XLibre
Support starting X from Display Manager Wayland Session #209
Replies: 16 comments 4 replies
-
|
Just use a proper display manager. And if your distro doesn't provide any anymore, maybe it's time to switch distro. Starting up a whole "X11 session" is far out of scope of the Xserver - that's entirely up to the individual desktop environments. Note that X11 itself doesn't even have the concept of "sessions" at all. If your favorite DE or distro is dropping X11 support, feel free to file a bug report there. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
I am sorry but that is head in sand answer. The problem is not just distribution choices. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_display_manager There are not that many active X display managers even less when you want to be able to load both X11 and Wayland sessions. Gnome 50 gdm will not have X11 session support. SDDM is being worked on being replaced with something based off Kwin and remember Kde policy of with the kwin_x11 being split off no new X11 features so odds are good no X11 session support in what ever kde decides to replace SDDM with. Dtlogin from CDE and TDM from TDE is normally not shipped in Linux distributions. Fairly much your answer is saying at some point users will have the choice of XDM or nothing(startx) and that if XDM remains maintained and them run into XDM does not start Wayland sessions. Most distributions want something better looking than XDM. Simple reality there use to be lots of X Display Managers XDM that part of X11 protocol does in fact have a concept of sessions and it was written into X11 protocol. Yes unmanaged session. Does a display manager wayland session manage wayland session answer is not it does not. Yes display managers dropping X11 session support equals less code in the display manager program. Wayland session hand over is simpler than the X11 one. https://github.com/GNOME/gdm/blob/main/daemon/gdm-wayland-session.c Yes I know it gnome but you can look at SDDM and Lightdm. Like it or not it is about half the code the display manager needs to start a Wayland session vs a X11 session. Yes X11 session takes twice as much display manager code to start as Wayland session and that being nice by skipping/not counting all the xdmcp code that pure wayland display manager does not need. Having a stub program that can accept display manager wayland session and then processed to start a display manager X11 session processing so xserver comes up would be a good thing. Like it or not it makes sense from a maintenance point of view to drop X11 session support out upstream display managers. Yes this drop out of upstream lead us to the upcoming problem because is not just a distribution choice instead that the distributions don't or will not in future have the upstream choices. At this time we still have dual X11/Wayland display managers with current code to reference what the difference are this may not remain the case. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
i think this is the very definition of scope creep. IMHO this project should supply an example startx script meant to be run after logging into a vc with getty. it's going to be one of the X11DEs that supplies an xdmcp server. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
Hello @oiaohm, thank you for reporting the issue. Could you please update the description using the template given in #132 ? Please add your content in the template fields enclosed with Could you please mark the checkboxes in the Extra fields section too by replacing the space Thanks for your help. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
There is one huge elephant in the room cheako. Most X11DE don't provide their own xdmcp server. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_display_manager#Active The X11DE that have been providing the Now Ubuntu/Canonical did LightDM as a neutral xdmcp but really last 2 years has not seen any major work since they started defaulting to GDM. Historically x.org xserver and xfree86 provided it own XDM. X11 DE like xfce have never provided their own xdmcp solution. Also a lot stopped because secure handling usernames and passwords is absolutely not as straight forwards as it seams. Can get very complex with what distributions have decided todo with PAM solution. I am trying to keep users here with a graphical login experience. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
There were two projects that provided more than plenty support for XDMCP, the X11 anchor tenants. With them moving out of the mall, other projects will fill the void... For as many options as they can support, likely down from what we had with Gnome and KDE, but rest assured as soon as there are no viable X11DMCP servers someone will write one. Edit: What am I talking about... there is xdm. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
@oiaohm Thanks alot for "retemplating the issue! |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
cheako Name a distribution that uses xdm as default. What majority don't.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_display_manager#Inactive This idea if yours does not hold up that someone will write one. As pam has got more complex number of display managers for X11 has reduced massively. The fall way of X11 display managers starts before Wayland starts. Distribution has a choice to support existing X11 desktop environments option 1 like it or not will most likely be new wayback for most of them if nothing changes. Why because this works with distribution Wayland display manger. Remember you are now saying to user to try out xlibre with a normal login system they have to change their display manager as well. The reason for this issue is being able to start as a Display Manager Wayland Session will lower the barrier of entry to users for xlibre and will low the barrier of entry for distributions to include xlibre. Yes is a barrier that can prevent distributions from shipping xlibre if xlibre will not work with the distributions chosen default display manager. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
