low latency over tear-free rendering.

<comment><USER34> I don't get this thread. On one hand, people complain (wrongly) about Wayland being too monolithic. Now, people complain about there being competing Wayland implementations with different feature sets. What's it gonna be, guys?

<comment><USER56> Those complaints aren't actually opposed but perfectly complement each other.

Wayland requires* everything to be monolithically built into the display server (which is also the window manager), which means if I want to use a new WM (say, XMonad) I need to reimplement all of this stuff. Want screenshots? Build it into your WM! Want redshift? Build it into your WM! The result is that development effort will be wasted reimplementing "competing Wayland implementations" stuff that no-one actually wants.

Compare X11, where I could run an Xorg server together with any of a number of lightweight window managers, and the window manager is _only_ responsible for, y'know, managing windows, and determining how the window decorations look. Xorg handles everything else, allowing a robust marketplace of competing WMs to arise.

* Unless/until they finally give in and standardise protocol extensions for out of process window managers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Can Wayland currently handle several monitors with different DPI? And by "handle" I mean, being able to resize (blurry, I know) windows that are not DPI-aware transparently when I move them between monitors. What Windows has been able to do for years now.

<comment><USER52> It's not Wayland's job, as I understand. GTK3 does it, I think Qt does it, and I'm not sure about anything else. Firefox has issues with menu positioning but works fine. Because X11 applications still talk using the X protocol to XWayland, which doesn't handle DPI scaling, there's no guarantee of it working.

<comment><USER57> Applications (and their toolkits) should be able to signal to Wayland whether they can handle DPI scaling or not, and if they can't, Wayland should forcibly resize the windows (ie paint them bigger) like Windows does.

If something as basic as this doesn't work...

<comment> iso-8859-1 Do you realize that Wayland is a protocol and it involves a compositor (which is NOT called Wayland)?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> I'm all for switching to Wayland session, but it has a long way to go to become usable.

The biggest issues for me:

* KWin still has major bugs like flickering windows due to broken subsurfaces clipping.

* No Wayland compositors support adaptive sync yet and according to KWin developers it will take "several years to arrive".

* No support for drawing tablets (Wacom).

So all this "X11 is dead" is way premature, as much as I want Wayland to take its place.

</comment><comment><USER59> How many of these Xorg developers are the original people who made X11R3 in the mid 1980's?

Somehow X didn't die without those people.

<comment><USER60> Keith Packard is the only one AFAIK.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> One of the comments on the article ( [https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/XDeathwatchSta...](https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/XDeathwatchStarts?showcomments#comments) ) is also possibly of interest, suggesting possible technical routes for using existing windows managers on Wayland:

> There is XWayland, and apparently it will support handling the root window, > not just application windows:

        https://wayland.freedesktop.org/xserver.html

> The missing piece of the puzzle is Xweston, which apparently allows you to > run window managers for X on Wayland:

        https://github.com/ackalker/Xweston

> or maybe xwlnest will work better:

        https://github.com/gschwind/xwlnest

<comment><USER38> Again -- XWayland _is_ Xorg. The xorg-server codebase contains a number of components, one of which is a front end called DIX (Device Independent X) that handles protocol-level stuff, another of which are several backends collectively called DDX (Device Dependent X) that handle drawing to the actual video hardware or other graphics layer. One of these DDX backends is 'xwayland'. So the XWayland server incorporates the entire Xorg server code base except for the hardware-specific back ends. And so if Xorg languishes unmaintained... well, sucks to be an XWayland user.

So your best bet is to commit now to switching, entirely, to Wayland. The aim is to get everyone off of X altogether as quickly as possible, and then stop shipping X (including XWayland) altogether.

<comment><USER61> >> So the XWayland server incorporates the entire Xorg server code base except for the hardware-specific back ends.

Well doesn't that mean XWayland will be easy to maintain since it has no hardware dependencies? X can completely stagnate so long as the Wayland back- end is kept up to date with any changes there - and no, people don't want to be changing Wayland protocols because every compositor would have to be updated. I think XWayland will be around for a while yet, but I'd rather have things run native Wayland.

