Graphical desktop system X Window turns 38:
The X window system turned 38 years old this week, and although it has more rivals than ever, it is still the go-to for a graphical desktop on Unix.
The first public release of the X window system, according to Robert W. Scheifler's announcement, was 19 June 1984.
X itself was a rewrite of an older windowing system called W, which ran on a research microkernel OS called the V-System (V→W→X, you see.) Both the V-System and the W window system seem to have now been lost, although Bryan Lunduke has an interesting history.
About the only relic that you can see today, if you're curious, is the V-System manual [PDF].
Just two years after launch, X had already reached version 10 – the oldest point release showing in the release history on the X.org Foundation web page. X11R1 was introduced in 1987, and with some modifications, that's what the world is still using today.
That is quite a feat of longevity, considering that that's the same year as OS/2 1.0 came out, as well as Acorn's Archimedes range.
The latest version, X11R7.7, is already a decade ago, and currently there's no timeline for a monolithic X11R7.8, let alone the barely even sketched out X12.
The X project is largely unchanging these days: we reported in 2020 that its lead maintainer had walked away. The X Consortium no longer exists, and today, X is maintained by Freedesktop.org – which is, of course, the primary body behind Wayland, the planned replacement for X.
[...] One of the central functions of X is that it works over a network connection, something that Wayland by design does not do, although there are workarounds such as waypipe and wayVNC.
It could even be that something better comes along and usurps Wayland altogether. The Arcan project is working on a completely new type of display server, and has a demonstration desktop called Durden. The website is prolix to say the least, and you might get more of an overview from its wiki or simply watching some demo videos.
ChromeOS doesn't directly use either X or Wayland, but has its own Ozone tool – although this does support Wayland for running Android apps on ChromeBooks.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Saturday June 25 2022, @03:30PM (27 children)
For some reason, even the best contenders still lack basic things that make X work better.
The latest example of this I stumbled onto is this: I maintain this Linux utility that generates TOTP codes and lets you copy / paste them into other open windows. With X, no problem: greb the window currently in focus and generate synthetic input events. It's a super-basic, super-useful functionality that's been around for decades.
In Wayland? Not so much: Wayland has no concept of window in focus, nor does it let you inject synthetic events in a particular Window. The result is, my simple utility won't run in vanilla Ubuntu, and there's nothing I can do about it. Just because Wayland sucks in those respects for no good reason that I can see. And it's not new, and it apparently won't be fixed.
All it takes is a couple such micro-injuries and losses of functionalities for users to stick with what works - X - even if it's a lot slower, kludgey and complicated.
And that's why it's still around after 4 decades: for some reason, none of the challenger windowing systems seem to understand that they must be AT LEAST as good at EVERYTHING X does to dislodge such an entrenched system. Being almost as good, or better in most everything but lacking in one seemingly minor area or other is not good enough, and will hurt adoption of the new system.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 25 2022, @03:55PM (2 children)
wayland
systemd
gnome
are examples of why we can't have nice things.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 25 2022, @05:35PM (1 child)
Aren't all of those Red Hat owned projects?
(Score: 2) by TheGratefulNet on Saturday June 25 2022, @09:15PM
redhat. redhats?? sigh...
like, "make linux great again" ?
sorry. ;)
OT: I also apologize to the world on behalf of the (now, very screwed up) USA. we have lost our way. if you find it somewhere, please let us know or just mail it back to us.
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 25 2022, @05:03PM (5 children)
The lesson of systemd is that it's OK even if you are worse at everything, so long as you have political power.
(Score: 4, Informative) by TheGratefulNet on Saturday June 25 2022, @09:17PM (4 children)
what would you say if I told you that systemd and a lot of that desktop style stuff is in MANY cars, of the self-driving kind? or partially self driving.
its true. its not something I agree with and I've commented before on this but when I find it and ask for reasons why we picked this, I never get a good answer. buildroot and yocto all have other init systems for embedded, or did that get taken away, recently? I dont think its gone, and yet, embedded systems are out there, in the wild, with systemd crap running them. well, rebooting them. sometimes.
what do you guys think? is this ever a good idea?
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 25 2022, @10:38PM (3 children)
Non programmer, ME chiming in: IMO, running anything safety critical in a car is not the place for commercial grade software. My preference: No desktop or webserver OS would even be considered, although specific realtime versions might pass muster.
This will probably raise a lot of hackles, but an OS that has really been beaten to death is whatever IBM is selling for their mainframes. That stuff is reliable. Probably ugly, but reliable, many 999999s.
