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

Re:X12?

[Paul Jakma]

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/