X Window System Turns 40 52
Ancient Slashdot reader ewhac writes: On June 19, 1984, Robert Scheifler announced on MIT's Project Athena mailing list a new graphical windowing system he'd put together. Having cribbed a fair bit of code from the existing windowing toolkit called W, Scheifler named his new system X, thus giving birth to the X Window System. Scheifler prophetically wrote at the time, "The code seems fairly solid at this point, although there are still some deficiencies to be fixed up."
The 1980's and 1990's saw tremendous activity in the development of graphical displays and user interfaces, and X was right in the middle of it all, alongside Apple, Sun, Xerox, Apollo, Silicon Graphics, NeXT, and many others. Despite the fierce, well-funded competition, and heated arguments about how many buttons a mouse should have, X managed to survive, due in large part to its Open Source licensing and its flexible design, allowing it to continue to work well even as graphical hardware rapidly advanced. As such, it was ported to dozens of platforms over the years (including a port to the Amiga computer by Dale Luck in the late 1980's). 40 years later, despite its warts, inconsistencies, age, and Wayland promising for the last ten years to be coming Real Soon Now, X remains the windowing system for UNIX-like platforms.
The 1980's and 1990's saw tremendous activity in the development of graphical displays and user interfaces, and X was right in the middle of it all, alongside Apple, Sun, Xerox, Apollo, Silicon Graphics, NeXT, and many others. Despite the fierce, well-funded competition, and heated arguments about how many buttons a mouse should have, X managed to survive, due in large part to its Open Source licensing and its flexible design, allowing it to continue to work well even as graphical hardware rapidly advanced. As such, it was ported to dozens of platforms over the years (including a port to the Amiga computer by Dale Luck in the late 1980's). 40 years later, despite its warts, inconsistencies, age, and Wayland promising for the last ten years to be coming Real Soon Now, X remains the windowing system for UNIX-like platforms.
Ahh the memories. (Score:5, Insightful)
Happy birthday X! It's amazing it is still as useful as it is today, 40 years later. Most of the X protocol is unused today, but it still works quite well, despite the fact it's completely unmaintained today in any implementation. Amazing how far we've been able to make it go, and a lot of that is because of people like Keith Packard, who came up with the extensions needed to do client-side rendering and alpha-channel blending etc.
Back before that time, I remember using X11 apps over a modem and it was pretty usable, thanks to server-side rendering of the widgets, fonts, etc. Once we started doing things like client-side rendering, running over a modem was no longer practical!
Currently I'm still using X.org because my desktop of choice, Mate Desktop, has not yet completed the transition to Wayland. But I expect to give it a go here pretty soon.
Except for some little implementation issues (focus follows mouse was one such issue on KDE), you wouldn't be able to tell whether you are running on Wayland or X11 with modern desktop environments, except that on wayland everything is smoother. It works fine for the majority of desktop Linux users now. In fact even X forwarding over SSH still works as it always has, thanks to the transparent XWayland server and applications that can fall back an X11 backend. The only issue with this is that GTK devs are hell bent on deprecating X11, so in the very near future GTK won't support it at all, so at some point GTK and Gnome apps simply will not work over ssh in this manner, but it looks like waypipe might be the solution. With more and more applications relying on GPU acceleration, the old method of X11 forwarding over SSH comes up short anyway. Not totally sure how waypipe handles this.
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Re: Ahh the memories. (Score:2)
Ah, xfree86. I am endebted: thanks to its instability, I learned to run stuff in GNU screen so my apps wouldn't poof along with the DE and I could just re-attach the screen session after X restart.
This then in turn lead to screen in ssh sessions and eventually to run boxes located anywhere. Not sure I would have gotten there without xfree86 crashing so often.
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Hey dude Crtl+alt+backspace isn't how you switch windows.
Re: Ahh the memories. (Score:2)
That would have been Ctrl-a,a or Crtl-a,(window number) :D
DECwindows was a version of X11 (Score:2)
and DEC was a big player back in those days.
OT: I had an interview with a recruiter the other day and I told him that I started at DEC and had to explain what DEC was. sigh.
the GOML part, I suppose, is: I still run twm (fvwm v1) on most of my linux systems. its also been working for decades and decades. it does what I want and it works. what else do I need from a window manager?
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I haven't had a lack of smoothness on my Linux desktop in over a decade. Can it really be smoother? Note that I've been using KDE ever since it's implemented the Compiz cube - which has sadly been removed recently - and with the right settings I've not had tearing or any
So, Wayland should be named... (Score:2)
Yayland?
