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September 15th was the 30th anniversary of the anniversary of X11
The X11 window system turns 30 years old today! X11 which still lives on through today via the X.Org Server on Linux, BSD, Solaris, and other operating systems is now three decades old.
It was on this day in 1987 that Ralph Swick of MIT announced the X Window System Version 11 Release 1. As explained in the announcement compared to earlier versions of X, X11 offered "This release represents a major redesign and enhancement of X and signals it's graduation from the research community into the product engineering and development community. The X Window System version 11 is intended to be able to support virtually all known instances of raster display hardware and reasonable future hardware, including hardware supporting deep frame buffers, multiple colormaps and various levels of hardware graphics assist."
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=X11-Turns-30
[As a point of reference, Intel introduced the 80386 in 1985 and the 80386SX variant in 1988. --Ed.]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 17 2017, @03:40AM
And roughly ten years ago https://libv.livejournal.com/27799.html [livejournal.com] Enjoy the reading, including the comments. How things have changed.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 17 2017, @03:47AM (5 children)
From: rws@mit-bold (Robert W. Scheifler)
To: window@athena
Subject: window system X
Date: 19 Jun 1984 0907-EDT (Tuesday)
I've spent the last couple weeks writing a window
system for the VS100. I stole a fair amount of code
from W, surrounded it with an asynchronous rather
than a synchronous interface, and called it X. Overall
performance appears to be about twice that of W. The
code seems fairly solid at this point, although there are
still some deficiencies to be fixed up.
We at LCS have stopped using W, and are now
actively building applications on X. Anyone else using
W should seriously consider switching. This is not the
ultimate window system, but I believe it is a good
starting point for experimentation. Right at the moment
there is a CLU (and an Argus) interface to X; a C
interface is in the works. The three existing
applications are a text editor (TED), an Argus I/O
interface, and a primitive window manager. There is
no documentation yet; anyone crazy enough to
volunteer? I may get around to it eventually.
Anyone interested in seeing a demo can drop by
NE43-531, although you may want to call 3-1945
first. Anyone who wants the code can come by with a
tape. Anyone interested in hacking deficiencies, feel
free to get in touch.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 17 2017, @06:16AM (4 children)
Yes, I'd imagine that X is older than X version 11, a.k.a. X11, which if you look very closely is the version both TFS and TFHeadline are about :/
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 17 2017, @07:38AM (3 children)
Maybe that's why the subject says X?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 17 2017, @08:14AM (2 children)
Yes, yes it does. Which is the entire point. Of course X is older than X version 11. You really don't see a problem with the following conversation?
A: "Today's my 30th birthday!"
B: "Your parents are older."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 17 2017, @10:21AM (1 child)
"The 30th anniversary of Windows 2.0 is coming up!"
"Here's the original Windows announcement from 1983..."
(Score: 1, Troll) by Bot on Sunday September 17 2017, @08:26PM
piss off pal, I am the only needed troll bot here.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday September 17 2017, @03:51AM (18 children)
I'm struggling to accept the fact that Linux will never be ready for the desktop.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 4, Funny) by JoeMerchant on Sunday September 17 2017, @03:57AM (3 children)
It's ready for my desktops - it's ready for lots of commercial product applications.
Face it, the world just isn't ready to give up being pestered every 48 hours to update their Windows 10 systems.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 17 2017, @04:48AM (2 children)
The applications won't move if the userbase doesn't move and the userbase won't move if the applications won't move. It's not going to happen until M$ goes belly up due to some completenly unrelated event.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday September 17 2017, @05:11AM (1 child)
... that Redmond will be hit by an asteroid.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Funny) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday September 19 2017, @02:13AM
My neighbor, in Florida, was a Microsoftie for 16 years - marketing type, lots of travel - you won't hit the ones like him with an asteroid to Redmond.
He actually just got laid off as part of a major downsizing, maybe no asteroid is required?
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by epitaxial on Sunday September 17 2017, @05:42AM (13 children)
Look I get it. You hardcore Linux people all love how you can open up a remote xterm, great. Now the rest of us want a GUI that is fast and responsive. Throw out all that legacy bullshit and concentrate on Wayland. Make remote display a secondary feature.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by sjames on Sunday September 17 2017, @07:19AM (12 children)
Actually make Wayland do what X can do (rather than handwaving about vague possibilities) and people might adopt it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 17 2017, @10:30AM (3 children)
It can run X clients [freedesktop.org], can it not?
