Charlie StrossJan 4, 2024
NO FUCK OFF GET AWAY FROM ME YOU CREEP— https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/01/ai-comes-for-your-pcs-keyboard-as-microsoft-adds-dedicated-copilot-key/
Microsoft is adding a new key to PC keyboards for the first time since 1994

Copilot key will eventually be required in new PC keyboards, though not yet.

Ars Technica
Show threadCharlie StrossJan 4, 2024

Seriously, if Apple copy Microsoft with a stunt like this, that'd be my cue to buy a Framework laptop and switch 100% to Linux for work.

(Which would be enormously painful as Scrivener isn't supported on Linux and it's been my work platform for the past 15 years.)

NB: only distributions with X.org ranther than Wayland and sysv init instead of systemd need apply.

Show threadalex  now on shonk.phite.roJan 4, 2024
@cstross why not wayland
Show threadCharlie StrossJan 4, 2024
@graphite Because Wayland AIUI isn't compatible with all previous X apps. And I want compatability. (Also, it's needless change for change's sake, just like systemd.)
Show threadhko 😷🪁
@cstross X11 applications can run on Wayland, via Xwayland
Jan 4, 2024 at 11:45amWeb
Show threadCharlie StrossJan 4, 2024
@hko So they've built an X display server that runs as a guest on Wayland, which is otherwise useful for what, precisely? It seems like a waste of CPU cycles to me (that is: I have no use case for it).
Show threadhko 😷🪁Jan 4, 2024

@cstross Telling the people who write display servers and protocols how to do their jobs is well above my paygrade.

For better or worse, the ecosystem seems to have mostly moved from X11 to Wayland. And personally, I'm not quite old enough yet to want to expend my energy on going against the grain, there.

Show threadlonjilJan 4, 2024

@cstross @hko

It seems like a waste of CPU cycles to me (that is: I have no use case for it).

Huh, but you just said higher up that you need compatibility?

Show threadCharlie StrossJan 4, 2024
@lonjil @hko I need compatability = I want to run X11. I am uninterested in whatever innovations Wayland is supposed to bring. I want a Linux desktop like it was in 1999, running KDE 3.5.8 or thereabouts!
Show threadTiago HackbarthJan 4, 2024
@cstross @lonjil @hko ah, the good old days...
Show threadKhleedrilJan 4, 2024
@cstross @lonjil @hko The problem is X was architected around a single standard: VGA graphics provided by the system BIOS. But in this day and age monitors are driven by many different combinations of microprocessor extensions, graphics cards, and operating system facilities, and they are not to a single standard. It is unfortunately necessary to break everything to fix it again, and Wayland is an architecture which can work across the spectrum of modern display devices...
Show threadKhleedrilJan 4, 2024
@cstross @lonjil @hko ... which includes foldable phones with sentinel displays on the back, e-ink readers, ray-traced game accelerators, 90-inch TVs, etc, etc.
Show threadCharlie StrossJan 4, 2024

@khleedril @lonjil @hko

You are Wrong. X11 had *nothing* to do with the VGA standard.

X11 predates VGA graphics by three years and wasn't intended to run on PCs or deal with a BIOS at all—it was designed for workstations with a variety of graphics hardware. I remember it on Sun 3/60 kit circa 1989 ...

Show threadKhleedrilJan 4, 2024
@cstross @lonjil @hko Yeh, sorry, I made a crap post there. Was trying to put across that it was designed to run on a system with *one* graphics sub-system, not several possibly disparate ones, but never mind my parabolicism.
Show threadRob LandleyJan 5, 2024

@khleedril @cstross @lonjil @hko X11 was a network protocol. It came from project Athena, launched in 1983 as a joint project between MIT, DEC and IBM to produce a "campus-wide computing environment".

X11 was designed to pop up GUI windows on a different physical machine than the program was running on, potentially with different OS on different hardware at each end. That was central to the design.

The xfree86 clowns broke a lot of that over the years "optimizing", but that's not X11's fault.

Show threadKhleedrilJan 5, 2024
@landley @cstross @lonjil @hko The correct answer, thank you.
Show threadRob LandleyJan 5, 2024

@khleedril @cstross @lonjil @hko Back at Rutgers I loved playing a game called "xbattle" which was implemented as 1 game process opening windows on a bunch of different machines (listed on the command line) so people could play against each other in a shared map.

If you could trivially do that in 1992 on a LAN, one computer with 4 monitors does not require significant new plumbing from X11.

Alas people wrapped the protocol with layers of shared libraries, each with "simplifying assumptions"...

Show threadCharlie StrossJan 5, 2024
@landley @khleedril @lonjil @hko Yup. X11 dates to the era of thin clients with bitmapped displays connected by ethernet because hard disks and CPUs were comparatively expensive. We turned the corner around 1993-96 when the price of RAM and hard disks dropped enough to make a single-user PC with an SVGA or better display running UNIX/X11 cheaper than X terminal plus a slice of a Sun or VAX server to drive it.
Show threadRob LandleyJan 5, 2024

@cstross @khleedril @lonjil @hko 20 years ago I wrote an extensive historical analysis of how Moore's Law's consistent advance was in part market collusion, in order to explain why Itanium failed in the context of SCO's lawsuit against IBM.

