X11 Window System Turns 25 Years Old

An anonymous reader writes "The widely used X11 Window System has turned 25 years old today. Version 11 of the X Window System is likely to remain in use for many years to come for backwards compatibility with the many legacy applications, BSD/Solaris systems, and Enterprise Linux distributions. Meanwhile, Wayland is still working to unseat the X Server for the common Linux desktop."

Comments

xeyes ...

[PPH]

... needs bifocals. But otherwise, it all runs fine.

I can remember back in the 'old days' running X over a 28K dialup. But now, with 100 Mbit and up LANs and decent broadband, I can run most apps without being able to differentiate between local and remote clients.

It still just works.

Re:What is Wayland?

[rubycodez]

Canonical being behind it may cause lag in adoption, since people are fleeing Canonical's UI ideas like creatures from a forest fire, even if they stay within the Ubuntu family it's Kubuntu or Xubuntu or Lubuntu....Unity and GNOME3 are inferior ivory tower designed, user-need ignoring crap

Better than usual from Phoronix

[mickwd]

Surprisingly level-header article, given the source (Phoronix).

I really do hope Wayland sorts out a good scheme for remote access. At the moment it seems to be just ignored.

I wish people who set out to *replace* an existing piece of software would endeavor to replace it in its entirety, not just the subset of features that they happen to be interested in.

Re:Better than usual from Phoronix

[CajunArson]

X11 as a remote access scheme is actually craptacular in many ways, with two listed below as a non-complete list:

1. Ever try actually using X11 for anything even remotely graphically complex over even a rather decent broadband connection? You could also gouge your eyes out for a similar effect! Before you say how great X11 is over your cable modem:
a. If it were so great, then Nomachine would never have come into existence and NX would not exist.
b. If I had a dime for every time somebody says that X11 is great *because he is forwarding X-terms over it using an @#K%JJ SSH tunnel* then I'd be rich and they'd be put into a mental asylum where they belong. I'm talking about *real* graphical applications being shot over a broadband network here, otherwise there is no point to "network transparency" to begin with.

2. Real simple scenario that I've known can't work for over 10 years and for which there is no solution available using X:
      a. I run a program remoted to my desktop. Yay network transparency (blah blah blah).
    b. I get up from my desk and grab my notebook/tablet/smartphone/etc. and I want to simply transfer the remotely displayed application to the other device.. *cannot be done*.
Note how I spotted this problem 10 years ago? That was long before everyone was carrying around smartphones/tablets/etc., I was way ahead of the curve and this issue has only gotten more important over time.
  c. What's really hilarious is how many people have called me stupid or moronic for thinking that actually have *real* network transparency over X instead of the crap version from 1985 we are stuck with now would be a good thing.. and many of these same people lovingly brag about how they use screen all the time....

That's 2 issues.. there are many more. People who seem to despise any OS other than Linux for "not innovating" really tick me off when they try to kill the first real piece of innovation in the Linux graphics stack that we have seen in this century.
     

Re:Better than usual from Phoronix

[CajunArson]

WRONG.
I'm saying that remote applications should be displayed *the right way* and Wayland does nothing to prevent the ability to display remote applications *the right way*.

Go look at the chrome remote desktop extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/gbchcmhmhahfdphkhkmpfmihenigjmpp

When a stupid browser extension does a better job of cross-platform remote GUI management than X, it is time to do something better than X instead of pretending that we reached a magical Utopia in 1985 and that anybody using facts and logic to disagree is some sort of religious heretic.

Re:ssh X11Forwarding even in Cygwin

[barjam]

And it is awful. All remote desktop access to unix/Mac is awful. X, Vnc, no-machine. Windows excels at this which is funny because they started out not having this functionality at all and unix folks would make fun of them for lacking it. Now it is the unix variants that largely lack a usable technology in this space. Of course it is rarely needed as unix servers excel at being administrated via shell and windows sucks at that.

Rdp over ssh works well and is many times faster than X or VNC.

Re:I can only hope...

[blade8086]

Plenty useful for me over a LAN .. what do you base this off of?

Oh right - it was useful over 10Mbit lans, but not now with GigE ???

Yes, some applications (which require heavy LOCAL graphics processing) will work better DUH LOCALLY
but this has always been the case.

Wayland is the bridge to the future

[BalkanBoy]

"Unseating X" is not what Wayland will do, at least not anytime soon. Even X's developers realize that X's architecture has gone a little stale given the current desktop use cases, so they are working to make X a Wayland client. X is likely not going to go away for another 10+ years at least, provided every X app ever developed gets converted into a native Wayland app... And that's a LONG time off on the horizon.

Wayland NAILED it where every attempt to replace X outright prior to it, failed miserably. Wayland is the future only because it allows X programs to run -unmodified-, while at the same time providing a new, more performant window server.

Wayland is the bridge to the future, along with X.

Re:X12?

[Paul Jakma]

GNOME and KDE are not going to migrate to Wayland only. They're going to continue to use toolkit libraries, and the toolkit libraries will handle the details of rendering (or indeed, other libraries underneath the toolkit library will).

E.g. KDE does not contain an X11 protocol implementation, it isn't even written to directly use Xlib or XCB. It's written on top of Qt. And Qt already supports rendering to Wayland via lighthoutse. Ditto for GNOME and GTK+/GDK.

These libraries already support multiple rendering backends, from rendering to dumb framebuffers (for use on embedded devices) to rendering to X11 across a network. These libraries are simply going to acquire another such rendering backend, for Wayland. The existing rendering backends, like X11, are not going to suddenly disappear. Not any time soon. Not any time where X11 sees any kind of significant use or vendor support.