<comment><USER38> Ostensibly, yes, but that would clash with the official narrative ("X is broken and bloated and needs to be deprecated"). If they can maintain Xwayland indefinitely, they can maintain a stub DDX that works with kms indefinitely also. What they are telling us is that they want to get rid of the entire thing. Pointing out that Xwayland would be relatively easy to maintain would be stating the emperor has no clothes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> Having the Lindy effect [1] in mind, I would not be too pessimistic about an early decay of this proven (albeit imperfect) technology.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect)

</comment><comment><USER63> I seek to be enlightened, not to flame: what exactly is so wrong with X that it can be retrofit to work better? Wayland is taking a while, which is expected sure, but for now, X works fine although with issues.

<comment><USER5> The design assumptions that went into making X were made before the modern computer or Linux existed.

Modern X is a Frankensteinian collection fixes upon fixes and unmaintained code.

<comment><USER64> You didn't actually answer the OP's question. There is nothing Wayland does that could not have been done via the X11 extension mechanism. X has already been reinvented several times --- few things use the core protocol nowadays, after all! For example, XRender for text is now universal.

The thing that's different about Wayland is that for reasons that nobody ever explains clearly at a technical level, _this_ time, a few influential people created a new and (IMHO, inferior) protocol instead of continuing to use the X extension mechanism.

Security? Isolate the X session data to individual client connections. Buffer management? Do it like GLX does. Want server-side decorations for some reason? What's stopping you? Sure, ICCCM isn't trivial, but it exists, and it's flexible.

<comment><USER65> Apple evaluated X11 when they were just starting work on Mac OS X.

This comment by Mike Paquette (designer and author of Quartz!) explains why it was better to dump X11 and start over:

"> they don't even use X at all!

What Apple is providing is an Apple-original window system that is graphics model agnostic, as well as a vector drawing system that maps very well to PDF, which is a sort of PostScript without the non-graphical operators. This is packaged under the name 'Quartz' for easy reference by Marketing types.

The window system is designed to support both buffered (like an offscreen PixMap) and unbuffered windows, and is graphics model agnostic, working equally well with QuickDraw, OpenGL, the Quartz drawing engine, X11, and third party solutions, and managing window geometry for the Classic, Carbon, and Cocoa environments. The server portion is a hybridization of screen arbiter and compositor models (and if that's all Geek to you, don't worry about it).

The Quartz drawing engine supports drawing primitives similar to the graphics primitives that might be found in the DPSClient single-operator primitives library for X and NeXTSTEP. There are no math and flow control primitives, as these can be done more efficiently in the native compiled code. There are no DPS or PS wrappers, as this optimization for server-side graphics is not needed in the Quartz client-side graphics model.

The operations provide imaging and path construction and filling operations as well as some interesting other bits that map well into the direction that 2D drawing is headed. (See Longhorn, or the X raster projects.) The drawing engine can output to rasters (like a window!), as well as PS and PDF streams to feed printers. The Mac OS X printing system takes advantage of the capabilities of Quartz to support all sorts of printers, and make the life of printer driver developers much, much easier.

Things we'd need to add/extend in X Window software (protocol+server+manager+fonts+...):

1) Extend font server and services to vend outlines and antialiased masks, support more font types, handle font subsetting. 2) Extend drawing primitives to include PS-like path operations. 3) Add dithering and phase controls. 4) Add ColorSync support for drawing and imaging operations, display calibration 5) Add broad alpha channel support and Porter-Duff compositing, both for drawing in a window and for interactions between windows. 6) Add support for general affine transforms of windows 7) Add support for mesh-warps of windows 8) Make sure that OpenGL and special video playback hardware support is integrated, and behaves well with all above changes. 9) We find that we typically stream 200 Mb/sec of commands and textures for interactive OpenGL use, so transport efficiency could be an issue.

So, yes, it looks like we can use X for Quartz. All we need do is define extensions for and upgrade the font server, add dithering with phase controls to the X marking engine, add a transparency model to X imaging with Porter- Duff compositing support, make sure GLX gets in, upgrade the window buffering to include transparency, mesh warps, and really good resampling, and maybe augment the transport layer a bit.

Ummm... There doesn't appear to be much code left from the original X server in the drawing path or windowing machinery, and it doesn't appear that apps relying on these extensions can work with any other X server. Just what did we gain from this?

Oh, yeah. My mom can run an xterm session on her desktop now without downloading the Apple X11 package, a shareware X server or buying a software package.

Been there, evaluated that."

[https://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=75257&cid=67...](https://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=75257&cid=6734612)

<comment><USER64> That comment _is my point_. Those things that the Apple guy mentions having to add to X _were in fact_ added to X. They're called XRender. There's no reason we couldn't have added more extensions.

