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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?
They are replacing X11 with Wayland. There's definitely much of X11 that is obsolete from a developer's standpoint. Pretty cool actually. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
Network transparency is a very nice feature; but it's debatable how 'transparent' X still is once you try anything remotely fancy or modern.
OpenGL, in particular, wasn't really part of the plan. It's been hacking in (in a number of different ways); but it's still pretty easy to trip on a mine: If the program is running on the remote host; but using your GPU, GLX indirect rendering should work, as long as you don't hit any OpenGL extensions that expect direct hardware access; but if your application likes to throw big textures around as though it were developed for computers where the 3d card is separated from the CPU by 16 PCIe lanes, rather than a LAN(or, god help you, WAN), you'll notice.
If you want the server to do the work, so that you can use an actually-thin thin client, you end up with something like VirtualGL, which uses X11 on both ends; but actually handles slinging the image data with VNC...
It's used every day, just not by you.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
The best way to explain it, that I've found, is this:
A server lets clients access a shared resource. On a file server, it's storage. On a web server, it's documents. On a compute server, it's processing. On an X server, the shared resource is the display, and clients are given access to it.