X11 Window System Turns 25 Years Old

X12? by Greg+Merchan · 2012-09-15 04:11 · Score: 3, Interesting

Potential protocol changes were noted in the documents of version 11, such as the ICCCM which notes that the FocusIn event should have a timestamp and a previous-focus field. Has anyone out there considered just taking X11, making changes known to be needed, and dropping the protocol support for what's rarely or not needed anymore?

Re:X12? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-09-15 04:38 · Score: 2, Interesting

and unfortunately, they're also dropping things that ARE needed.
Re:X12? by jedidiah · 2012-09-15 05:04 · Score: 2

...and will be as useless as using VNC with a Mac.
Before you try to clone something, you should actually use it yourself first. Same goes for goading other people to clone something.

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Re:X12? by Paul+Jakma · 2012-09-15 05:22 · Score: 5, Interesting

The people working on Wayland have used X11. Indeed, in many cases they are *also* X.org developers. Hell, one of the people working on Wayland is Keith Packard[1], who's been working on X.org since longer than I've been using Unix. Indeed, he's been working on X11 since before many of us had even used a computer, indeed for anyone younger than 24 make that "since before you were born". Hence, to say the people who are working on Wayland do not understand X is just a ridiculous argument, and does not suggest the person making that argument has much credibility on the subject.
I'll be honest, I was a little sceptical when I read about some of the design decisions in Wayland. In particular, the decision to move some of the window management to the application (in general, that means the toolkit, like Qt, GTK+, etc) makes me wince a bit, because it will lead to the hung-window-syndrome we know and love from MS Windows. However, the people involved in Wayland know far far far more about the subject than I do (I have no experience of designing or implementing windowing systems), and I'm sure they know a lot more about balancing the various trade-offs for and against all these decisions than most of us.
As for the remote displays. I was initially concerned about that capability too. However, if you look into it, well there's nothing that stops X11 being used with Wayland - indeed X server to render to Wayland already exists. Generally, there's nothing to prevent whatever style of remote display protocol being implemented for Wayland, be that in applications directly or (more sensibly) in the toolkits.
1. Keith Packard on Wayland and X: https://lwn.net/Articles/491509/

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Re:X12? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-09-15 05:28 · Score: 2, Interesting

indeed X server to render to Wayland already exists
In the same sense that an X server to render to Windows desktops exists, yes, but that does NOT make it a replacement for the functionality in X11 today.
Re:X12? by 0123456 · 2012-09-15 06:15 · Score: 2, Interesting

Remote display protocols, like X11, VNC, etc., will still be able to render to Wayland displays.
And Wayland will not be able to display efficiently to any other machine. It will require some shitty pixel-scraping technology like VNC.
As the world becomes more networked, the Wayland fanboys are trying to copy Windows by throwing away X11's separation of display and execution.
Re:X12? by dslbrian · 2012-09-15 06:19 · Score: 2

I'll be honest, I was a little sceptical when I read about some of the design decisions in Wayland. In particular, the decision to move some of the window management to the application (in general, that means the toolkit, like Qt, GTK+, etc) makes me wince a bit, because it will lead to the hung-window-syndrome we know and love from MS Windows.
It causes more than that. This is a good read on the problems caused by CSD.
Re:X12? by Paul+Jakma · 2012-09-15 06:25 · Score: 2

Yes, it is an appeal to authority. However, if you're interested, you can easily find talks by those authorities explaining those trade-offs. E.g. the link I gave contains a long report on a talk by Keith Packard.

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Re:X12? by Paul+Jakma · 2012-09-15 07:05 · Score: 4, Interesting

And Wayland will not be able to display efficiently to any other machine. It will require some shitty pixel-scraping technology like VNC.
No, that isn't true. Nothing prevents Wayland supporting toolkits from using whatever kind of display protocol they want, from low-level pixel grabs of windows, to using more abstract drawing commands that match the higher-level structure/behaviour of the application. Indeed, a toolkit could easily use X11 as that protocol, if it wished - and that's already possible with XWayland, I understand.