Nobody has given me a straight answer for why Wayland-style buffer management couldn't have been an X11 extension. Nobody.

<comment><USER65> I think the more pressing question is, what's wrong with supporting all these legacy X11 apps with XWayland?

Who cares about xeyes, xterm and twm? I sure don't, at least not when it comes at the expense of maintainers that have better things to do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> I'll miss x11vnc which is currently the only way on linux (afaik) to have a network connected monitor and between which I can seamlessly move my windows.

</comment><comment><USER67> I don't really like Wayland, and I think X is better. There are some problems with X, and I made some ideas how to fix it, including getting rid of a lot of the extensions of the X protocol, but making now XBell is like XkbBell instead, moving many things out of the protocol, and also some other stuff.

</comment><comment><USER68> Sway has become one of my favorite pieces of software. The only issue is that Sway or Wayland seems to have trouble implementing an easy to use redshift/nightlight. Based on my research into eye strain and talking to my optometrist I keep redshift on 24/7 and I can't go back.

<comment><USER69> If you call redshift before calling sway, it works for me. I have it always on and just give it a value.

redshift -m drm -PO 3000

sway

<comment><USER70> Wayland was meant to fix stuff, and there are already hacks to make it work with certain scenarios people had been relying on for years.

It'll end up becoming just as convoluted as X and I don't understand why the devs don't see this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> Can we record the screen or take screenshots yet? If not, Wayland is DOA.

<comment><USER72> [https://github.com/emersion/grim](https://github.com/emersion/grim)

<comment><USER14> I think that depends on a protocol that only Sway (the compositor) implements.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> I would die a happy man, if I never had to open an xorg.config again.

<comment><USER74> Recent releases encourage you to remove xorg.conf altogether and let it figure out the config itself. Works pretty well from what I have seen.

<comment><USER75> I must add "recent" here means more than 10 years. Last release that required an xorg.conf file was released in 2006 or 2007?

<comment><USER73> Id din't know that Sometime ago I was trying to make an old nvidia video card work with my pc in With Fedora. One of the instructions was to open the xorg. change the drive to replace the noveau drive, or something like that. I think it wasant't even 2 years ago.

Then I just installed ubuntu and isntalled with apt-get install nvidia- wathever-version. And worked like a charm for me.

<comment><USER75> When you need to configuration, best practice is to put only the necessary configuration in a configuration snippet inside /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/ without creating a full xorg.conf file.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER76> I intend my next PC build to last ten years, like my last one has. I will be including an AMD GPU, because I don't want to be left high and dry by NVIDIA when Wayland takes off.

</comment><comment><USER77> It's still not possible to remap mouse buttons for most applications under Wayland and libinput is allergic to adding features.

</comment><comment><USER78> RHEL 8.8 will be released in 2023Q4, so I suspect RedHat will continue to maintain the code at least until then.

</comment><comment><USER79> There's a lot that xwundows can do that it'll take many years for anything else to catch up to.

</comment><comment><USER80> So long and thanks for all the fish. I even think X's death came late in the game

Not that it's bad per se, but it was created at a different time, for a very different use case than modern desktop computers

While there's a love for the "true Unix way", I think X is one where this is embodied the least

</comment><comment><USER81> So is there a timeline for when the RHEL8 lifecycle will end?

<comment><USER82> The normal support period for a RHEL release is 10 years. RHEL8 came out earlier this year.

</comment></comment><comment><USER83> that sucks for me I guess, or for me using linux as desktop since I have nvidia ah well

</comment><comment><USER84> You mean the nights watch

</comment><comment><USER85> So, RedHat decided that they do not want nvidia users anymore? I'd be more than happy to switch to Wayland, but I can't.

<comment><USER86> GNOME, which is what powers the RedHat desktop, supports nvidia on Wayland just fine, and KDE got nvidia/EGLStreams support since KWin 5.16. So at least 2 major DEs do, though quite a few others don't, and have taken a principled stand not to (Sway for example won't).

When it comes to RedHat though, they're all-in on GNOME anyway so keeping X around for nvidia users isn't really a concern for them when their desktop experience supports nvidia on Wayland just fine.

<comment><USER85> No, just checked it with the latest Fedora 30, it defaults to X when it detects an Nvidia card.

<comment><USER86> Just b/c it defaults to X does not mean it doesn't work or isn't supported on Wayland.