I'm not saying we need 10 DMs... in fact 4, including xdm, is probably too many. Someone will write something, perhaps with xdm as a base, that's the way of open source. I'm guessing one of the big X11 window manager teams will do something. They shouldn't go chasing after unicorns, trying to keep up with the extinguish phase. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_display_manager#Inactive cheako look at the Inactive list. X11 window manager teams use to. They ceased doing this a long time ago because it is too hard of work. Only the biggest teams like KDE and GNOME have had the resources to put into having their own display manager. XDM has mostly been kept alive by Oracle/Solaris developer. Yes the same developer who runs x.org xserver so not likely to be friendly to any particular changes to support Xlibre. Serous point what size do you think most X11 Window manager teams are. The answer is 1 person. A project that not KDE or Gnome that people would think is a big X11 window manager main team size is normally 1-2 people. https://github.com/linuxmint/cinnamon/graphs/contributors Yes when canonical has found that they cannot afford to maintain their own display manager remember they attempted with lightdm. This also cuts out most of the smaller distributions from rolling their own. https://www.majagrcic.com/blog/everybody-somebody-anybody-and-nobody cheako You attempting to make a point that the above little story says you should not. The point is the most likely correct answer other than KDE and GNOME and Oracle(for Solaris) the answer is most likely nobody else has the resources to put into maintaining a display manager. Killing blow KDE and GNOME are dropping X11 session support out their display managers and we have to live with it. CDE development fairly much stops in 2023. TDE massively under supplied for developers but it about the only exception that might have enough developers to keep its TDM alive. But then you run into the problem that most distributions will not have TDM from TDE because they will not have TDE. Xlibre did not fork XDM instead the Xlibre developers response as you can see here is that users will use just a distribution that happens to have a X11 compatible display manager that happens to be compatible with xlibre. This is also very much wishful thinking that their will be distributions to switch to with a compatible display manager. that will run the software the user needs. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
All that work and expense... so you can "stay in a graphical environment". Yeah, I get it, appearances are everything to people now, and they demand that underlying complexity be hidden from them, preserving the illusion of the matrix. Logging in on a virtual console is at least as easy, if not easier and faster than logging into a display manager, and I get the same functional result, and theoretically better security by running X non-root. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
You don't seem to understand that the biggest or the two biggest window manager teams will solve this issue, that's the way it has always been. There already are 2 good solutions in the form of startx and xdm and we welcome your contributions to either one. X11 should not cater to gnome-shell or gnome-session as a window manager and neither should it cater to gdm as a display manager... Though ppl are welcome to build and maintain compatibility layers, just don't expect any assistance from the x11 teams because it's a waste of time to chase obstinate infrastructure down. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
Moving this to X11Libre Ideas · Discussions · GitHub since it, well, seems more of a discussion and in the need to be refined. Once this is done we can have a look at the concrete requirements and what needs to be implemented. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
Is there anything preventing a DM that chooses Wayland to display itself from being able to start an X session? I don't think there is. If the display server wants to only support Wayland sessions and you want to boot into an X session, then use a different DM. At the end of the day, we can't force to distros, desktops, and display managers that do not want to support X sessions to support X sessions, it's that simple. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
There is a lot more setup code for DM be it running on X11 or Wayland to pass over to a X11 session than to pass over to a Wayland session. https://github.com/GNOME/gdm/blob/main/daemon/gdm-x-session.c#L255 Notice something problem here. You find this in the other X11 display managers. x11 xserver arguments are hard coded in the display managers. Now look a the wayland session the wayland compositor arguments are not hard coded in the display manager. The arguments a Wayland compositor starts with come straight out the ".desktop" in /usr/share/wayland-sessions. Yes the ".desktop" files in /usr/share/xsessions have zero control over the x11 xserver you are using.
