When you consider they were at one point planning to limit people to making AVX2 a requirement, this kinda falls in line with the frustration they’re being too deviated from standards.
Hence why @wendell has moved his VFIO tutorials to Pop!_OS for the time being, I think…
Wendell might need to clarify some of the points in that rant or set the record straight, because this is the point of view of an extremely frustrated dev, and we need more points of view about Fedora before we brush it off.
Personally, Fedora 28 did not have these issues, but I’m now hesitant to move to Fedora 31 and I myself may just go to Pop!_OS 20.04 LTS for VFIO.
TBH I can see both sides of the argument so I’m not particularly mad at anyone here.
Running rootless X might be unconventional, but they do have a point that without pushing the changes, they’ll never get adopted. And that’s not just limited to software. And their security argument might not be relevant now, but we also once thought Intel CPUs were safe, and see where we stand now. We also once thought OpenSSL was rather save until Heartbleed happened. So just because now there are no (known) attacks on X, doesn’t mean we can extrapolate that on the future. So I can totally see why they are doing this especially with respects to RHEL where security is arguably a selling point.
The argument of “it’s nvidias fault” might have been a bit too fast (though we also don’t know if those answers were from actual Fedora devs or from random people that just threw something at the wall). But on the other hand they do have a point in saying that if their drivers were open source, people could fix it themselves. For how it is now we will always have to wait on nvidia for no particularly good reason. See also: AMDGPU.
From what I know (and I don’t know if this is still up to date), nvidia also just straight up doesn’t support Wayland either… like… at all. Think about Wayland what you will, but eventually it will probably replace X at least on the Desktop side of things.
So all in all, I don’t think that change was with bad intention, and nvidia may or may not be at least partially to blame.
It kind of bugs me that the author thinks running X as root is some kind of Linux “standard.” No, it’s just that the original XFree86 had no kernel drivers that it could use. So they faked up all the kernel support in the X server. Even running BIOS code in the X server. It was a horrible kludge and disgusting hack. But hey it worked on Linux and the BSDs. Mostly.
None of the real UNIX systems ran X as root. Not Solaris, not HP-UX, not AIX or SGI. Every one of those had real in-kernel drivers for their graphics hardware so that no program had to be given the ability to WRITE ALL OF KERNEL MEMORY and PCI MEMORY MAPS and DMA and INTERRUPT REMAPPING.
Because from a security standpoint that would be ridiculous.
So as for the X standard, running without root is simply going back to how it really was standard.
Wasn’t there something in the RHEL announcement that they wanted to focus more on gaming too?
Also, what makes a “workstation OS” really (or a “gaming OS” for that matter)? I mean… as long as drivers are up to date you can use it for anything really…