I am not really sure if these are limitations and issues of X11,but the problem
is: who is going to lift them. We can talk forhours but the problem is whether
someone will step in and implement the ideas. On the other hand, Wayland, which
is supposed to be the future has tons of problems, issues, andlimitations. So
what are you proposing?
Regards,A.S.----------------------Apostolos Syropoulos
Xanthi, Greece
On Friday, June 20, 2025 at 10:59:32 AM GMT+3, Sad Clouds
<cryintotheblue...@gmail.com> wrote:
Some of the issues and limitations of X11:
- Complexity and latency associated with X11 protocol. This is part of
the reason XCB was created to replace Xlib, but in my view, these sorts
of hacks are not worth the effort.
- Hacks like direct rendering and shared memory extensions. These are
all designed to sidestep performance limitations of X11.
- Poor security around authentication and encryption. Yes you can
tunnel X11 via ssh or ipsec, but it's a bit clunky and requires correct
configuration on every remote node.
- Poor session handling. If Xserver is terminated, the session is
killed and remote X11 clients also terminate. With VNC I can disconnect
and reconnect multiple times and my session can be running in the
background.
- Complexity and limitations associated with multiple monitors with
different resolution and scaling, HDR issues
(https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/issues/1037#note_521100),
etc.
- Clunky font support. People didn't like how X11 handled fonts, so
they created fontconfig, which was a completely separate system,
relying on third party libraries for rendering fonts. Personally, I
hate font anti-aliasing and prefer older X11 bitmap fonts, as they look
much sharper on regular monitors. But people keep adding hacks and
workarounds to make X11 more "modern".
So to summarise: modern GUI applications use graphics card GPU for
things like window transparency, shadows, animations, etc. X11 can also
do window composing but via various extensions and workarounds. It is
showing its age and may not be the best design for such applications.
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