Of course this has the question will that DM support Xlibre correctly. X11 session in most DM is calibrated and hard coded for x.org xserver these days. Like can you by that DM turn xnamespace off for a session. Yes doing what I asked for in this issue Will require handling how state is passed over between display manager to wayland compositor that different to X11 command line method.. Nothing stops you from starting X11 session from a Wayland Display Manager just like nothing stops you starting Wayland session from a X11 display manager as long as it support the session start up method. Of course you are not thinking that the X11 session startup method in the display manger is calibrated in most cases for X.org xserver and that xlibre to have extra options on top of x.org xserver options will have to have each display manager altered. This is why ones without decent active development I was not counting. Of course there is nothing really stopping a x11 xserver starting in a display manager wayland session other than not having a wrapper to take the state information that is transferred to Wayland compositor and converting it into command-line arguments for the x11 server and fending the x11 server the information nomrally in the xsession .desktop files. One thing that been overlooked is that starting a xlibre X11 session if xlibre develops will not be the same as the x.org xserver X11 session. Same thing happened when we had x.org xserver and xfree86 on distributions at the same time you find display managers unable to start one or the other correctly due to passing the wrong command-line arguments. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
@oiaohm After having a look at https://github.com/GNOME/gdm/blob/main/daemon/gdm-x-session.c#L255 I was thinking: Why not have a simple shell script which creates the correct command line to invoke the X server? Why hardcode such things? The shell script could be called by a whatever login/display manager, couldn't it? I really don't get the need for Wayland-something here. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
@oiaohm I intensivly cleaned up the Are We XLibre Yet? · X11Libre/xserver Wiki wiki page after your edit. This are the changes I kindly ask you to keep the discussion and your opinion here and only state factual correct information in the wiki. At best with sources. Having researched the situation about future X11 support for display managers, I tend to say that things look better than what one might think. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
Except its really simple to make it look better than it is. Entrance Enlightenment ❓ but should https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entrance_(display_manager)#cite_note-Current_Repo-3 https://github.com/wltjr/entrance#logindelogind-aka-systemd
If you are wanting to use logind/loginctl as majority of Linux distributions do then Entrance is out at least for now. Yes the readme here also has the project history. SLiM (agnostic) ✅ works When this is marked as works is this the unmaintained Slim on github or the slim-fork from sourceforge that maintained by a single developer.. This slim-fork also lacks logind/elogind intergration. The use to be 1 problem child when making a Display Manager that was PAM. I forgot about the modern one being logind/elogind integration so you have two problem child to deal with making a working display manager. as well as the graphical environments. Yes for distributions using systemd or elogind not having this integration this can have knock on effects. Like swap gdm/sddm/lightdm for SLIM/Entrance/TDM/dtlogin and find items not work right on distributions using the logind/elogind because session stuff has not been done right this can turn up as like network manager wanting root/sudo password for actions that normally would not have required as a local session. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
True.
Yes, I was referring to slim-fork. But it also has no logind/elogind intergration, that's true.
True. I updated Are We XLibre Yet? · X11Libre/xserver Wiki by marking SLiM etc. as "systemd logind free". |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
Thank you for your contribution! We currently restructured the "Ideas" discussions and accordingly this discussion will be moved to the X11Libre 4 Good Ideas For Later category. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
Uh oh!
There was an error while loading. Please reload this page.
Uh oh!
There was an error while loading. Please reload this page.
-
Describe the feature
Provide wrapper to allow xlibre X11 desktop session to start from Display manager Wayland Session.
It should be implemented because
This will allow xlibre to work on a broader range of distributions using what is a currently testing log in method.
Being able to using a wrapper and register a X11DE session up as a Wayland session for a Wayland supported display manager would avoid on quite a few distributions having to use a under-tested display manager with distributions PAM configuration.
What are the alternatives?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_display_manager#Active
This list of alternatives is getting shorter.
Pray that distributions still keep on supplying X11 compatible display managers.
Also remember distributions defaulting to Wayland display managers its the wayland display managers that will be tested against distribution PAM changes.
The X11 display managers were disappearing out of existence before Wayland turned up due to the trouble that happens when distribution alters PAM configuration and you are not using one of the distributions preferred X11 display mangers they tested with resulting in login failures and worse.
Addtional Information
Distributions that go Wayland dominate we can expect them to want their display managers not to have X11 session support. Yes if Wayland compositors and X11Libre Xserver can start from the same session type reduces this problem.
Extra fields
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
All reactions