<comment><USER85> It defaults to X, because it works very poorly with Wayland. Until very recently, it was impossible to run Gnome with Wayland at all (even though it theoretically supported Eglstreams), as there were many kernel errors generated by gnome-shell, etc. Now it sort of works, however, lags and freezes make it completely unusable in most cases. I am testing it every Fedora release. It _is_ possible to use Gnome with Wayland, I managed to get it working with Arch Linux once. However, it took me 4 days, manual patches (literally editing the WM code myself to fix some issues as suggested by the community) to get the configuration right, and the next rolling Arch update broke it beyond repair.

Again, I am not against Wayland. Wayland API is beautiful and I want it adapted more and sooner. It is just sad that me and many other users are not getting it. Developers blame Nvidia, because they do not open source their driver (which is a valid concern), however, there are many other binary blob drivers in mainstream Linux kernel, and everybody except hardcore open source apologists are OK with that. Why Nvidia is different, I don't understand.

<comment><USER86> Developers don't blame nvidia b/c they don't want to open source their driver. They blame nvidia for insisting on others shouldering the tech debt of EGLStreams (a closed, proprietary nvidia-only solution with no documentation whose implementation can't easily be tested and verified by compositor authors) instead of enabling the use of GBM with their drivers like every other Linux graphics driver. nvidia doesn't have to open up their drivers for that, AMD's closed source driver (so not the Mesa stack), supports GBM just fine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER87> This is troublesome, and it feels like "progress" for the sake of "progress" rather than actual improvements. The X Window System is time-tested technology, while Wayland, from what I've seen and read, is not.

This isn't a good thing to me, especially considering NVIDIA hardware doesn't seem to be well supported. Someone come along and correct me, please.

<comment><USER3> X11 is a pile of hacks. Have you ever tried to read the source code? When the X11 devs design a new system and stop maintaining X11, it's likely that X11 is not in a good shape.

>This isn't a good thing to me, especially considering NVIDIA hardware doesn't seem to be well supported. Someone come along and correct me, please.

It's the other way around: NVIDIA doesn't support GBM, the standard for buffer allocation.

<comment><USER55> How about cleaning up the mess.

The most "mess" is coming from old graphics hardware drivers, a task that is now managed by the kernel.

Besides, the "mess" performs better than Wayland in many use cases thanks to DRI3.</comment></comment></comment>


The Unbelievable Skepticism of the Amazing Randi - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/09/magazine/the-unbelievable-skepticism-of-the-amazing-randi.html <comment><USER2> >he hates to see them lose, he said. "They're always rationalizing," Randi told me as we walked to dinner at the casino steakhouse. "There are always reasons prevailing why they can't do it. They call it the resilience of the duped. It's with intense regret that you watch them go down the tubes."

It's nice to see that Randi is still able to see these people as human beings, rather than charlatans to be disproved. I was a big fan of his back when I was reading a lot of Ayn Rand and preaching Reason as the only god, and I took a sort of smug pleasure in watching him debunk psychics and mystics. But I realize now that that was just another form of dehumanization.

On an unrelated note, I recall an interview where Randi said he never took drugs because he sought to experience "the realest reality." That strikes me as very odd. Surely hallucinations are a part of reality, albeit a highly subjective part. I'm surprised that someone so involved with the paranormal would have no interest in studying the psychedelic experience.

<comment><USER3>
      I was a big fan of his back when I was reading a lot of Ayn
      Rand and preaching Reason as the only god

Could you share how you've come to see things differently than through the lens of reason, since then?

What triggered that change?

At the risk of sounding critical, I want to know how individuals consciously depart from their reason-driven worldviews to something driven by another agent. Emotion perhaps?

Please elaborate.

<comment><USER4> He started "Reason" with uppercase R and used verb "preaching", this means that he probably tried to express some sort of irony and he doesn't really consider Ayn Rand's worldview "reason-driven".

<comment><USER3> I am neither a detractor of Ayn Rand's worldview nor do I think her views are exclusively molded by reason.

In fact, if anything, I think Reason ( or reason ) - as in the opposite of emotion and sentiment-driven - is a very good instrument to deal with the problems of the world.

It imbues a dose of balance to our thoughts and actions, both of which are sadly lacking in the highly emotion-driven decision-making of the modern world.

We are as much creatures of emotion now, as we have ever been.

Reason does not inform our decision making, as much as it should.

<comment><USER5> Rand's reason is reason in name only.

