On Wed, 23 Aug 2017 at 10:06:26 -0700
Rick Moen <rick@???> wrote:

> Quoting Alessandro Selli (alessandroselli@???):
>
>> Not having to login as root to manually configure Xorg just to change
>> video card or monitor was one of the best and most wanted improvements in
>> Linux in the past 10 years.
>
> I'm sure, but on the other hand, how often did that happen? Extremely
> seldom.

How often did *what* happen? That one has to reconfigure Xorg because of a
card/monitor change? On desktops the monitor seldom changes, the graphics
card a few times. On laptops the video card never does, the secondary
display (aka external monitor) often does. So what? What does one gain
making Xorg configuration static? Close to nothing. What does one lose? A
lot. Having to login as root to reconfigure Xorg by hand is a show-stopper
in several places, like where I work: people who use the firm's PCs are
usually not given administrative credentials, they never do when they're
not employees. And even many who do cannot manually tune Xorg's config file,
because they've never seen one. And why should they do? Xorg can
self-configure when hardware changes, why drop a very useful feature because
it's seldom necessary (but when it is not having it can be a nightmare)?

>> Manual Xorg configuration is so tedious, time consuming and error
>> prone that requiring users to be capable of it is just crazy.
>
> Au contraire: Even if you had nothing besides Xorg (or previously
> XFree86) itself, in almost all cases you could just do 'Xorg -configure
>> /etc/X11/Xorg.conf' and nothing else.

If Xorg fails to autoconfigure on some hardware, very likely
automatic config file generation is going to fail or it will not work on
that hardware.

> However, pretty nearly all
> distributions provided even-easier X configurator tools.

What is Devuan's?

> Many long years ago during the XFree86 era, different chipset
> necessitated installing individual X server packages, so, if you
> switched cards, you often needed to not only reconfigure X but also
> install a new X11 server package. That was burdensome -- but, again,
> how often do you wake up one morning and say 'I know! I'm going to
> install a different video card today!' And that bit was ages ago.

Yeah, that was ages ago, and it has no relevance to today's case.
I remember those days, when lots of people would update to the latest
Matrox/Ati/3d-fx/nVidia card as soon as it was out to get the latest GLX
support which was needed by some game or by GoogleEarth.

> Perspective, not just a dictionary word.

Indeed.


Alessandro