wpeckham. zeebra, re TinyX, I've been working with that a bit for inxi for this coming release, so I have brushed up.
If you are serious about looking into these, first, just grab one of the tiny isos, tinycore basic for Xvesa, and TinyCore Pure64 for Xfbdev. I think tinycore has the code on their code repo, maybe slitaz too. Alpine may use these, not sure. I think they are not though. DSL (damned small linux) was the one that sort of brought TinyX back from the dead, though the initial version was rolled back to 1.2 due to some issues, which appear to be resolved since now at least TinyCore is at 1.3. But talk to those guys if you want to look into it.
First, TinyCore and Slitaz use TinyX. Both of these are very cool, but different, remarkably so given their tiny sizes. The reason it's tiny is because it's an absolutely stripped down barebones X server, with the driver as part of the server, thus, Xvesa (32 bit only), Xfbdev (64 bit) are TinyX servers, then a bunch of legacy servers only people with really old hardware will own. quoting from the docs I just made for TinyX:
https://codeberg.org/smxi/pinxi/src/...i-graphics.txt (Section Display Server Data > TinyX
Known to exist or have existed:
Xchips
Xfbdev [verified tc, active 2023]
Xi810
Xigs
Xipaq
Xmach64
Xmga
Xmodesetting [only tentatively proposed by TinyCore, not existing]
Xneomagic
Xsavage
Xsis530
Xtrident
Xtrio
Xts300
Xvesa [verified tc, active 2023]
I also package inxi for TinyCore so I'm used to TinyX. Short version: most people won't like it because it's tiny. Amazing, incredible, fantastically weird, but tiny. Currently I believe only Xvesa and Xfbdev are alive, at version 1.3, which is the same version they were forked at, so I don't know how much work has been done on them beyond making the code compile and run.
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jayjwa, zeebra
Re the general question of X.org vs Wayland, first, just to correct a few things, Wayland is like x11, it's a protocol, not a display server. kwin_wayland, wlroots, sway, etc, are like X.org. You don't write a how to for wayland, you write a how to for the compositor, which is a royal pain since there are a lot, but sway basically saved the free software ecosystem by creating what is basically the reference compositor library for anything that is not kwin_wayland, gnome-shell, enlightenment... and one of a hundred experimental ones. this is the list inxi uses currently, with some new updates coming in 3.3.32, which is going to be a massive release:
asc awc bismuth
cage cagebreak cardboard chameleonwm clayland comfc
dwl dwc epd-wm fireplace feathers fenestra glass gamescope greenfield grefson
hikari hopalong [Hh]yprland inaban japokwm kiwmi labwc laikawm lipstick liri
mahogany marina maze maynard motorcar newm nucleus
orbital orbment perceptia phoc polonium pywm qtile river rootston rustland
simulavr skylight smithay sommelier sway swayfx swc swvkc
tabby taiwins tinybox tinywl trinkster velox vimway vivarium
wavy waybox way-?cooler wayfire wayhouse waymonad westeros westford
weston wio\+? wxr[cd] xuake
A subset of these compositors support x11 and wayland protocols, but I suspect the smaller ones are dumping the x11 and just doing wayland.
I have followed this for many years because I have had to struggle with the remarkably poor state of wayland docs, the total absence of reliable wayland protocol debuggers that you can rely on always being there like X.org tools are, but you have to remember, while the wayland people created their reference compositior Weston, which nobody uses to speak of, the x11 group reference display server was X.org, which became the defactor standard so most people don't even realize X.org is an x11 display server that just happened to also be written by the same group. Sadly that same result did not happen with weston, which does have decent debugging tools, as do sway/wlroots in some cases. I know of no debugging tools for wayland for kwin_wayland or gnome-shell, but I gave up looking because I could find nothing.
I use xfce, who are very slowly working on wayland in 4.19, but they are following the proper slackware style development model, which is to not jump in until it's actually ready for prime time. To paraphrase your BDFL Patrick V., what distros are doing this coming release, like Fedora, is essentially releasing sucker display servers, and I for one am very happy to let their users find all the bugs.
Recent postings have indicated also some real issues in wayland, but Damentz, who does the Liquorix kernel, said he's switched to KDE wayland and that over the past year, there's been a huge jump in quality and reliability, so experiences may improve.
If I were to do bare metal testing, I'd pop sway on an old Thinkpad, try to keep Xwayland off of it to force myself to use only wayland programs because it's guaranteed that there will be bugs when a display compositor talks to an xwayland adapter layer.
I don't think however that with what is certain to be a very rapid pace of development now for wayland compositors (and remember, there is no such thing as a wayland display server, it's just the protocol, which means you can't talk about a single compositor the way we can with X.org, even though there can in theory be other x11 display servers, but there really aren't).
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Re forking etc, easier said than done, personally, wayland solves no issues I have, but wayland does solve some issues some people have, just not me. So I have zero incentive to switch until the xfce guys feel it's working well and it can be reliable, I trust them like you guys trust patrick to not do something stupid. Virtually seamless transition to gtk 3 for example, I barely noticed.
Just thought I'd share my perspective and experience, the best thing to do is to run it and test, though like many here, I expect to be one of the last to switch, at least I hope to be.
But if anyone is serious about it, you should get with for example OpenBSD Xenocara/X.org, Theo is not thrilled at all with wayland, doesn't like the eway it forces a single linux model of a unitary stack, he was just talking about this, though wayland is available as a port.
But the logical thing to do based on the complexity is to talk to all other projects who don't want to use wayland, this can work, Trinity desktop, much to my surprise, and Mate, both survived and exist today because they were not fans of new kde or gnome. But fragmented attempts, no way.
Also interesting is if real interest were to show up for the TinyX servers, but they are not X.org replacements, they are tiny, and do not do what X.org does, though they do run a desktop and window managers fine. But if you are curious, just talk to the Slitaz/TinyCore guys.
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Re the basics, the primary X.org maintainer has said in public he no longer works on X.org, he only works on Xwayland, which you can see here:
Code:
Display: x11 server: X.Org v: 1.21.1.9 with: Xwayland v: 23.2.2
A few years back xwayland was at 21, same as x.org, now it's several major versions ahead. So it's not really relevant what anyone feels or thinks, including me, the fact is that X.org is not being developed anymore actively, so unless a group of people get together to basically start working on it (keeping in mind Keith Packard of Intel agrees that wayland protocol compositors should be the future, and he was the x11 guy if I remember right) the current stagnant state will continue.
Once no active development happens on such a large codebase, bit rot has to set in, driver issues, conflicts, things don't get fixed, until the system starts getting visibly glitchy. I am not certain, but I have been seeing visual glitches on some applications now already, mostly gtk based, and apparently KDE's wayland compositor is significantly better than GNOME's, which is no suprise. Sway is nice, if you like i3, you can use the same config file basically. There's a few OpenBox type compositors too if floating windows are your thing. That's the easy way, just make sure it's based on wlroots or kde/gnome/enlightenment, otherwise you are just testing someone's hobby project for them, imo anyway.