Pretentious naming is something it has the dubious honor of sharing with something for example Scientology ("but .. we're not a religion, it's all scientifical!" was what they started out with).

There are parallels in everything from geopolitics to literature: If you feel the need to be extra explicit about your name, it's should be a pretty big warning to everyone that there are issues with it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> To anyone interested in reading more about skepticism, Carl Sagan's _Demon- Haunted World_ is one of the most impactful books I've read on the subject.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demon- Haunted_World](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demon-Haunted_World)

</comment><comment><USER7> I think Randi has probably done incredible good in the world. Getting rid of ignorance is thankless work.

<comment><USER8> I like Randi and I went to see his presentation when he came to my college campus years ago. I've never felt in much danger from the types of spoon- benders and various charlatans he targets, though. Maybe I'm just naive, but somehow I can't imagine those types of folks gaining an appreciable number of followers, even if never formally debunked.

Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of successful charlatans and frauds out there. But those ones aren't fools. It's those that worry me.

<comment><USER9> GMO food is effectively forbidden in Europe, even though the scientific consensus is that GMO crops are no more dangerous than non-GMO crops. The politicians just don't listen to the scientists.

<comment><USER10> While I agree that GMO crops are no more dangerous from a human health perspective, there is a very real concern that the rapid introduction of entirely new varieties of crop, that under cultivation would take hundreds or thousands of years to develop and introduce, can have negative and unforeseen ecological effects.

This more reasonable side of the anti-GMO argument tends to get drowned out and dismissed when people see the pseudoscience 'natural' health arguments brought out front and center. It's pretty evident that arguments for restraint for reasons of long-term sustainability take a lot of effort to get any traction, especially when fighting profitability.

All this to say, the GMO debate, like everything in life, is not as simple as most people tend believe. It is something that should be proceeded with caution, but certainly continued. This I think is where I think the almost religious anti-GMO fervor really causes harm, in the same way anti embryonic stem cell research causes harm.

Move fast and break things is a great slogan when the systems you're moving are relatively simple and the consequences of breaking them are relatively minor. Global ecology is an extraordinarily complex system that we don't fully understand, and breaking it can cause real and life threatening damage to the people of the world. Not to mention the fact that reverting negative changes operates on the same time scale as the original negative change. If it happens that GMO breaks shit, you can't just submit a patch and have things working again in a couple hours.

<comment><USER9> > there is a very real concern

Also e.g. anti-vaccine people have very real concerns. They just are not scientifically founded.

Here is a summary report on 10 years, 200 million euros of research in Europe:

 _" The main conclusion to be drawn from the efforts of more than 130 research projects, covering a period of more than 25 years of research, and involving more than 500 independent research groups, is that biotechnology, and in particular GMOs, are not per se more risky than e.g. conventional plant breeding technologies."_

ref.: A decade of EU-funded GMO research (2001 - 2010) [http://ec.europa.eu/research/biosociety/pdf/a_decade_of_eu-f...](http://ec.europa.eu/research/biosociety/pdf/a_decade_of_eu- funded_gmo_research.pdf)

Can you give any scientific references to support your "very real" concern?

<comment><USER5> > Also e.g. anti-vaccine people have very real concerns. They just are not > scientifically founded.

They also have some very real concerns. It makes it all very complex to weed out who what to listen for and from who. The answer is probably that you should listen to arguments, not persons, and that you should begin with the arguments you find strongest.

(See for example Ben Goldacre's Bad Pharma about medicine research.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It makes me so happy to see him getting this deserved attention while he's still around to enjoy it. 20-odd years ago I was lucky enough to see him perform and speak and he was indeed amazing.

For those who want to know more about him, there's a recent documentary out: [http://anhonestliar.com/wp/](http://anhonestliar.com/wp/)

It's a great example to me of how Kickstarter can really work. I was happy to help fund it. They raised circa $100k over the goal, and I'm sure that's because there were a lot of Randi fans like me who were happy to chip in. [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/220588101/an-honest- lia...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/220588101/an-honest-liar-the- amazing-randi-story)

</comment><comment><USER12> In case some of you don't know it his foundation YouTube channel is really good: [http://www.youtube.com/user/JamesRandiFoundation](http://www.youtube.com/user/JamesRandiFoundation)

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm surprised they didn't mention it in the article but BBC just released a great doc about Randi. It covers all the same stuff in this article but goes into a lot more detail, showing many of his confrontations with Geller, Popoff, etc.

