We need to make a X11 demo (as in demoscene demo)

[darkhog]

Frankly we need to make a statement to show how great X is compared to the Wayland. And what would be better than a demoscene demo showing TRUE POWER of X that literally can't be run on Wayland or even XWayland/Wayback because of the missing components?

What we need:

• Some cool demoscene effects and routines that works only on X11 (both Xorg and Xlibre) and which use extensions that Wayland simply doesn't support, even in XWayland. Use as many obscure and interesting X extensions as you can!
• A cool music track, possibly make in a tracker.
• Someone to organize and help put it all together (me).

Ideally it would be done without pulling metux off the main task of developing Xlibre, and would be something we'd do in the spare time for fun. What do you say?

Some examples to inspire you:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHXx3orN35Y
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGpU3DicbLQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWDxdoRTZPc

[bonkmaykrQ]

Correct me if I am wrong, but I don't think X has much in the way of hardware accelerated drawing functionality that sets it apart from Wayland, aside from lower latency. It's having functional interactions with the UI that make X so important for such a long time.

Maybe using only legacy X protocol features just because "why not" would be an interesting project but it wouldn't show the "true power of X".

[darkhog]

We can just use whatever extensions X has that aren't supported under (X)Wayland. The point is to make something that only works on X11 and not Wayland. Use of external libraries, etc. is allowed, as well as interactivity, as long as it uses arcane/obscure extensions that makes it choke under Wayland, but not under X11. For example, we could draw over other apps (which isn't allowed under Wayland) and do some cool effects that way. Or use XComposite to get textures straight from the user's display and do something funky with them. And does it really have to be hardware accelerated?

[kkmzero]

The point was to try as hard to fit as much as you can into very limited space. Often times, the result was nice, very small and portable executable. I don't know for sure but if I would be thinking about doing something like that on Linux/Unix, I'd try as hard as to avoid window manager altogether and preferably just try to draw to framebuffer if that's even possible anymore. On Linux you want to avoid everything except the kernel because who knows what users might have installed and I assume baking X into your executable will not make it small. Afaik drawing can be done both in X or Wayland window though. However, this experiment can be useful because who knows what problems you might uncover if you try to use some obscure extensions or whatever.

[darkhog]

That might be the point of regular demos, but not this one. We treat "runs fine on XWayland" as a bug, and fix it, by making deliberate extension and protocol choices that makes it only run on X11. Just like 8088mph and related demos can only be ran on genuine hardware and not under, say, DOSBox.

[wayward777]

I'd try as hard as to avoid window manager altogether and preferably just try to draw to framebuffer if that's even possible anymore.

Someone is working very hard on reviving and preserving the linux framebuffer. See the following links:
https://github.com/caramelli
https://archive.fosdem.org/2020/schedule/speaker/nicolas_caramelli/

I sort of wish people would shout from the rooftops about this project, it is very cool work that he's doing.

From a security standpoint, I have been bothered for some time about binary blobs doing who-knows-what in the background (malware, backdoors, etc) and would like to see more work done with framebufffer.

[callmetango]

Thank you for your contribution! We currently restructured the "Ideas" discussions and accordingly this discussion will be moved to the X11Libre 1 New Ideas · Discussions · GitHub category.