Don't Bet On "X12" Succeeding X11 Rather Than Wayland (Or Mir)

Written by Michael Larabel in X.Org on 16 June 2015 at 04:02 PM EDT. 50 Comments
X.ORG
While there's long been an X.Org Wiki page with some pipe dreams for X12 as the successor to the X11 protocol, don't bet on it ever happening.

Plans for X12 are occasionally talked about but there's been no actual work towards this milestone. As most Phoronix readers know, a majority of the upstream "X.Org developers" are now also contributing to Wayland or focusing upon parts of the stack that carry forward -- such as Mesa, DRM, libinput, etc. However, in what seems like comic relief, every few years there's someone coming out with bold claims or suggestions for the next-generation X.

This week an independent user wrote about nested procedures in X12. "I would like to suggest something, which could improve speed of X12 protocol and maybe XServer too. My suggestions is the same idea, which makes databases works faster, OpenGL(via commands list) works faster and NoMachine NX works faster: nested procedures. I don't know, which language you will select to writing nested procedures. I think, that my idea could improve speed of data exchange over network. It could also improve speed of X subsystem, because window manager could declare nested procedure, which could be compiled and no needs to send signals into window manager. We can drop whole code of supporting window manager from X Server and suggest Window Manager developers to attach nested procedures to events of X Server. Maybe just drop as many messages as we can and force to use nested procedures to make X Server implementation simpler? I don't know, but my idea seems to be very mad."

Longtime X developer at Sun/Oracle, Alan Coopersmith, responded snarkily that it's basically a re-invent of Sun's NeWS window system from two decades ago, as well as the obvious, "The current massive redesign work is all going into Wayland now - there is no one working on X12, and no massive redesign planned for X. Making stored procedures in the Xserver work safely & securely would be a very complex task that someone would have to be really dedicated to the idea to complete, and I don't know anyone with the time available to do that - do you?"

Hopefully within the next year or so we'll finally see Fedora and other Linux distributions defaulting to a Wayland-based environment over an X.Org Server. On the Ubuntu front, their goals for Mir on the desktop have also been dragged out.
Related News
About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

Popular News This Week