40 Years of the X Window System

[@RonHelton]

It appears that the main talent of Gates and Jobs was "borrowing" ideas from others and then marketing them aggressively. ; )

[@mojoblues66]

Apple did license the GUI from PARC, in exchange for Apple stock. Microsoft, on the other hand, just copied everything without any negotiations. I know this is hard to swallow for the Apple haters.

[@musiqtee]

True since both Edison and Ford. Or the Stevensons for railways 50 years prior. Capital and value are different beasts…😅

[@RonHelton]

@@mojoblues66 I don't hate Apple. I just think it is priced too high for what one gets. Ever since it started.

[@massmike11]

That why wee all buy are pants from the same company… oh wait sometimes deferent people can have similar ideas and come up with way that do the same thing’s without actually copying

[@jonisin5498]

Nextstep is very original and innovative.

[@empathy_monster]

Not many companies take major risks anymore by investing in novel technologies that might fail, which is why so much of the world still runs on legacy systems.

[@tschak909]

I need to point out something that is consistently conflated: PARC had _NOTHING_ to do with the Dandelion (what you're calling the Star) machines. The D machines were designed and implemented entirely by the Systems Development Department (SDD) at Xerox, which was in El Segundo. They were a completely different team from the CSL lab at PARC. The Dandelion was also sold as a LISP and SMALLTALK workstation (as the 1101).

[@JoePep-b6w]

I like your closing remarks "Be excellent to each other" It's something that could solve a whole load of our problems. Not so easy to do, but worth trying.

[@Meower68]

Y'all do realize that's a Bill and Ted reference, right?

[@AlsGeekLab]

@Meower68 baudaciois!

[@mulad]

Latency issues have been a big problem for X11, with too many back-and-forth messages needed to draw things -- people noticed that Windows apps under WINE could run faster than native apps, partly since that simplified communication down to shoving large blocks of pixels around rather than for the many smaller elements of the regular X11 apps. Wayland keeps getting better, but I hope remote display becomes straightforward soon. I need to manage a lot of remote systems for my job, and a number of things would become a lot easier if I could spin up web browsers on distant machines without needing to do full remote desktop sessions

[@supercompooper]

I hope they make multiple remote display with Wayland much better soon.

[@paulfalke6227]

The original X idea was program runs on a large multiuser computer and the input/output was on an X terminal, a graphical terminal with local microprocessor. The "intelligent" terminal was known because IBM used the 3270 terminal since 1972. This terminal was text only, but could be "programmed" to do input checking and formatting of entry masks. The microprocessor progress made the central computer/local terminal approach obsolete. X adapted to the new paradigma of everything on one computer.

[@thingsiplay]

X11 is no more, Wayland is my new best friend.

[@darukutsu]

*keeps on using x for another 10 years*

[@notuxnobux]

Wayland? that ain't it chef

[@mgord9518]

@@notuxnobux Neither is X. Even my NVidia gaming PC has been working better on Wayland than it ever did on X

[@mnoxman]

Unix used to be nice in that when they published a Beta software it was more stable than an Microsoft pre-alpha release to developers. Yet today, thanks to Wayland, we have software that is RTM but should be called an unstable Alpha. fwiw Sun had SunView and NeWS wich was also not as good as X and was only slightly more stable than W.

[@miao_renfeng]

Watched this video on WindowMaker with X11, thanks

[@AlsGeekLab]

Makes me happy that people are still.using WindowMaker

[@idtyu]

Redhat has advantage here, fedora adopted wayland as default back in 2014, and helped it matured to a point where redhat can use it. While Ubuntu tried their own graphics compositor and no one used it

[@NeilRieck]

More than a month ago, RedHat released CentOS Stream 10 beta (a.k.a. EL10). Checkout the release notes because they are dropping support for X11 and KDE

[@diego001]

5:00 Sorry, but fact-check: Unix was not invented at MIT. Unix was developed at AT&T Bell Labs by developers who had experience in the joint venture operating system of MIT, AT&T Bell Labs, and General Electric which was called Multics. Unix was considered a separate operating system that was derived from Multics and simplified some of Multics's concepts to make it smaller and simpler to operate. Multics ended up being finished by Honeywell's computer division and MIT after AT&T Bell Labs pulled out. Yes, the X Window system was developed originally at MIT as part of MIT's Project Athena and the integration of Unix systems for Project Athena. But Unix was done separately and it went on to take over the world while Multics became a footnote of operating systems history.

