What is Unity 8 and why's it a big deal?
Unity as a name and project began life in 2010 as a new UI for desktops and laptops and it arrived swiftly – in the following year. However, the idea morphed to offer the same screen and user experience on all devices regardless of mouse or touch. Put Ubuntu running Unity 8 on a phone and it'll render as a phone, put it on a PC and it'll render as a PC, put it on a tablet and it'll render as a tablet. That's the idea anyway, and it was analogous to ideas floating around Redmond for a single version of Windows running on PCs, phones and tablets – the same UI and same "experience". One brand, development and runtime.
That was part of the idea of Windows 8 anyway, and the Metro UI.
Coming with Unity 8 is Mir, the planned display server replacement to the predominant X Windows[sic] System, which Canonical announced in March 2013.
X Windows[sic] System is an industry standard for bitmap displays in Unix-like systems such as Ubuntu and is the product of Stanford University, MIT and IBM. Canonical wants to build its own display server, however.
Four years on, though, the dream remains unrealised with Mir like Unity 8 available only as a preview.
Unity 8 is, by the reckoning of Ubuntu daddy Mark Shuttleworth, a year late.
Windows 8 was an amazing innovation and totally worth replicating?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 07 2017, @11:07AM
From the xterm man page:
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 07 2017, @09:21PM
https://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.6/doc/xextproto/security.html [x.org] copyright 1996, over 20 years old. So the problem is not X11, the problem is the programs that ignore the things already provided. Two decades of "X11 is insecure" bullshit. No, your fucking program or toolkit is insecure.
Same style than blaming X11 for being slow (xlib, yet someone put effort in coding xcb to fix many issues), being unable to refresh without jaggies (SYNC & DOUBLE-BUFFER exts), etc. Ignore what is there (run xdpyinfo if you wonder what you got) or the option to create a fix (new extension... like XFIXES when it was new), and just go full NIH.
Oh, BTW, if you need to go paranoid and fix a crappy program, you can go with Firejail + Xpra, no need of dumping X11.