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday September 17 2017, @12:35PM (2 children)
No, if you look at the diagram you see that it is still an X server that those X clients connect to. It's just that the X server itself runs on top of Wayland.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 18 2017, @08:15AM (1 child)
I don't understand why you wrote "no." To handle requests from X clients, one must by definition have an X server. Perhaps if the X server were integrated into Wayland in a monolithic fashion, you'd say "yes." As a practical matter for users, I'm not seeing that the choice of running Wayland implies a loss of functionality.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday September 18 2017, @08:43AM
Wayland implies loss of functionality because as soon as programs are changed from X clients to Wayland clients, you lose the ability to open them remotely (except for crutches like VNC), and that both on computers running Wayland and on computers running X.
Also with some applications talking directly to Wayland while others talking to the X server, interoperability will suffer.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2, Disagree) by Alphatool on Sunday September 17 2017, @10:37AM (7 children)
Building X11 style remote rendering into Wayland might sound sensible at first glance, but once you look more closely it's actually a really silly idea. Wayland doesn't render anything anywhere - it leaves it up to client to put rendered content into a shareable buffer. This design makes the whole display process much simpler and allows lots of space for future improvement but it means network transparency is basically impossible at that level.
Is it really a loss though? Remote X11 is woeful for any modern software as it uses bitmaps rather than X11 drawing instructions. This means that it's basically a more cumbersome version of VNC with a crappy user experience. It's even worse than using RDP. I totally agree that better remote access wouldn't be a bad thing to have but Wayland isn't the place for it. A new protocol at the toolkit level (qt, gtk etc.) would be great, not sure if it will ever happen though. The growth of HTML5 means that web browsers have taken over a huge chunk of the remote application space and VNC is normally close enough if you absolutely need a full remote GUI for legacy purposes. I think there is every chance that conventional remote GUIs are close to dead and won't get much development for the foreseeable future.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 17 2017, @01:04PM
So "modern" software paints itself into a corner, and somehow it is X11's fault.
And people wonder why there is so much "hate" (more like enlightened worry and suspicion, but "hate" is such a lovely debate short-circuit) regarding the Gnome project these days.
(Score: 3, Informative) by isj on Sunday September 17 2017, @01:25PM
Remote X11 is woeful for any modern software as it uses bitmaps rather than X11 drawing instructions
I find the speed acceptable on LANs.
WANs are another story. I used to use lbxproxy over a 128Kb/s connection for that but the results were not always great. Combined with a compression proxy I could get work done.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by sjames on Sunday September 17 2017, @04:10PM (3 children)
As someone who once made a block of shared MEMORY network transparent using mmap and a segv handler, I call bullshit. Now, my network shared memory was dreadfully inefficient mainly because it had to be bolted on to a protocol that never considered network transparency, but it actually worked, and didn't even need root access. And you're telling me nobody working on Wayland can even manage it when they control the protocol|? And you wonder why people like me say they will NEVER adopt Wayland?
BTW, X actually works quite well over a LAN and tolerably within the same metro area. It's far less clunky than remote accessing whole desktops. Using tools like Xpra, you can even dettach and re-attach to remote GUI software more or less the way screen works for text.
Your best argument is that you personally never do that thing that's so easy to do in X so it's fine if Wayland makes it impossible? What happened to that space for improvement? It sounds more like a once and for all lock in.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by digitalaudiorock on Sunday September 17 2017, @04:42PM (2 children)
+1000. I use X in applications via ssh all the time. No way am I giving that up just because the freedesktop.org folks don't think it's necessary.
I actually didn't realize until reading the comments here that it was from freedesktop.org at all. What reason has anyone been given to trust those asshats? How long until it requires systemd as does Gnome?
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 18 2017, @05:24AM (1 child)
I wish folks would quit posing this nonsense.
systemd is -not- compatible with *BSD.
GNOME -is- compatible with *BSD.
QED: GNOME does not require systemd.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by digitalaudiorock on Wednesday September 20 2017, @11:35PM
Bullshit!! All the folks forking stuff and writing fucking shims etc, and this [wikipedia.org] beg to differ:
No surprise you posted this AC.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Sunday September 17 2017, @08:40PM
> This means that it's basically a more cumbersome version of VNC with a crappy user experience.
I find VNC useful as a remote control.
I find networked X11 useful to run the single window and copy paste from it, all with no additional setup over ssh -C -X. These are two different cases.
Instead of dumping X11 you should put it on top of wayland or use wayland as an X extension. Or you can adapt all gui applications to deal with the quirks of running on wayland with an updated gui toolkit. The upside is that after 10 years of trying that, very few old unported applications will be widely used.