(Score: 2) by TheGratefulNet on Sunday June 26 2022, @12:02AM
to be clear, there are 2 general types of 'complex ecu' in the car; those that run linux and those that run RTOS (like freertos). note, freertos and lwip are inside esp8266 chips even though arduino hides most of it.
the linux boxes are never safety critical boxes. they handle things that are more 'app level' and while they often have can and lin and eth, the critical can bus stuff is handled by realtime ecus.
still, systemd is a nasty enough thing on desktop. I cringe when I see that (and binary journals instead of ascii syslogs) on cars.
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Sunday June 26 2022, @01:35AM (1 child)
Remember: The SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule has touch screen displays that are controlled by . . .
<no-sarcasm>
Yes. Really.
I am seriously not kidding.
</no-sarcasm>
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 28 2022, @08:20PM
Thankfully, they have auxiliary controls for the critical parts of the spacecraft. But they don't look fancy or sci-fi enough, so they hide them out of camera-shot or behind panels.
(Score: 3, Disagree) by RamiK on Saturday June 25 2022, @08:26PM (14 children)
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/merge_requests/50 [freedesktop.org]
X conflicts with the opengl graphics pipeline to such an extent that both the Android and the Freedesktop devs concluded it's impossible to work around many of the redraws while passing around all the extra contexts & locks. It might have been a different story if they had vulkan to work with early on since they could have gone lower to match the state machine by fine tuning semaphores in a way that's x-compatible... But even then it would have required a complete rewrite and hardware-specific drivers so its questionable if they would have gone through with it.
X lost 99.9% of its potential user base to surfaceflinger and ozone. What remains is of little to no commercial interest. Well, that was true right up until fairly recently when:
1. Vulkan forced rewrites of opengl and egl code thus overlapping the redevelopment efforts between mobile and desktop to a great extent.
2. Microsoft's release of Win11 managed to piss off Valve enough to invest time and capital into wayland.
Regardless, X's longevity isn't to due to the alternatives being feature incomplete. It's the opposite: It was largely surpassed by other solutions to such an extent that what little remains barely justifies the effort that would go into replacing it in all its use cases.
compiling...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 25 2022, @10:40PM (8 children)
So you're saying that X just works and there's no point to wasting time trying to replace it?
Seems we're all in agreement.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Sunday June 26 2022, @01:38AM (6 children)
X may work. But it has a fatal flaw that makes its replacement a matter of highest priority.
It uses the terminology "server" and "client" in a way that is opposite to what most people think of as server and client.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 26 2022, @02:39AM
cancel culture for using the wrong X-terms. :)
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday June 26 2022, @05:34PM (4 children)
It uses the terms the correct way. If the majority of people is clueless about those terms, it's not X's fault.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday June 29 2022, @02:22PM (3 children)
It is only the correct way if you think a Decwriter is the major focus but the mainframe that occupies the entire office floor above you is a mere peripheral. An afterthought really.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Wednesday June 29 2022, @05:51PM (2 children)
A server is a program that manages a resource, and a client is another program that contacts the server to access the resource.
Now given that servers often run on dedicated big machines, people have come to also use the term to refer to those big machines that run the servers. But X is software, not hardware, and therefore the software terms apply.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday June 29 2022, @07:29PM (1 child)
I really do actually understand the notion of how X is a server.
However in any conventional use or conversation it is typically backwards.
It always seemed backwards.
I'm not the only one.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday June 30 2022, @09:26AM
So people would call progranmslike XTerm or Firefox servers?
Because in most cases these days, all the programs are running on the same computer anyway.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Informative) by RamiK on Sunday June 26 2022, @09:30AM
Sure. If X's performance issues aren't relevant to your use case, why stop using it? I personally use xorg+i3wm on one box for many things. I also keep an air-gapped winxp 32bit box running ie11 for a few specific things. I even have a 4/32 router running openwrt without luci as a network repeater... If it works and isn't costly to keep around, why throw it away?
If anything, I'm far more receptive to Arcan's call to drop the terminal protocol ( https://arcan-fe.com/2022/04/02/the-day-of-a-new-command-line-interface-shell/ [arcan-fe.com] ) since I constantly run into those sorts of issues... In that space I'd be more inclined say that people should just stop using the old crap and move on. But with xorg vs. wayland? Nah. That's not as bad.
compiling...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 25 2022, @10:50PM (4 children)
The year of our Lord 2021?