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Re:X12? by Greg+Merchan · 2012-09-15 07:23 · Score: 2

It's not that ridiculous. There's more than one aspect of X to understand. I know next to nothing about drivers or anything else internal to X, but I have, I believe, a decent grasp of the things above those layers which are documented. Unless the documentation is lying, there are things on X that have, especially for the sake of modern UIs, been done incorrectly for years. Focus handling is the main thing I keep harping on. Just about everything should be using the globally active focus model by default, but most things don't. Motif and other Intrinsics-based toolkits allow it. Gtk+ does not. I don't know if Qt allows it, but it didn't do it by default last I checked. Too many people "just know" that's not the way you do things, so they keep doing them the way they've been doing them and then can't get things like drag-and-drop to work properly without a bunch of ugly hacks. There's too much knowledge of what is, getting in the way of learning what could be. My fear for an X12 would be that, like Wayland (or maybe just Weston, can't tell yet) developers almost did, they would lock-out getting things done the right way.
The X selection mechanism, for another example, is something that could be used to greater effect. But most people think of it as just the PRIMARY selection, the clipboard, and part of drag-and-drop, if that much. Fewer people recognize it's part of window management and the message tray protocol (or whatever it was called). It has more potential, but again you get people who know very well what X is, but don't recognize what it could be.
Re:X12? by hairyfeet · 2012-09-15 08:05 · Score: 2

It all comes down to the market, and Ubuntu is for HOME users, remember the "Linux for humans" advertising? So how many home users are remoting into their desktops using X Server? My guess is you could count that number on 2 hands and still have fingers left over, remote control of desktops is just something that most home users don't even think about, much less do.
And the simple fact is for non enterprise uses X is fricking terrible, just piss awful. I could post Thom's epic rant from OS News how simply switching from a video to his chat causes the whole damned desktop to crash, or how Mozilla won't support hardware acceleration on Linux because of X being buggy and crash prone, by why bother? This isn't exactly a secret and daring to go against group think just gets modded down anyway.
If you want more mainstream users you are gonna have to give them a nicer experience and X is about as nice as a kick to the groin. Sure it works great in the enterprise but 1.-The enterprise isn't running full GUIs, watching videos, popping up chat windows and all the other things that home users do and 2.-Because enterprise pays people to work on the problems they encounter enterprise bugs are usually fixed pretty quickly. Again this isn't the case for home users.
So Canonical sees a problem and is trying to route around the damage.,..isn't that how things are supposed to work in FOSS land? you can always fork away if you don't agree with a direction?

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Re:X12? by Paul+Jakma · 2012-09-15 20:59 · Score: 2

The toolkits applications use (e.g. GTK+, Qt, Wx, etc) will continue to support rendering to X11. There is a rootless X server for Wayland, which will continue to exist.
In short, X11 will continue to work just fine with Wayland. Just think of Wayland as a better architecture for the X server.

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Re:X12? by Paul+Jakma · 2012-09-15 22:00 · Score: 3, Insightful

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.

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Re:X12? by Rich0 · 2012-09-16 00:14 · Score: 2

We already have N incompatible ways today - X11, VNC, RDP, NX, etc. All Wayland intends to do is to move *1* of them from the display server out to the toolkits. That's not going to have much visible effect to the user, except perhaps the smoother rendering of local apps, because the local path can have a simpler architecture now
Yes, but right now EVERYTHING supports X11, and almost nothing supports any of the others except for bridging software that basically converts from X11 to those protocols. So, the *1* thing that you propose to move is the *1* thing that has universal support. Toolkits aren't going to implement direct support for any of the others (or if they do they'll pick 1-2 and you'll end up with apps that can run on RDP and apps that run on NX and so on). So, if you get rid of X11 then you're stuck with VNC screen-scraping, since that is the least common denominator, and it is pretty lousy.

What is Wayland? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-09-15 04:15 · Score: 3, Informative

Posting AC cuz I'm not a karma whore

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Wayland

Re:What is Wayland? by rubycodez · 2012-09-15 04:20 · Score: 4, Insightful

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
Re:What is Wayland? by Paul+Jakma · 2012-09-15 04:29 · Score: 4, Informative

Wayland isn't a Canonical thing. There's a bunch of people from various companies working on it, including Intel and RedHat.

