[klodolph]

If you are on Linux, you will probably want to convert to OTB instead. Pango has dropped support for BDF and it’s just a matter of time before your distro gets hit with the full effect (if you are on a “stable” channel then you probably haven’t gotten hit yet). If you use old-school X programs without Pango you may not notice, but nearly everything on Linux that doesn’t look like XTerm uses Pango.

See: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BitmapFontConversion

As a side effect, the fonts will probably work better as OTB anyway. At least, that’s my experience.

[bitwize]

Makes sense. Bdf is an X11 format, and X is deprecated technology. X font rendering is certainly deprecated.

[dilandau]

Wayland fans: so desperate for traction that they'll snap up any chance to spread false information. Or maybe this commenter doesn't know the difference between gnome/pango and xorg/xft?

Xorg isn't going anywhere for a very long time.

[bitwize]

Of course I know the difference. Pango is part of the "new world" in which all text rendering is done client-side. BDF is the old X11 bitmap format, used for X11's server-side text rendering. It makes sense for Pango to move away from supporting it, as hardly anyone uses BDF anymore except for backward compatibility with legacy X applications, and the world is moving away from X.

Matter of fact, rendering everything is moving to client side, hence why X is increasingly unnecessary, and why Wayland is designed the way it is.

Oh, and among "Wayland fans" you can count just about everyone who knows anything about the Linux graphics stack, except maybe for Keith Packard. So yes, getting traction is important, because no one wants to keep maintaining the broken X architecture. Xorg is largely maintained by Red Hat who have put it in "hard maintenance" mode with virtually no new development.

[dilandau]

Ah yes, the "new world" that the developers like and that ultimately complicates things for end-users, and obsoletes 30+ years of software in the process.

I prefer stability.

[bitwize]

You want to talk complicating things for end users? Does "XF86Config" mean anything to you? X only got halfway decent when the KMS driver came out, migrating much of the video hardware functionality OUT of X and into the kernel. The X server is thus now largely a state tracker for an obsolete protocol.

Meanwhile, Wayland has pretty much the same graphics server architecture that Windows and macOS had decades ago. It finally brings the Linux desktop architecture in line with the state of the art. There may be a rough transition period, but the faster the Linux community pulls together and rips the X band-aid off, the shorter that period will be.

[api]

From day one Wayland struck me as a completely unnecessary effort that could instead have been spent making Xorg better and fixing its problems. If aspects of Xorg are ugly, create new extensions and deprecate the old ones and set a sunset after which those old extensions will be removed. That would be a much easier sell than a 100% new graphics server.

This sort of "lets rewrite, and rewrite, and rewrite, ad infinitum" stuff is a major problem with the open source community. It leads to an enormous amount of wasted effort in an area where effort is always needed to address real problems around usability and hardware compatibility.

[klodolph]

X11 is too centralized. Adding more extensions exacerbates the problem—most of those extensions should have been in libraries in the first place, and with Wayland, they can finally be taken out of the server and into individual apps. That, and X11 has too many built-in assumptions which haven’t been reasonable for most users for 20 years (but it sure is nice to run X over SSH on a low-bandwidth link!)

The usability improvements on the Linux desktop happened in spite of X11. The conversation is about font rendering—and why should font rendering be a part of your windowing system? For most apps, it’s not—it’s in Pango, and Pango dropped support for X fonts. All of these changes which already happened have been eroding whatever advantages X11 offered in the first place.

So it’s time to decentralize all the random functionality in X11, and just move it into client-side libraries.

[api]

I don't get it. I don't understand why things can't be deprecated and why this requires a 100% new clean slate rewrite that actually loses functionality (the ability to run remote).

The other problem is priorities. There are a million other much higher priority things: better hardware support, better support for laptop power management, endless usability improvements to desktop apps, etc.