"Initial release 30 September 2008; 13 years ago"
So maybe in another 30 years of development, Wayland will hopefully achieve feature parity with X at last. :)))
To what, exactly? What were they trying to do, demon summoning? So they found a way to fail while hordes of people use OpenGL windows in X without any problems?
Have Nvidia driver, never seen any problem in ages.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Sunday June 26 2022, @08:47AM (3 children)
Wayland will never achieve feature parity with X. e.g. Why would anyone bother with a print server or network transparency when you can just screenshot / stream? Well, the print server was removed from xorg so technically, x isn't in feature parity with x nowadays... Well, whatever. Qemu works in wayland so just use that I guess.
To repeat, preventing redraws. For actual figures, both gnome and firefox moved from GLX to EGL in both x11 and wayland so ~>2021 comparisons between x and wayland reflect the costs of x's additional context switches. To give a rough estimate though, it's about %1-3 throughput and 20% peaks worth graphics compute. The memory overhead is a bit more complex since wayland adds a buffer for each window so, depending on resolution, 2-3 windows means wayland is slimmer but over 5 typically means x is more efficient.
Anyhow, there's an old presentation discussing the x, xorg and wayland background that should answer most questions I hope: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWQh_DmDLKQ [youtube.com]
compiling...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 26 2022, @07:18PM (2 children)
Translation: all the huge ado is about an actual nothing. Q.e.d.
1-3% is random noise, and 20% peak is what you lose by one single misoptimized inner loop if you are lucky.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Sunday June 26 2022, @09:44PM (1 child)
It's a frame tear / drop / redraw worth which isn't tolerable for commercial embedded / gaming / video playback.
compiling...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 27 2022, @12:42AM
The ONLY cause of frame tear is a broken desktop compositor messing with the video player's window. The video players themselves have had no tear since times immemorial, with Nvidia drivers at least, and they don't have it now, once the compositor is prevented from fouling up their window.
If people who make compositors cannot NOT foul up video windows, they should be leaving said windows ALONE when no effects are applied to them (which is 99.99% of the time).
Another option is for them to learn what they are doing before doing it, but I know learning things and fixing bugs is totally out of fashion these days.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by sjames on Sunday June 26 2022, @12:09AM
For some reason, instead the Wayland people went with insisting nobody ever uses [feature] of X, even when in a conversation with someone who just said they depend on [feature] daily and want to know how it might work in Wayland.
Then they wonder why I and others have shown zero interest in moving.
BTW, if you insist, Ubuntu will give you X. I know because I insisted on my workstation.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 26 2022, @01:26AM
I recently got a new laptop. I installed Debian testing, and was going to see how well my window manager's (enlightenment) wayland port was doing. Never bothered. After searching for replacements of things I use all the time, e.g., mouse gestures ([heavily patched] easystroke), and finding nothing equivalent, I shrugged, and continued forward with X (been using X since the late 80s).
X mostly just works today, but you still can configure things at a low level if you need to. Sometime in the 90s, I had a laptop with a 640x480 LCD. I used an XF86Config modeline that claimed the display required double scanning (which would never apply to an LCD), and ended up with every other horizontal line deleted. Everything (e.g., text in an xterm) was still readable, and not really distorted looking, but I had 640x960 resolution now! People complain if they have to configure things, but the alternative view, is if you have an evil idea and a flexible configuration system, you can accomplish really neat things.
(Score: 2) by boltronics on Sunday June 26 2022, @03:04AM
I switched to Wayland this year, willingly. I moved my laptop from Debian Bullseye + XFCE to Arch + KDE, because X (and old KDE/Wayland i Debian) just couldn't do what I needed.
Specifically, I have a 4K 14" screen, and I also connect to an external 4K 32" monitor. I need DPI scaling on one to be different from the other, and I also need to be able to seamlessly drag windows between minitors while keeping the per-monitor scaling correct during the transition. This is the only solution I've found that can work for me.
Yes Wayland has some paper cuts. I had to switch screen capture tools, I have occasional copy/paste bugs, etc... but the main thing is that it solves modern problems, so wins by default.
On my 6 year old desktop at home with a single 2K panel, X works fine and I have no need to switch on that system.
It's GNU/Linux dammit!
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 25 2022, @04:42PM
The only place I can think of that would still have a copy of W or other versions of the V-system would be backup tapes at Stanford or MIT
The copy on bitsavers came from someone that worked on the project, and was read off of their magtape back in the 80's
I talked to Jim Gettys about CHM archiving the earlier versions of X 10 years ago, and he hadn't saved anything. The only reason X
was saved back to 10.3 was those were the earliest versions that were distributed widely via usenet and ftp.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 25 2022, @04:58PM (16 children)
Sun's NeWS [wikipedia.org] was a far better graphical windowing system and would have moved the industry well ahead of where X did, but Sun foolishly decided to charge money for it, so it died.