But I think the drill is to restore the incompatibilities that makes some IT people stay employed.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 17 2017, @04:29AM (4 children)
You're my only hope! [freedesktop.org]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by sjames on Sunday September 17 2017, @05:30AM (2 children)
Keep in mind, if it's from freedesktop, it's probably a trap.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 17 2017, @06:20AM
Let Lennart into your heart!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 17 2017, @09:14PM
https://lwn.net/Articles/481778/ [lwn.net]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 17 2017, @01:13PM
I think a certain "you were supposed to bring balance" quote is more fitting...
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Sunday September 17 2017, @04:49AM (1 child)
They don't make 'em like that anymore, except, actually, they do? Party on, X.org!
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 17 2017, @08:49AM
This one goes to 11 [x11.org] and stops.
(Score: 4, Informative) by NotSanguine on Sunday September 17 2017, @05:01AM
I currently use X11 on Linux, BSD, Solaris (OpenIndiana) and Windows. In the past, I've used it on SunOS, AIX and HP/UX as well.
I haven't used X11 on MacOS because MacOS is crap and I don't care enough to install it.
Is X11 the be-all and end-all? No. But it works. Pretty much everywhere.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Rich on Sunday September 17 2017, @01:17PM (5 children)
As Hanlon's Razor "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." goes, I occasionally wonder if malice can be found in this area to keep Linux away from mainstream success. The X architecture and its detail solutions are so squarely off, that it is impossible to improve it out of its misery.
Bit of history (as I understand it): They saw Lisa and Mac and thought "me too". Out came X with Xlib, which looks a lot like the old Mac window manager (cf. "GetNextEvent" vs. "XNextEvent" and so on) with remote QuickDraw. Networked, and tidied up a bit for that, and working around the evil regions patent. Not too shabby, actually. Then the problems started: Seeing that, the workstation vendors became greedy, every one of them thinking "we're the next to make it big" and a "no policy" policy was introduced, to create a "healthy market", or whatever the asshats might have called it.
This led to an architecture cut at about one third of where the classic Mac's Control manager was, aided by the fact that the bolt-on semi-official "Athena Widgets" were unpleasing to use and looked like shit. It would still maintain the box outlines for controls (or widgets, how they called them), but leave the rendering to the client side. Also, it seemed to be a good idea to them (which it was not) to move the handling of the windows to a vendor specific window manager. The first issue, not helped by licensing issues, brought the mess of Motif, Qt and GTK - which eventually switched to ignoring the control outlines. With the second part, we got the mess around the ICCCM and EWMH window manager managing. If you're ever trying to get out of there, you have to do it at the toolkit layer and replace everything below.
Now at the time that happened, it was not clear cut that the mainstream would move to "everything client side". Apple's original ideas for Carbon and BeOS, as we saw it, did have the server side "policy", where an application server separate from the application renders the interface. In the case of BeOS not to its disadvantage, as it is still seen as "teh snappiest" GUI ever. Had Apple bought Be, Carbon would have become a client protocol for the Be Application Server. But after the NeXT deal was done, the engineers had the task of unifying two more divergent systems. Their solution was to render everything client side - which is what the Linux systems today do as well to then force it through XRender (which perverts the original low-bandwidth networking design). Wayland is merely a cleanup of this outcome. No malice involved, I guess, merely accepting the least common denominator, when there was no will to force a coherent and efficient design through the whole stack.
The true evil lies on the driver side. It started with not cleanly separating out the hardware access, but instead building it into the main X server, leading to a situation where the server is the driver, and every attempt to deal with, or adapt the driver requires dealing with the whole server. Because this situation was unmaintainable, the vendors started out bolting on additional acceleration drivers to their driver parts (XAA, KAA, EXA). So at this point already, if you wanted to do anything with supported graphics hardware, you had to use X11, because it was impossible to otherwise get a working driver out of the mess.
Enter OpenGL. Originally mostly a direct representation of whatever graphics hardware Silicon Graphics had running. IIRC originally with awful limits like power-of-two-only bitmap sizes and being non pixel-precise, which made it mostly unsuitable for desktop acceleration. When 3D needed to be integrated, a few bright minds had the idea of putting OpenGL on the hardware, which was where it belonged, and putting X on top of OpenGL (probably while maintaining OpenGL a bit into the direction of being usable for 2D). This would have had the neat side effect of separating the drivers from X, effectively leveling the play field for anyone trying to do just the task of windowing and compositing.
And then the evil happened: A new scheme, AIGLX was devised and deployed, that put OpenGL under control of the X server. Which means, any and all usable graphics system from now on had to be part of a steaming X shitpile. This architectural move was so bad that I'm not sure that it still can be attributed to stupidity. Eventually, the stench became putrid enough that at least those functions needed for daily survival had to be factored out and put into the kernel (as KMS) under the control of more sane people. The remaining 3D functionality filtered down to Mesa. Which is another interesting thing, because although it sits further down the stack, it seems to insist being built against X. There seems to be a distinct lack of compassion to tidy up the architecture - which is strange, because it seems to be little effort, say, compared to implementing the LLVM softpipe.