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Re:What is Wayland? by 0123456 · 2012-09-15 06:16 · Score: 2

Hint: who do you think made up most of Gnome's user base?

xeyes ... by PPH · 2012-09-15 04:17 · Score: 3, Insightful

... 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.

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Happy Birthday by ADRA · 2012-09-15 04:20 · Score: 4, Funny

I only met you 12 years ago, but I've been obsessed with you ever since. Its been so long, that I just had to say something now.. Please please don't jump the shark like so many others these days... I just love you the way you are!

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Re:Happy Birthday by Sique · 2012-09-15 04:46 · Score: 2

You think, XXV Window may be more appropriate?

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Better than usual from Phoronix by mickwd · 2012-09-15 04:25 · Score: 3, Insightful

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 by Paul+Jakma · 2012-09-15 05:29 · Score: 2

All they chant is how it will be possible to run Wayland apps in an Xserver running under Wayland. But that does NOTHING for apps that are designed for and compiled for Wayland. THEY will have zero network transparency and will not run on remote Xservers
Where are these apps? Why will their authors have chosen to write their applications directly on top of a low-level rendering library? It's pretty unlikely. Rather, they'll be writing using a toolkit, like GTK+/GDK or Qt, etc. And these toolkits *already* support multiple rendering backends, from bare-framebuffers, to X11 (via Xlib or XCB or whatever).

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Re:Better than usual from Phoronix by CajunArson · 2012-09-15 05:49 · Score: 4, Insightful

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.

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Re:Better than usual from Phoronix by 0123456 · 2012-09-15 06:19 · Score: 2

a. If it were so great, then Nomachine would never have come into existence and NX would not exist.
X11 was designed for LAN use, hence the excessive reliance on round-trip messaging. As NX and other proxies have proved, there's nothing particularly difficult about fixing the protocol for WAN use.

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.
X11 was innovative. There's nothing innovative about Wayland, it's throwing away everything that separates Unix graphics from the rest of the world.
Re:Better than usual from Phoronix by Paul+Jakma · 2012-09-15 06:31 · Score: 3, Interesting

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?
Actually, I was able to do this just fine, 10 odd years ago with iPaqs handheld and GPE, which was X based. I could bounce GPE applications from my iPaq to main computer, so that I could use my main keyboard and display with the application (much handier than the pen based input on the iPaq). There's nothing in X that stops this from being implemented. It's the clients (i.e. there toolkits) which have to learn to switch between servers. Alternatively, it can be done done with an X server proxy - at least architecturally. (I can't actually remember which way the GPE solution did it).

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Re:Better than usual from Phoronix by Paul+Jakma · 2012-09-15 06:40 · Score: 2

You seem to have completely missed the point of my reply. Again, apps for Wayland will almost certainly be written to use a toolkit library like GTK+/GDK or Qt. The app itself will *not* be written directly for Wayland - that'd be insane, because that'd require the application to completely re-implement its own child-window and input handling, as well as widgets (i.e. re-implement the stuff Qt, GTK+, etc already provide). So the app will be Wayland agnostic. Instead it will be GTK+/GDK or Qt that does the Wayland rendering. These toolkits *already* support multiple rendering backends, already support X11 (via Xlib or XCB) - and this can be runtime selectable.
So, again, the applications will be written using some toolkit, like GTK+/GDK or Qt, like they already are today. The toolkits will determine what display protocols are supported. These could easily allow you to choose whether to render locally or via X11, at runtime, as they already today are capable of supporting rendering choices at runtime. Hell, they could even do it transparently, without asking you, based on whether DISPLAY is set or not.

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Re:Better than usual from Phoronix by shiftless · 2012-09-15 08:38 · Score: 3, Funny

It's the clients (i.e. there toolkits) which have to learn to switch between servers.

Sounds trivial.
Re:Better than usual from Phoronix by CajunArson · 2012-09-15 10:40 · Score: 3, Insightful

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.