I recall T-shirts (posters? handouts?) from that era with a fake advertisment for the book "X-netics by L. Bob Scheifler". Some of the Sun folks were less than pleased by X's rise and considered it a cult.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 25 2022, @05:55PM (12 children)
Brought to you by the same guy that inflicted Java on the world.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 25 2022, @06:25PM
What would you have everybody else use--Python?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 25 2022, @06:53PM
Maybe the failure of NeWS drove him crazy.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 25 2022, @06:56PM
And sold the rights to Emacs that weren't his.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Saturday June 25 2022, @09:00PM (8 children)
The most popular programming language for 15 years running, and even now still in the top 3. To have such large uptake for so long, it must be doing something right.
But if it isn't right for YOU then it must not be right for anyone ever!
If there were one perfect programming language for all purposes, we would all be using it already.
Back here in the real world there are lots of languages because they serve different needs. Any language that has been wildly successful must be doing something right. For some significant audience.
Most Popular Programming Languages 1965 - 2019 [youtube.com]
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 25 2022, @09:32PM
It is owned by Evilcorp
It will NEVER be 'right'
(Score: 3, Interesting) by sjames on Sunday June 26 2022, @12:13AM
Java works OK for some things, but always seems to have more than a whiff of pig with JATO to it.
Java is the new COBOL.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 26 2022, @12:53AM (4 children)
(different ac)
I remember when Java was first announced. A successor to UCSD's P system with a more modern language and the backing of Sun. It was going to be amazing, write once, run anywhere applications were going to be the norm...
But, it didn't work out that way. Pretty much the only two places java is used today, is server-side "enterprise" applications that are only ever run on a single platform anyway, and phones which use so much native code that when x86 android phones came out, they couldn't run many apps because even though parts of the app were in java to interface with Google's apis, the rest of the app's code was native (only compiled for ARM), because java was too slow.
It is odd how java fulfilled none of its original promises, and is now just used as yet another memory safe language and portability doesn't even come up anymore.
But, java sure is dominant in those two spaces.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Sunday June 26 2022, @01:46AM (3 children)
Java was in those shiny little chips on your credit card for a long time.
Java is in every Blue Ray player.
Don't underestimate how large an installed base that actually is.
Enterprise software and vertical market software (specialized for particular business) are what makes the world go around. It's there. Everywhere. Silent. You don't even notice it.
You go to your doctor, she uses specialized web applications. You go to the library, they have specialized software. You go to your oil-change place . . . more custom software. Custom software for plumbers, law enforcement, cabinet makers, legal offices, and it goes on and on.
Not all of this is in Java, but of the software that makes the world go around, a good bit of it is in Java. Too much to be replaced. (like COBOL)
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 26 2022, @04:35PM (2 children)
> Don't underestimate how large an installed base that actually is.
I don't. But, I still think it is odd that the most distinguishing feature of Java, portability, is not even a consideration where java is most used.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 27 2022, @07:52PM
You can run Java apps on Windows, Linux, or Macintosh OSes on x86-64 or ARM CPU architectures. I consider that pretty damn good cross platform capability. Java is a server language, and those are the server flavors.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 28 2022, @08:45PM
It is a large consideration. We have run the exact same Java code on machines ranging from COTS x86, SBC ARMs, big-iron POWER, and everything between. Single-core and low memory to supercomputing clusters. Big endian, little endian, bi-endian processors. Linux, BSDs, Windows, operating systems you've probably never heard of, and no OS at all. Java's portability is very important when you are building systems engineered to last decades. It is very important when you have to write software that must run anywhere, even environments that aren't invented yet.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 27 2022, @05:59PM
JAVA: The Suited Whores' Choice!
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 25 2022, @07:18PM (1 child)
No one remembers Display Postscript either, beyond NeXT fanbois
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 26 2022, @12:55AM
> No one remembers Display Postscript either
Yes, some of us do.
> beyond NeXT fanbois
Oh.
(Score: 2) by TheGratefulNet on Saturday June 25 2022, @09:20PM
ah, sun OS windowing. aka, brokenlook.
seen on a whiteboard, while at Sun (long time ago):
"bugs fly in from Open Windows"
(I miss sun. and sgi. and dec. and and and..)
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
(Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 25 2022, @06:00PM
Sun folks were less than pleased by X's rise and considered it a cult.