Stream here: [http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b04ndsb3/storyville-201...](http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b04ndsb3/storyville-20142015-8-exposed- magicians-psychics-and-frauds) (UK only but the tech savvy reader may be able to find it elsewhere)

</comment><comment><USER14> That NYT article is a put-down. "Unbelievable Skepticism"? No. Believable checking. Calling bullshit on phonies. Somebody has to do it.

<comment><USER15> It's just a reference to the style in which roadside attractions, circus show performers, and fortune tellers are billed. The Amazing Randi was the man's stage name so it comes together for a clever title.

<comment><USER16> I see the cleverness in the title; I also see that it's most obvious, and literal, interpretation is one of putting down his skepticism. Before reading the article, I thought it was going to be about how James Randi is too skeptical.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I wonder if most people (both sceptics and believers alike) are more eager to confirm their existing beliefs, than finding the truth?

<comment><USER18> That's a known failure mode of the human mind. It's common to everyone.

The asymmetry comes from the fact only skeptics have the tools to demolish beliefs. Believers, by definition, can only cling to them; once they try to test them and are willing to relinquish them, they become skeptics.</comment></comment>


How We Can Convince Apple to Allow Flash on The iPhone/iPad - <AUTHOR> http://curtisp.com/Article.aspx?blist_id=5c8c1438dd&cat=iPhone,iPad I just had this crazy notion that would ultimately revolutionize a protest  for Apple to allow Flash content on their mobile devices http://curtisp.com/Article.aspx?blist_id=5c8c1438dd&cat=iPhone,iPad <comment><USER2> It helps to understand that the exclusion of Flash from the iPhone OS -- while arbitrary -- is reasoned, even if you don't agree with it.

Many argue that Flash is unstable. To be sure, most of this is anecdotal at this point, but I think that's true. For a device that emphasises browsing, stability while doing so is a must. If mobile Safari crashes, Apple cop the blame. So that's the first reason for excluding it.

It is slow. It's a battery hog. Simple as that. It's completely unsuited to mobile devices.

So think about it, given those reasons, how would a boycott help? From their point of view you're asking them to make the browsing experience worse. What needs to be done to get them to change their mind? What can Adobe do?

Basically a boycott at this point is like saying "I know you think it's crap, but just do it anyway". It's making a demand without an actual argument to back it up.

<comment><USER3> By definition, something that is reasoned is NOT arbitrary.

arbitrary adjective based on random choice or personal whim, rather than any reason or system

With the automatic bug report generation in OS X, Apple has direct evidence of Flash stability problems, so their knowledge of instability is NOT anecdotal either.

anecdotal| adjective (of an account) not necessarily true or reliable, because based on personal accounts rather than facts or research

Stability problems go hand in hand with security problems. A search of the major security sites will produce a long history of vulnerabilities and also demonstrate that fixes have been slow in coming.

And on an individual level most of us can likely see an example of the instability on any platform by visiting <http://flashcrash.dempsky.org/>

(The 10.1 beta, which is not in any OS/browser by default, is reported to have a fix. Of course disabling Flash from loading with NoScript, Flash Block etc avoids the crash also)</comment></comment>


Don't Panic: The Hitchhiker's Guide to Unwinding - <AUTHOR> http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2014/10/30/dont-panic/

<comment><USER2> Unwinding-by-default is perhaps the last contentious Rust feature that's still on the table. I'm glad that Armin's giving it the coverage it deserves, but there's a little more to the story here both for and against the notion of unwinding.

 _For_ : for some domains, you really, really, really want to be able to handle panics. For a notable example, one of the first production deployments of Rust is a Ruby gem that runs inside of a client's Rails process ([https://www.skylight.io/](https://www.skylight.io/)). Without the ability to unwind, a panic in your Rust code would bring down the whole process (henceforth an "abort"), and your paying customers will probably be somewhat peeved. Servo is also looking to leverage unwinding, so that a panic in one tab doesn't abort the entire browser process.

 _Against_ : the concept of unwinding is inherently flawed in some very pernicious ways. Say you're the user in the previous paragraph who _needs_ to catch panics. You have everything set up properly, and when your code panics you're prepared: the stack unwinds, freeing resources and calling destructors. Everything is peachy. But here's a twist: while unwinding, what happens if one of your destructors panics? The process aborts, is what happens. You've setup all this machinery for apparently nothing at all. And generating all the machinery for unwinding is a hit to compile time, bloats binary sizes, and can potentially thwart optimizations in the generated code.