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Wayland is 16 years old. Certainly not a new project by any stretch of the imagination, and it's barely getting good enough to displace X only now.
Core and critical infrastructure like graphics subsystems - or hell, kernels... Linux isn't exactly new either - take a long time to mature and win acceptance.
Re: So, Wayland should be named... (Score:2)
Wayland has enough functionality to be used as a daily driver for most people. But it refuses to implement and support a handful of corner cases that X does. And Wayland is very sensitive to bugs in the compositor, so you may have trouble with some combinations of graphics card and compositor and configuration. (Like with multiple heads) The popular compositors and wlroots generally work, so people who aren't straying off the beaten path arefine.
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Meanwhile (Score:5, Interesting)
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+1
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I feel bad for X because it barely got a chance to live up to its potential. I have been a big fan of using it remotely and have surprised a few people who had no idea it existed.
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uhhh, something like:
"make athena great again!"
(the guys at redhat might get a kick out of that. or not.)
X Window system buys a sports car (Score:2)
No, dudes, am not really balding that's a skin condition. AH I really like the way this thing drives, you have to understand, I am a car guy.
X11 (Score:5, Interesting)
Hopefully I'll be retired by the time X11 no longer works. Wayland may eventually end up being better than X11 for local rendering (though my last experience with it was a disaster of epic proportions), but X11 forwarding over SSH is a killer feature I can't work without.
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As along as the apps and toolkits still support an X11 backend, you'll be able to forward X over ssh like you've always done, thanks to Xwayland.
For wayland-only apps, waypipe may be the answer. Although like I said before, I'm not sure how it deals with apps that need GPU rendering. But that doesn't work under X11 forwarding either. There are quite a few apps that I can't run remotely because of that.
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I think X11 will be around for sometime but Xorg is pretty much dead. Newer features are being added into Xwayland such as explicit sync [freedesktop.org] that more modern video cards are looking for. DXVK cannot even talk directly with Xorg anymore, it goes through SDL as an intermediary. Xorg is sitting there watching video hardware pass it by.
X11 forwarding over SSH is a killer feature I can't work without
Xwayland will allow you to forward it. So if that's holding you back, just set up Xwayland to forward if you don't want to use waypipe to forward wayland stuff. In fact here's a [dbts-analytics.com]
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Xorg is dead,
This is the sad state of affairs. The reason to switch to Wayland isn't that it's better, it's that Xorg isn't being contributed to much any more. Sure, Wayland desktops still can't do things that are considered as standard features of desktops since forever, but X org is dead! Gotta switch.
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(Look at the plumage)
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Newer features are being added into Xwayland such as explicit sync [freedesktop.org] that more modern video cards are looking for.
But does this Phoronix news link [phoronix.com] indicates explicit sync will generally be available in X11/X.org?
At the start of April Mesa 24.1 saw Vulkan explicit sync support for Wayland implemented. Now hitting Mesa 24.1-devel today is Vulkan explicit sync support for X11/X.Org.
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That's not in Xorg, it's through Mesa, and if you check the requirements [freedesktop.org] you'll see how they're able to do that.
Xwayland implementation: xorg/xserver!967 (merged)
Wayland protocol specification (now available in wayland-protocols 1.34): wayland/wayland-protocols!90 (merged)
So Xorg isn't getting the feature, Xorg is just handing off to someone else to do the work. This is what I mean by Xwayland is likely the future for X11. Most of the features can come from wayland and Xorg is just bypassed for that particular aspect. Like I said, DXVK doesn't even talk to Xorg anymore, it completely bypasses it and uses SDL to obtain a rendering context. Most things just compl
Re: X11 (Score:2)
Ah thanks. So from what I understand the patch will be to XWayland, a minimal Xserver bundled in Wayland. An equivalent patch will likely never reach X.org. Is my understanding correct?
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Yeah. But this is indicative of everything with X. Nothing is done in X, everything is done elsewhere. In this case it's via Mesa and it's Mesa that'll pick Xwayland for X sessions. Mesa can be used on all kinds of things, it's a pretty independent thing. The way Xorg's explicit sync will work is via the Vulkan WSI [vulkan.org]. The WSI implementation that's being used is the one that's in Wayland. To be able to have Xorg talk to it, it'll interface with Xwayland. So Xorg --calls--> Xwayalnd --calls--> Vulk
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What is it you can forward over SSH that will not VNC will not forward well?
I don't mean to say your stupid lolhaha, I am genuinely curious.