--
Open Systems instead of Free Software.
(Score: 3, Funny) by DannyB on Saturday June 25 2022, @09:10PM
X turning 38 is better than turning 2038.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2) by Rich on Sunday June 26 2022, @08:13PM (3 children)
X Windows was created by academics trying to rip off the Mac for their purposes without the slightest ability to perceive beauty, elegance, or even coherence. These people came from a UI background with marvels like awk or sed - but compare the original libx11 to what's in Inside Macintosh wrt QuickDraw and Events. Of course they had expensive machinery that wasn't available to the plebs so they would add process separation (which originally was thought out as bad as their mutilation of what was the clipboard).
Then the corporate bigwigs figured out that this Mac toy stuff wasn't actually that much of a toy concept, and they saw Windows gaining territory and wanted a piece of the cake too (or just not be steamrollered), but they would lose the race, until they got a head start, which was X. Problem was, there were many vendors, but only one X, so they split it up between them and introduced the "no policy" policy. Which gave us the worst of both worlds. Either just have top level windows and render client side (as it is done today), or do the controls servier side. They went for top-level controls, rendered client side. I leave out the confusion coming from the required "window manager" here.
With Linux upcoming, we got a free version of X that had upheld the disdain for any user friendliness. Writing modelines for xf86.conf used to be the worst example of a configuration setup in history and only recently was surpassed in its difficulty by the task to configure Windows (or Android, to be fair) so that it does not exfiltrate personal data.
Anyway, while the previous struggle was among the workstation vendors on who'd win the UNIX desktop wars, RedHat had become the corporate elite of the Linux world and figured out that who controlled the window system controls Linux. At the same time, graphics drivers reached a complexity that was beyond the community to tackle, especially with the amout of withheld proprietary documentation. RedHat since make sure that the graphics drivers are closely coupled to the window system they control. Two decades ago there was a showdown between XGL and AIGLX. XGL would have been a standalone graphics stack, on which a driverless X would have sat. RedHat made sure that AIGLX made it in, interwoven with X11 in ugly ways. This made sure that no one else can try a clean start with a windowing system, and the strategy is continued today with Wayland.
Wayland's progress, btw, is so slow that I suspect malicious intent rather than incompetence. With today's knowledge, tools, and libraries, a decent desktop can be hacked out in less than a man year if there's a solid driver foundation to base it on. And, straying a bit further from the topic, the GTK team has recently announced that they don't want to cater to other frameworks trying to use common widgets anymore, but just serve GNOME.
Anyway, I use X11 when I use Linux. It's there, and we have to live with it. And, at the end of the day, it gets the job done. About as good as Windows 3.11 got the job done.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 27 2022, @01:50AM (2 children)
Everything you said is wrong. What really happened:
X and MacOS were introduced the same year, 1984.
Both have the same ultimate progenitor, the Xerox Alto which was introduced in 1973. But, X is a decedent of W which was introduced in 1983, so beat MacOS by a year. But, even though the family of W/X predate MacOS, the MacOS GUI was inspired directly by the Xerox Alto. Steve Jobs was given a demonstration of Xerox's gui + mouse in 1979 leading ultimately to MacOS UI using the same key features.
In chronological order:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Alto [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W_Window_System [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System [wikipedia.org]
https://www.britannica.com/technology/Mac-OS [britannica.com]
(Score: 2) by Rich on Monday June 27 2022, @10:36AM (1 child)
Eh?
"19 June 1984 0907-EDT (Tuesday) I've spent the last couple weeks writing a window system for the VS100." And conveniently the diffs to the "predecessors" are lost.
That's half a year after the Mac was out, and the Lisa was out for even longer, so Californian universities certainly had knowledge about Apple's semantics. The PARC stuff was awkward to use and couldn't even auto-refresh. It was four years of work, mostly of Hertzfeld, Atkinson, Tesler (ex-PARC!), and Raskin to turn that into something smoothly interactive.
X uses crude lists of rectangles to work around the region patent from Apple (really the first time software patents became seriously ugly), so the developers either were precisely in the know about what Apple did, or operated at a competence level way below below Atkinson. (But then, as Bob Scheifler wrote, "it took a couple of weeks" to write it)
Also, here's the challenge to find anything in history more shitty to configure than XF86's modelines. (Sendmail doesn't count, that requires an admin anyway)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 27 2022, @06:17PM
You have conveniently ignored that W (the direct predecessor to X) existed 1 year before MacOS was released.
Mac was neat and all, but rewriting history is silly.