[...] And the providers of that money want a more secure and more maintainable replacement for Xorg. Personally, I will regret the passing of XOrg but I am not going to rail against it, especially on a Forum that has absolutely no say in the decision. [...] Gtk2 is past its use by date. Its flogging a dead horse. It has ceased to be. It is a dead widget set.
i have yet to hear
any compelling argument as to why Xorg (X11) or GTK2 are no longer fit for purpose. i've certainly heard many nebulous claims such as 'it is insecure', 'it is old', 'no one uses it any more', but i have
not heard any specific examples. all i've heard is what is essentially 'advertising hype', the sort of stuff that makes for good advertising content designed to capture customers. or youtube videos. or AI slop.
can
anyone provide examples where:
- Xorg (X11) has been the cause of a security failure due to defects in the Xorg code or design?
- GTK2 has been the cause of a security failure due to defects in the GTK2 code or design?
for both Xorg (X11) and GTK2, i
have heard complaints that keeping them is consuming disk space. but then today disk space is incredibly cheap compared to just 2 or 3 few years back - 32gb of flash memory costs less than $5, and the binary footprint of
both projects together would fit into a minuscule corner of that 32gb. i'd estimate the actual hardware cost of keeping Xorg (X11) and GTK2 on an individual linux machine would be no more than a few cents.
i've also heard complaints that Xorg (X11) and GTK2 are not as fast as the proposed replacements. but again, computrons are so incredibly cheap these days that speed of code execution is irrelevant in any but a tiny fraction of cases. the same holds for RAM usage - RAM is cheap as chips, and will continue to get cheaper once the AI boom has done its thing.
and as for (non-security) bugs within the code: sure, GTK2 has some things that do not work correctly, but these things are well understood since the code has been (essentially) frozen for the past few years. those who write code that interfaces with GTK2 (i'm taking here about our solo UI programmer, zeljko) has done a sterling job in working around those things in GTK2 that are 'less-than-perfect'. it is a fact that
all software has bugs; we document them and provide workarounds.
i feel we need replacements for Xorg (X11) and GTK2 as much as we need a new design of fork to enable us to eat faster and more efficiently. or a better design of paperclip, or any number of 'new things' that are no better than the 'old things' we already have.
[...] Please stop this conspiracy theory agenda. No one is lying to you, what on earth would we have to gain if we were? [...]
some folks are picking up on the 'advertising hype' and re-broadcasting it as "fact". it is not a conspiracy, it is just people doing what people do - they hear a well dressed-up opinion, and innocently dress it up as 'fact'. it is the same sort of perfectly innocent gossip that used to get witches burnt at the stake. the one thing that irks me most, is when intelligent folks start accepting things as "fact" when there is no actual evidence to back it up. as i said above, i've seen
no compelling arguments for replacing Xorg (X11) or for
removing GTK2 from distros; what i have seen is hyperbole being accepted by folks who should know better.
[...] Should I lock this topic? [...]
i notice there are around 700 threads on this section of the forums (Lazarus » Forum » Programming » Operating Systems » Linux), and that this topic has received 43422 views.
it is ranking at number 3 on the most viewed list, which to me seems pretty impressive. forum members
are interested in the discussion, and while i agree that most everything that there is to say has already been said, i feel that 'locking' the topic would cast a shadow over the integrity of freepascal.org as an open community.
cheers,
rob.
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