I'm still kind of proud of that writeup:

http://www.catb.org/~esr/halloween/halloween9.html#itanium

Halloween IX: It Ain't Necessarily SCO

Show threadAlexandre Oliva (moved to @[email protected])Jan 8, 2024
there have been many eras of thin clients, and we're going through one of them right now. there were dumb text terminals, then there were dumb graphical terminals, then there were netbooks, and now there are javascrippled web sites, often packaged as TRApps. the pocket computers people carry are the dumb terminals of yore, capable of computing fonts and even doing turing-complete postscript, but artificially constrained to serving a remote master
Show threadRob LandleyJan 5, 2024

@khleedril @cstross @lonjil @hko With the result that "nobody programs against libX11.so anymore, use gtk or qt to talk to libx" and I'm going "libX11 is _itself_ a wrapper around a documented protocol!""

Posix was a common subset of shared Unix API, an attempt at similifying and stabilizing, "you can rely on this, there may be extensions but they can be ignored".

Nobody even tried to do that for X11...

Show threadhko 😷🪁Jan 5, 2024
@landley @khleedril @cstross @lonjil since the 1980s, many people have started to want their display system to do new things, which are not very efficient on vanilla X11. Like rendering video streams with obscene numbers of pixels. Possibly scaled up to full screen, on displays with bazillions of pixels.
Show threaddholsoppleJan 4, 2024

@cstross @lonjil @hko The most important innovation of Wayland is convincing people post-2010 to give away their time for free to maintain it.

X works fine for now, but bitrot is slowly chipping away at the ability to successfully run it, and it's going to continue that way unless someone volunteers for the thankless, unpaid job of maintaining it.

Show threadStephan SchulzJan 4, 2024
@cstross @hko For one, CPU cycles are essentially free. X11 worked well on a Sun 3/60 with a single 8GhZ 68020. And secondly, having a single modern display engine means that you only need to support hardware compatibility once. Then you can run your different frameworks on top of that.
Show threadTiago HackbarthJan 4, 2024

@StephanSchulz @cstross @hko fuck no!

It's this mentality that "CPU circles are essentially free, storage is practically unlimited, network bandwidth is a given" that makes software that could run on a Super Nintendo bloat to the point that you need a state of the art computer bought in the last two months to run.

Show threadStephan SchulzJan 4, 2024
@hackbarth @cstross @hko Well, say goodbye to bloaty languages like Perl, AWK, Python, or Java then. Pure C on the bare metal is the only solution. Operating Systems are for wimps! Yes, bloat can be a problem. But not all abstraction is bloat - or if it is, some is well worth it. I have no interest in running anything on a Super Nintendo. And I do write pretty mean C code for my main project - where performance matters. I use "bloaty" Python for e.g. data analysis.
Show threadJ$Jan 4, 2024
@StephanSchulz @cstross @hko CPU cycles are essentially free. The earth has infinite resources to waste, war is peace, and are you interested in this nice little bridge I happen to have to sell you?
Show threadReid Ellis ☑️Jan 4, 2024

@cstross @StephanSchulz @hko I think you mentioned “with a single 8 *MHz* 68020”

Just imagine a Mac IIfx with an 8 GHz CPU. The mind boggles!

Show threadCharlie StrossJan 4, 2024
@clith @StephanSchulz @hko Mac IIfx: March 1990-April 1992. Sun 3/60: launched some time after mid-1985, end-of-life by 1989. So it predates the Mac IIfx by approximately half a decade (at a time when things were changing FAST). Also, no Sun 3 ran slower than 15.7MHz.
Show threadStephan SchulzJan 4, 2024
@cstross @clith @hko MHz: Granted, I misremembered. Must have confused that with the Atari ST.
Show threadRaven OnthillJan 4, 2024

@cstross @hko mostly Wayland is a performance improvement for applications running locally on a computer, at the expense of applications which rely on the X windows client/server model. I don't know enough about the engineering issues to speak to its advantages if any, but Wayland has basic user interface problems.

It is a consistent problem of Linux that usability invariably take second place to engineering issues.

Show threadflere-imsaho 🇺🇦Jan 4, 2024

@ravenonthill that's actually bullshit and there are practically no contemporary toolkits that use x primitives anymore – and to get a decent desktop experience you have to work around the protocol. this is one of the reasons why x is so painful to develop.

(and i actually did set up and then run regular x protocol over network around ~2005, with thin clients running x servers and connecting to a beef-ish application server. it was bad even then.)

i mean, wayland is by no means perfect, but you clearly have no bloody idea about how x works, and why its developers all moved to work on wayland.

Show threadsabikJan 4, 2024
@hko @cstross
Not all, or at least not completely; eg MS Teams Linux app can't share screen under Wayland (but can if run via Firefox, which is a hassle albeit workable)
Show threadJoakim ForsJan 4, 2024
@sabik @hko @cstross The teams app on Linux has been deprecated for a long time. The web client as a PWA via Edge is the way to go. Screen sharing etc works flawlessly on Wayland via xdg-desktop-portal