I don't think it would be uncontroversial to provide unwinding as an option. The biggest question here is whether or not that option would be enabled or disabled by default, as it would have implications for distributing compiled binaries (though perhaps Cargo could assist with this).</comment>


Startup or Pokémon - <AUTHOR> http://www.evilbrainjono.net/pages/startup-or-pokemon.py <comment><USER2> Hmmm, makes sense. Pokemon names are roughly representative of some of their characteristics and are designed so that even children can remember all of them.

Now if only we could name historical events and pieces of legislation like we name pokemon and give them cool animal logos...

</comment><comment><USER3> Is this yours? There is no reason to have 10 on a page. Do it like "Steak House or Gay Bar". <http://steakhouseorgaybar.com/>

</comment><comment><USER4> Funny! You might want to improve the visuals of the page, though. As most people agree, design "has an unfair influence on people's first perception of something".

</comment><comment><USER5> speaking as someone mulling various names for products, I'm wondering why pokemon and startups happen to have ostensibly names. what pressures are applied to the designers of pokemon and startup founders that cause this?

</comment><comment><USER6> I got 8/10!</comment>


Ask HN: Are there 'standard' projects to complete as a rite of passage? - <AUTHOR> OK, I've started my journey into programming - I'm 45, dabbled for years, but a career change (partially enforced, mostly planned) is what I'm looking at, and I'm planning to take a couple of years of working near full time on studying Python, hopefully moving into learning data analysis/visualisation and machine learning.
Anyhoo... when I was young, I did an engineering apprenticeship, where I learnt both mechanical and electrical/electronic engineering (2 years) before specialising (another 2 years). Part of this was doing 'standards', which in the case of mechanical engineering started with simple cutting and filing accurately, and moved onto things such as making parallels, spirit level, etc.  The same has been true of music - I play (and teach) guitar, and can see the idea of the progression from Grade 1 to Grade 8, gaining useful skills on the way.
Is there anything similar in terms of programming challenges?  I've found a few pages here and there which have some simple ones (which I've done and enjoyed), but nothing that would seem to follow a progression; there seem to be lots of 'get started with...' courses (I've done a few), but I'd appreciate any suggestions you have. <comment><USER2> Not really. As an industry, computer science is still pretty young and disorganized. Dynamic, ever-changing.

There are tests - the silly interview questions you see, QuickSort, A* algorithm, trees..

And as a practitioner, there are some standard tropes which vary over the years and areas of specialization, like writing your own blogging software, a basic back-propagation neural network, or completing the Advent of Code exercises.

But I think for your position, as someone eager to learn and show his growth, you should just pick a project that is interesting to you and somewhat challenging and do your best at it. By publishing the work you will say "I completed this" and be able to show it as a badge of your skills. All the better if you "kill it" and produce something better than what has existed before.

And above all, congrats on your exciting transition into programming. It's a challenging and important field.

<comment><USER3> +1 for the advent of code. Good for beginners and experts alike. It's well thought out, bite sized and easy to pickup and leave

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A Tetris clone, breakout clone, or text editor seem like something a ton of people do. A little calculator that parses and evaluates mathematical expressions. An esoteric programming language implementation. A program that outputs "you are c00l" in a loop. A key/value store. A Hacker News reader app for iOS. A p2p file sharing system. An IRC client. Web forum software. A chess engine. Some Markdown-like HTML generator. A static website generator. Planetary orbit simulator. Cellular automata simulator.

</comment><comment><USER5> Why not get a degree in computer science or software engineering if you plan on spending a couple of years full-time learning? Projects often include implementing an OS and a compiler.

</comment><comment><USER6> Interpreter for a programming language</comment>


Is Science As Important As Football? - <AUTHOR> http://www.powells.com/blog/?p=6721 <comment><USER2> Its an aside, but it always frustrates me to hear about the cuts at NASA and how the budget simply won't allow this or that project when every city in America seems to think it needs an $800mm tax-payer funded arena to "stimulate the local economy."

No, you don't get moon bases, hover cars and cures for cancer. You spent your allowance on football, remember?

<comment><USER3> Football is a very important pastime to a lot of people. Just playing devil's advocate here: can you name one reason why those NASA programs are more important than the football arena, without making reference to your own subjective value system which would be at odds with that of the ardent football fan's?