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ssh X11Forwarding even in Cygwin by digitalaudiorock · 2012-09-15 04:30 · Score: 4, Interesting

One thing I love about X has always been the ability to run gui apps remotely via ssh using your local X via X11 forwarding. For those who haven't tried (or haven't tried lately) it's even pretty easy to get a shell running within X in Cygwin and run remote gui 'nix applications under Windows...too cool.

Re:ssh X11Forwarding even in Cygwin by Paul+Jakma · 2012-09-15 04:59 · Score: 2

Pedantry: The X *clients*[1] may be able to snoop on all your keystrokes, including to other applications, and read what is on your display.
1. The X clients are the applications you run, which connect to the X server. The X server is responsible for co-ordinating drawing to the display. X client may run remote from the X server. The X server typically runs local, on the machine you're sitting in front of, and whose display screen you're looking at. I.e. in X, the server is the local bit (on your machine) and the clients are (potentially) remote, running on other machines - this often confuses people. ;)

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Re:ssh X11Forwarding even in Cygwin by barjam · 2012-09-15 06:05 · Score: 2, Insightful

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:ssh X11Forwarding even in Cygwin by mpol · 2012-09-15 06:50 · Score: 2

One thing I really like is the aspect of 2 cut-and-paste buffers. When I explain it to tech-friends of mine they really are amazed.
There's a primary buffer and a secondary buffer. The secondary buffer is like the buffer in Windows and MacOS. You have Ctrl-C for copy and Ctrl-V for paste. Or you can use the context menus.
The primary buffer however is everything you selected, and then ofcourse only the last selection. Pasting is done with middle mouse button.
This way you can use 2 buffers. Like you Ctrl-C the username, and select the password. Place focus on the other app. Paste the password from the primary buffer, and Ctrl-V the username. All in one go.
I just don't want to live without it.

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From the article by Anonymous Coward · 2012-09-15 04:33 · Score: 3, Funny

It only took three years to go from X1 to X11

Of course. First X1, then X10, then X11 (to be followed by X100, then X101, then X110, then X111, then X1000, etc.)

You must be new here.

Re:I can only hope... by nurb432 · 2012-09-15 04:38 · Score: 3, Funny

You have no clue what X11 is all about, and are a fool.

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The olden days by gdav · 2012-09-15 04:39 · Score: 3

The first time I used it was in 1993 when NCSA Mosaic came out. There was a copy on the university Sun box, my office boasted a spare 286 running DOS - some packet drivers and Vista-eXceed for DOS and I was away!

Re:I can only hope... by gigaherz · 2012-09-15 04:59 · Score: 2

I do have a clue, and I still want it to die.

age becomes me by at10u8 · 2012-09-15 05:06 · Score: 2

I remember the first vendor demo workstation arriving with X running on it. I remember GraphOn X terminals, and NCD X terminals. I remember rewriting the Keck CCD image display program not to send each image 3 times and getting live readouts over 28k modem to my living room.

Re:age becomes me by sconeu · 2012-09-15 07:03 · Score: 4, Informative

Back in the day (1992), we used to run SCO Unix on a 486 box with HDS X terminals connected to it.

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Future by StripedCow · 2012-09-15 05:07 · Score: 2

Any speculations on the future of windowing systems?

Personally, I wonder when we'll get the first windowing system based entirely on HTML5.

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Re:Future by bobs666 · 2012-09-15 05:38 · Score: 2

I wonder when we'll get the first windowing system based entirely on HTML5.

That would be a web browser. Browsers can run in lots of windows. You can have that already. (right?)

NextStep tried using postscript to render window content. I never got to use one, ... as I understand the problem was the hardware was under powered. Perhaps an idea before its time.

Not HTTP-friendly, blew opportunity by Tablizer · 2012-09-15 06:29 · Score: 2

Something like X-windows could have allowed for desktop-like GUI's over HTTP, but it doesn't handle latency well because it micromanages individual keystrokes and characters. Contrast with an HMTL text-box.

We wouldn't have to fart around with DOM and JS and Microsoft IE unstandards if they did it right.

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XOrg's X11 by jd · 2012-09-15 07:16 · Score: 4, Interesting

...is just a "reference implementation". It is NOT the be-all and end-all.