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My experience with VNC is that even with the fastest network it won't feel local due to some different kind of lagginess and there's certain ceremony in even making use of it in the first place.
With X and SSH I can just run an application and it will start*, regardless it's a terminal app or an X11 app, no matter if it's local or not. No matter if it's multiple windows or one window.
I long time ago I remember going to lunch and starting xlock -mode ifs to lock my workstation. When I came back I noticed that
Multiple sessions, multiple computers (Score:2)
The advantage of X forwarding is that I can work on multiple hosts at the same time on the same screen.
For example, I can work on separate build and test systems at the same time. Usually it's terminal, but occasionally gimp or other graphics-intensive programs.
If I have a poor network connection, the advantage of X is that I can work with smaller windows, whereas with VNC, I have to forward the whole screen, regardless of network bandwidth or the size of my screen. Yes, I know VNC can optimize the p
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VNC takes screenshots of the desktop by scraping the video buffer and passes them along, X11 can do this at an application level so you're not beholden to either a single desktop for a single person or a specific stream of images. It is much more compact and faster, the compositing, cursor etc is done on your own desktop so you don't have to wait for the send-and-receive of keyboard and mouse inputs. This is even a problem on SSH, which is why people use systems like Mosh (keyboard inputs feels snappier bec
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What is it you can forward over SSH that will not VNC will not forward well?
Flip this, X is the older protocol so why did everyone start using VNC for everything? As far as I know VNC doesn't allow for rootless applications or it's a special thing. X apps show up remotely just like any local app and even use your local window manager.
How did VNC get so popular with unix heads that could be doing the same thing with the packages they already had installed?
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What is it you can forward over SSH that will not VNC will not forward well?
To start with, all remote access protocols (VNC, RDP, etc.) are banned at my workplace for security reasons, while SSH is encouraged. For work, that's the end of the discussion. SSH is the ONLY remote access program allowed on our network, making SSH/X11 the only way we can remotely run Linux GUI programs.
But to go further regardless, VNC forwards the entire screen, while I never want the entire screen. I don't want multiple VNC desktops on my desktop. I only want particular programs that act like all my ot
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My question was not what is the difference between VNC and X11, it was which programs do you run? None of the replies answered that.
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I don't see anyone giving specific answer, so here is mine: thunderbird, keepassxc and even eclipse. Yes, it is dog slow and PITA when the bottleneck on the network connection has speed of about 3MB/s. But in emergency it can be used.
Yes, VNC would probably be more responsive solution. It was just not worth the effort in my case.
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Why hasn't Wayland implemented forwarding over SSH2?
Can we just schedule the funeral? (Score:2)
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What would you replace it with? It doesn't seem that Wayland is getting much love here.
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can't. It's proprietary (Apple own it).
meanwhile... (Score:2)
Wayland is still unuseable
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I have been running Wayland + Xorg for a few years now without issues.
With the release of KDE Plasma 6.1, I have now uninstalled Xorg.
I am now Wayland only.
Waland underwelmed (Score:2)
Hi
I use wayland since 4 months on Fedora.
I am a bit underwelmed.
Especially crahsed programs not being able to move their windows is so Microsoft style. That's the thing I always loved about X11. Just move the misbehave program out of the way.
And then there is also no cool screensaver to look at.
If it aint broke (Score:2)
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Long live X-Windows
If it works for you, knock yerself out.
Personally, and speaking as someone who lived through the X10 to X11 migration, it hasn't worked for me for years. Every time I launch an X app or X desktop, I'm consistently disappointed. X11's killer feature (to me) used to be throwing displays over the network. Every time I try that now (even throwing from a WSL environment to the MobaXterm server on the same laptop) the performance is abysmal. Not to mention when you put X and native apps side by side, the native a
Imperfect but good (Score:2)
Reposting my comment made under the original submission (I'm still a beginner with Slashdot):
X may be imperfect but I still think it has been a useful addition to the UNIX-like graphical environments. I still use WindowMaker despite its age and I have no tearing problem while using the TearFree extension - I disable this option while playing games to avoid input lag.
Some may argue - most prominently Wayland developers, whom ironically are partially responsible for the mess that is the modern codebase of Xor
It Just Works ... (Score:2)
Typing this comment from an X powered desktop (XFCE on Xubuntu).
It just does what it is supposed to do, and stays out of the way.
It has many features that are useful to many, but if they don't want them, they don't bother them.
Thanks to the X team over the decades, and keep it going ...