SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 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.