If someone were to produce a wholly new windowing system that had a compatibility layer for the standard X11 API, support for the X11 configuration files, and the option of sending X11 packets over a network, you would have something that was compliant with the reference implementation. It would be a superset, but the reference specification would be 100% implemented according to the standard, agreed?

Indeed, since the current reference implementation is highly modular, you could replace one module at a time with something that solved the problems inherent in X but which remained 100% backwards compatible.

Let us call this new implementation X12, since it's a stepwise upgrade, similar to (but less crippling than) the upgrade from X10 to X11.

What would I imagine this X12 to look like?

Well, X is still horrible for games, so sprites and shaders make sense. (Nothing stops environments like Gnome or KDE from implementing their own, but to make games viable, you've got to have one API that always works even if you have other APIs for each desktop environment.)

Also on games, but also for multimedia, sound would be good. The challenge is that you want a universal "front end" API where you can switch between engines (such as PulseAudio or Jack) without having to change the code. You'd simply get the characteristics you want. The reasoning there is that different sound systems do have different characteristics and you want a different set for different circumstances. But, again, manufacturers don't care about your freedom to choose, they care about being able to sell to the most people with the least variation in the codebase. No problem. If there's a single universal API that forwards what applies, translates those things that are translatable, and ignores the rest, then the manufacturers are happy and the freedom people are happy. Everyone is happy. That's good.

For scientific and engineering work, you get the best results by converting from vectors to pixels at the last possible moment. Metafont/metapost have a good way to describe shapes (though you'd want to "compile" these descriptions into bytecode for efficiency), and transformation matrices aren't complicated. It would take a bit of work to get the system to work efficiently in 4D, but it would make life a lot easier.

The legacy X11 protocols aren't very efficient OR secure. They're needed because there's so many X11 terminals out there, but X12 should only use X11 to talk to X11 systems. X12 to X12 should be designed from the start to be secure, compact and extensible. It should also be transport-independent. Why should X care if it using TCP, UDP, DCCP, SCTP or something yet to be developed? Or what version of the IP protocol is involved? (If it IS involved! What's wrong with X over Infiniband?) So long as both sides of the connection know what to use, and things that have to be reliable are kept reliable, it's just a port as far as 99% of the code is concerned. Only when it comes to building it in the first place will there be any difference and that can all be hidden in an abstraction library.

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Re:You Must Be Kiddin by Miamicanes · 2012-09-15 09:10 · Score: 4, Interesting

The difference is, if you tried doing it with a 32-bit alpha-blended desktop, VNC would have to shovel raw bitmaps over the network when you moved that semi-translucent terminal window that's partially-obscuring kEdit. RDP would just say, "move window XXX to a new origin of (x,y)", and all the alpha-blending window-translucency magic (and dropshadows, and everything else) would be rendered locally.

RDP between two computers running Windows works decently well over slow network connections, even with large displays and 32-bit alpha-blended eye candy. The same can't be said for VNC.

Wayland is the bridge to the future by BalkanBoy · 2012-09-15 09:25 · Score: 4, Insightful

"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.

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Re:Wayland is the bridge to the future by jbolden · 2012-09-15 14:04 · Score: 2

The X developers are the Wayland developers. Wayland came out of the people working on X being asked to do things that were too hard or impossible with X.

Re:Sorry. Wayland is a POS by Paul+Jakma · 2012-09-15 09:26 · Score: 2

Uhm, it's hardware vendors who are paying for the work on Wayland, and the Linux graphics stack generally. Most notably Intel.

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UNIX Haters Handbook Chapter 7 by ydrol · 2012-09-15 10:23 · Score: 2

Whenever I see "X11 Window System" I think of the UNIX Haters handbook. A bit dated but well worth a read - even if you like UNIX/linux - http://m.simson.net/ugh.pdf

X Window System by HoaryCripple · 2012-09-15 11:01 · Score: 2

I am being a stickler I know, but can we please call it properly the X Window System, X or X11. Conflating the X Window System and X11 into the X11 Window System just sounds silly. Much like X Windows. That is all.

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