Although Wayland has largely replaced Xorg, and most major Linux distributions and desktop environments have either already dropped support for the aging display protocol or are in the process of doing so, efforts to extend Xorg’s life or replace it with similar alternatives continue. Recent examples include projects such as XLibre Xserver and Wayback. And now, a new name is joining this group: Phoenix.
It is a new X server project that takes a fundamentally different approach to X11. Written entirely from scratch in the Zig programming language, it is not yet another fork of the Xorg codebase and does not reuse its legacy code. Instead, according to devs, Phoenix aims to show that the X11 protocol itself is not inherently obsolete and can be implemented in a simpler, safer, and more modern way.
efforts to extend Xorg’s life or replace it with similar alternatives continue.
This is 100% true, but the efforts are negligible and not even worth consideration.
- Xorg maintainers are doing just that: maintaining it (and, for the most part, begrudgingly). It will continue to exist for a long time, but that’s the only remarkable thing about it.
- XLibre is made by some anti-vaxx conspiracy dipshit who thinks
^is an exponentiation operator in C and who got kicked off Xorg for being a moron who did functionally nothing of any importance while carelessly breaking things like the ABI. Enormous quantity but zero quality to speak of. It will go nowhere and only has any crumb of relevance because of the maintainer’s virtue signaling. - Phoenix basically just started, yet Linux outlets are tripping over themselves to report on it, showing there’s very little real work to speak of in this space. It’s a nothingburger of a story. It doesn’t even do basically the only thing X11 is even good for anymore, which is support legacy applications.
As GNOME and KDE drop X11 and DEs like Cinnamon adopt Wayland, more and more actively maintained applications will stop giving a shit about X11. Even if they don’t explicitly not support it, none of the developers will be using it, and most of the userbase won’t either; thus, applications’ support for X11 will just rot away if it isn’t outright deprecated. Obviously X11 will always have a base of legacy applications, but you’re going to be seriously hard-pressed even two years from now to find someone who would use X11 over Wayland – except for specific and severely outdated hardware, conspiracy nutjobs, and the rare case where XWayland doesn’t properly support a legacy application.
Whenever I see a new project trying to modernize Xorg, my first question is whether it’s actually about the code or just another protest/spite project. We’ve already seen how XLibre is less about display servers and more about a weird crossover of technical incompetence and fringe politics (championed by people like Lunduke). Is Phoenix actually a serious technical effort, or is it just the latest attempt to build a sanctuary for people who were kicked out of the Wayland and Xorg dev circles?
Sadly xrdp comes to mind. The builtin-in rdp server of Gnome is not on par yet and behaves differently.
Xrdp server prompts for the login of an existing user while Gnome new implementation has a kind of additional user/password which all users need to know. I did not find an option to disable it.
What is neat about the new implementation is, that you can login to a running sessiom remotely without being logged out at the local machine. This feels more like desktop sharing. Awesome, and in this case, having a seperate user/password makes sense.
I dunno, I thought the description of the efforts and ambitions here sounded really promising. It’s not even meant to be fully X11 compatible.
I’m excited to hear more down the line. If it turns out to be nothing, fine, but I’m excited for the possibilities this could bring.
I think this is important to highlight:
Wayland compatibility is part of the long-term plan. The developers say Phoenix might eventually support Wayland clients directly or use bridging tools to run Wayland-only apps in an X11 environment. Running Phoenix nested under Wayland, as an alternative to Xwayland, is also being considered.
In 2038, there will be a 32-bit computer with this, sysvinit etc. dying a well-deserved time death.
32 bit computers can handle 64 bit timestamps, it’s just a matter of defining time_t to be 32 or 64 bits at compile time. The compiler will deal with all the mess of splitting the 64 bit value up to calculate on the smaller registers in 32 bit architectures, just like any other variable defined as int_64.
Linux kernels have had support for 64 bit time on 32 bit systems since version 5.something, so generally speaking there’ll still be retro 32 bit hardware running past 2038 just fine.
*2058
I’m very well aware. But you’re clearly not aware of the fact that this X server simply wouldn’t be running on an old enough kernel for the 2038 problem to be relevant.
But why the name? Even Firefox had switch from Phoenix.
Didn’t they switch from Firebird because of the database?
It was first named Phoenix and they ran into issues with the phoenix BIOS because some of their BIOSes had a built in browser. They renamed to Firebird and then found out about the DB with the same name, and that’s when they finally renamed to Firefox.
BIOSes had a built in browser
The plot thickens…
Another X Server in Pheonix in Zig? I’ll keep an eye out for this one.
