Question about the future of Xorg

gene heskett gheskett at shentel.net
Mon Jul 7 00:40:58 UTC 2025


On 7/6/25 18:46, Vladimir Dergachev wrote:
>
>
> On Sat, 5 Jul 2025, gene heskett wrote:
>
>> On 7/5/25 01:32, Vladimir Dergachev wrote:
>>> There are many developers having fun with Xorg. Some on the list, 
>>> some not, some will reply to you, some not.
>>>
>>> There might be some that are employed to work on Xorg. In USA that 
>>> usually means two weeks notice, so that is the total extent of the 
>>> "commitment".
>>> If they have to switch to a new job it will likely displace any open 
>>> source contributions for at least a month.
>>>
>>> People having fun produce good code. Don't mess with it.
And you are obviously much closer to that code than I will ever be, 
given my remaining time on this ball  of rock and water. But why can't I 
run synaptic from a shell?
>>>
>>> best
>>>
>>> Vladimir Dergachev
>> Rant on:
>>
>> And this, Vladimir, is the clearest, most concise description of the 
>> problem I have seen.  My path thru life has been that of keeping a 
>> television station on the air and profitable. Along that line I have 
>> coded up a couple projects on "company" time. Projects the station 
>> needed but no one sold. So I bought the hardware and wrote the code.  
>> Then sold them the hardware.  Code that turned out to so handy it was 
>> used for decades.
>
> Nice!
>
>> That is/was unheard of, control room hardware gets replaced by 
>> competitive pressure or mechanical wear out years before the tax 
>> write off is complete. TV news people are hell on hardware, but get 
>> the story regardless. But as quick as I could get the parts, they got 
>> the busted ($7500 to repair) camera back to go wreck them again. Now 
>> I'm 90 and 23 years retired and it would take me the rest of my life 
>> to wrap my head around a quarter of the code xorg maintains.
>
> No problem then:)
>
> You don't actually need to mess with a quarter of xorg code, as most 
> of xorg works just fine. The only problem that might arise is lack of 
> support for newer cards.
>
> This is an issue we had before 25 years ago, and as Carsten and Alan 
> explained to me is much easier now as Wayland compositors don't have 
> their own drivers at all, but rather use mesa and other kernel 
> interfaces.
>
> So, if necessary, it should be possible to write an Xorg driver that 
> does the same.
When debian switched I thought it was good, but years later I am still 
stuck with NON GUI apt to stay current with the rest of the system. Why 
can't I have a gui like synaptic so I can see whats available BEFORE I 
install it?
> best
Back at you.
> Vladimir Dergachev
Cheers, Gene Heskett, CET.

-- 
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
  soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author, 1940)
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  - Louis D. Brandeis



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