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X Window System Turns 30 Years Old
An anonymous reader writes "One of the oldest pieces of the Linux desktop stack still widely in use today is the X Window System that today is commonly referred to as X11 or in recent years the X.Org Server. The X Window System predates the Linux kernel, the Free Software Foundation, GCC, and other key pieces of the Linux infrastructure — or most software widely-used in general. Today marks 30 years since the announcement of X at MIT when it was introduced to Project Athena." X wasn't new when I first saw it, on Sun workstations the summer before I started college. When did you first encounter it?
No one is using the "network transparency" of X11 as it was intended to be used anymore, and has been like this for years. (Unless you use Motif, like 0.0000001% of the X11 apps). NO ONE USES SERVER-CLIENT PAINT PRIMITIVES.
It's just image buffers sended over. Like VNC but without any optimization and using ugly paintig primitive trickeries.
So, then. Explain why scrolling in an X-forwarded text editor is pretty much instant, while I can watch the pixels redraw if I use the same application through VNC?
Ah, because this is just something you read on the Internet, and you don't use X-forwarding every day like I do?