To sum it up: The history the driver architecture of X11 is the main evil that has been holding back Linux.
That rant has been long enough, so I don't extend it to the rotten network protocol (that needs its own "-X" switch in ssh) and all the other stupid things that make it really hard to get a modern media workstation out of it.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday September 17 2017, @05:40PM
Shuttleworth's faggotry is what kept Linux from "mainstream success."
The largest potential userbase are Windows converts. But nooooo, Shuttleworth wanted to be fucking Steve Jobs and now Linux has no chance of mainstreaming.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 17 2017, @10:04PM (1 child)
Lots of changes, that for you seem to be crap, but in practice they seem to improve performance and adapt to current hardware. Check benchmarks, what other OS do with other systems, you get in Linux too if the driver uses the hardware to the fullest. Check creativity, people implementing all kind of window managers or plain apps.
Maybe X11 is flexible enough to adapt while keeping backwards compatibility, and the reason it lasted so many years. No app cares if processed via EXA or Glamor, do they? Yet you can get video without frame drops, video sync, 3D, multple monitors, hot plug and many other things inside modern implementations of X11.
Ideal, clean systems are just theory. Practice is dirty while getting things done.
(Score: 2) by Rich on Monday September 18 2017, @01:31AM
Now that was awfully apologetic. The software just beneath X11, the Linux kernel, shows how a large scale project is properly run. It may have its rough edges, but in terms of cleanliness, compared to the graphics stack above, it is about two magnitudes ahead. And it took like what, two decades, until the multi-monitor screen arrangement preferences looked like that from System 6, from 1988. As far as "flexibility" goes, I have suggested before to replace X11 with TCP/IP, which is even more flexible, and carries much less legacy burden.
The X stack does have to have a certain quality. If it was any worse, it would be booted out and replaced by something more sane, which would probably look a lot like what Google does on Android (e.g. standalone EGL on top of KMS, and a rootless compositor on top of that, and VNC for remote access, because once the pixels are client side, screw architectural network transparency). I lost one (fanless, and fortunately cheap) graphics card to the lack of power management in its X driver. Damaging hardware is pretty far up on the scale of crappy software.
I'm just armchair-bickering here, of course, but if I was in charge, Linus style (or better Theo style, given the smell of the mess) I would boot all hardware dependency and escalated rights requirements out of X, make it one of many clients of Mesa, and prohibit any lower level software, under threat of court-martialing, to have dependencies on X. (Sort of where Wayland is supposed to go, but i remember reading about them introducing yet more horrible dependencies). Mesa in turn would get a unit test suite (based on piglit?!) that firstly checks for pixel precision of test results, and then for speed, so that every 2D/3D accelerating module (e.g. new graphics card) can immediately get a thumbs up/down - while running widely visible "user education" to only spend money on "thumbs up" solutions.
To be noted though, these days, there's the whole matter of GPU processing (non-uniform processing architecture?! NUPA?), but that has to do more with the kernel and less with X. I haven't really looked into how this would be properly dealt with.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Monday September 18 2017, @08:01AM (1 child)
That's as retarded an argument as saying that taxis are rubbish because you have to ask the driver to open the boot in order to put your luggage there. Setting up an X tunnel is an overhead that most poeple don't need most of the time - having it optional is the polite thing to do. You'll be complaining about the ``-t'' switch in netcat next.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by Rich on Monday September 18 2017, @08:59AM
I won't complain about netcat adding what's needed to get commands through, but I will complain about the underlying protocol design, that, on a system where "everything is a file and can be piped together", makes issuing remote system commands an interactive exercise in terminal capability negotiation. I understand that all of this legacy comes from having to support semi-dumb text-only terminals (as do all the stty options, with stuff like "raw", "cooked" and "sane"), but from a system design view, nothing of this overhead belongs where it is now. It's just that they had the need to kludge it somewhere 40 years ago, and it stuck.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 18 2017, @08:00AM
X11 is 30 years old, and the competition is still trying to catch up.
RDP wishes it was as transparent as X11. Oh, there are some extensions to allow sending windows rather than screens, but 1) I've never gotten them to work, and 2) they are a hack consisting of allocating a huge desktop and never allowing any windows to overlap, then cropping each window before sending.
And wayland is barely at the level of Windows 95 with that piece of crap VNC, while hoping to get the performance of Vista on top of unstable 3D drivers.
(Meanwhile, Apple probably won't bring out any form of remote GUI until they have their own proprietary network interface).