<comment><USER4> Football can and would exist without subsidies. Spending public funds to support private industry is a bad economic decision. Funding space travel on the other hand is something that would not exist without public funds. So it's outside of the effecency debate.

"debating gladiator reform while Rome burns…"

<comment><USER5> _Funding space travel on the other hand is something that would not exist without public funds. So it's outside of the effecency debate._

If activity X is to matter in people's lives, it needs to be scalable. To be scalable it needs to be profitable. Since the U.S. government does not operate on a profit motive, the spending on the space program will have as little long term impact as the Zheng He fleets. You should read this article: [http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2006/10/how-to-succeed- or-f...](http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2006/10/how-to-succeed-or-fail-on- frontier.html)

<comment><USER6> perhaps the federal government should fund commercial endeavors in space like they fund commercial endeavors in sports.

Lots of people would pay to go to space if they could afford it. Make it affordable.

<comment><USER7> The federal government doesn't fund sports at all. Stadium subsidies are usually a municipal or state matter at best.

<comment><USER6> It doesn't matter which entity signs the check, it all comes from the tax payers. If the feds weren't paying for the roads, the municipalities would. It's all the same.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Important to whom? To the average person-in-the-street, the answer is no. Science isn't terribly entertaining, lacks an easily understood competitive aspect and isn't accessible. Football, on the other hand, is something people can and do play amongst themselves and can be watched/enjoyed at many levels of competition.

To society as a whole is a different question. But I'm not sure it leads to a different answer. Billions of people watched the World Cup over several weeks. I can't imagine science, short of things like positive-net-energy fusion or curing AIDS having anywhere near that much interest.

I've studied science and have been fortunate enough to be able to create scientific software. I'm also comfortable with allowing people to do what they want, and pay attention to what they want. I'm not able to do football professionally, but I can (and do) do this science stuff professionally. Different strokes for different folks, eh?

</comment><comment><USER9> Let's not confuse science and NASA too much in the discussion here I'd say. Flying the existing shuttle back and forth to space for 3 decades is as much dog and pony as it is science.

I'd like to agree with part of this article though. The science olympiad would have been a LOT more fun if the contest was to create the biggest explosion instead of the strongest toothpick bridge.

</comment><comment><USER10> I thought the title was flamebait. ARE YOU KIDDING! science is more important than football. But once I went through the article, he does make some valid points.

I just wish that he hadn't inserted so many pics from his new book - now the article smells of a sales job. His argument should stand independent of his book

</comment><comment><USER11> My middle school was willing to make us play frisbee dodgeball (with the expected results), and then spent millions tearing apart a couple of classrooms after some kids dropped mercury on the floor and stomped on it.

I think Phys. Ed. would be a good target level for danger in the classroom.

<comment><USER12> To contrast, at my school a teacher dropped a bottle of mercury while showing us how it ran away from heat. They cleaned it up with a mop while we played with it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I don't remember my science classes to be that exciting. Then again, my sports teacher didn't like football either.

<comment><USER14> Usually in US schools there are two parts to a science course: the lectures and the labs. The lectures and homework do get boring and tedious if you are really not into that particular field. However, labs are meant to not only show students science in practice but to show how cool it can be. By doing experiments themselves and seeing real-life demonstrations by teachers, some few students will become interested enough in the field to persue it seriously, and others will at least gain more perspective on the world around them.

However, with our misguided obsession with safety, science education has been neutered of this exiting part and all that's left is dry formulas and obscure vocabulary.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> His complaint is that science education is boring, but the same could be said for any number of subjects in school. The irony is that it's the same scientists who've created performance targets for educators to hit in the form of standardized testing. This has led to unimaginative teaching and a strictly check-box approach to learning by running down a long list of curriculum items in a very limited time frame.

<comment><USER16> People creating performance targets for students to hit on standardized tests are not _scientists_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> football is only a sport if we didnt had sience we would be like chimps.

</comment><comment><USER17> is much more important

</comment><comment><USER17> sience

</comment><comment><USER17> sience

</comment><comment><USER17> sience

</comment><comment><USER18> Interesting analogy. I would say the danger isn't quite in students injuring themselves in the classroom as much as it is giving destructive chemicals to students. Sure some of them can handle it, but the deviant ones will create havoc given the opportunity. In football there is a certain physical discipline allowed, where as in science its just the principals office, which can be better than class. Good analogy, but I think far from raising the argument...

<comment><USER16> Let's all worry about the "deviants". Conformity for the win!</comment></comment>