[@AlsGeekLab]

I did say Bell labs. Unix was used largely first in MIT as it was a joint venture there. I didn't conflate X and UNIX, the only thing that ties them together is that X was developed for UNIX

[@diego001]

@@AlsGeekLab "Unix had been invented at MIT in cooperation with AT&T" is the actual quote. The joint venture wasn't Unix. It was Multics.

[@tschak909]

Also, love that you're playing real fast and loose with Blit and X intermixing them between shots. I guess most people won't notice, but that's not accurate at all.

[@AlsGeekLab]

It's hard finding footage of a 40 yr old system so the context kinda fit. It was really just a filler

[@ninetydirectory3798]

The Rise And Fall Of The X Window System

[@tschak909]

The synchronous nature of V that you're referring to, refers literally to the fact that every single message had to be dispatched and replied, before the next one could be handled. It was a major performance bottleneck.

[@AlsGeekLab]

You seem to know about V more than most! I could hardly get a scrap of information on the net about it, how do you know about it?

[@tschak909]

@@AlsGeekLab I have been trying to scrape together any information about it, initially as part of trying to bring-up the first version of X on an emulated VS100 in time for the 40th anniversary, but couldn't get it done in time. :)

[@AlsGeekLab]

@@tschak909 would love to know more!

[@mojoblues66]

0:13 says "No Window Manager", yet ps output show "uwm" running...

[@breadmoth6443]

Been using Linux for 20 years now , and even back then I have never had any such need to "run an app over the network from another room" , nor do I have a VAX and need to run X11 on it from another building. My needs are modern, I need a proper system with local GPU support, no screen tearing and a less creaky codebase. Wayland is proof that X11 is very long in the tooth, and that you have devs from X11 writing Wayland code should say something. I could care less about network transparency , and if you need something like it - you got RDP or VNC perhaps ... I myself would prefer a system that can properly handle modern desktop needs.

[@RogerioPereiradaSilva77]

Conversely, I don't have a single issue with X11 that Wayland solves except that with Wayland I have to give up functionality (like network transparency) and it actually introduces quite a few problems of its own. Wake me up when Wayland can do proper ICC color profile (looks like KDE finally managed to get that working properly - good luck trying to use Krita for anything serious without it) and have a proper replacement for tools like Autokey. Heck, I'll settle for - gasp - screen sharing in video conference apps without having to jump through hoops!

[@breadmoth6443]

@@RogerioPereiradaSilva77 perhaps i have bad luck, i experience screen tearing, and im using both the nvidia proprietary driver along with the kde compositor, no matter what i try every solution i try, i still get vertical tearing when scrolling through text and sometimes random horizontal tearing on video, so nah , im ready to give X11 the boot.

[@dfs-comedy]

Back in ancient times (early 1990s) I did use remote X11 access quite a bit. However, I haven't used it in the last decade or so. I'm still on X11, though. It works for me and I see no upside and lots of downside to switching to Wayland. Most critically, my desktop environment (XFCE4) doesn't yet support Wayland.

[@breadmoth6443]

@@dfs-comedy xfce is already starting its move to support wayland . I am just not nostalgic for x11 in anyways, and considering i have tried every single "fix" for my screen tearing, and using compositors, nothing has worked. i can live without the legacy of x11 if it means i get a proper desktop experience.

[@supercompooper]

What I don't like about Wayland is how limited it is vis-à-vis remote access and VPNs. It's screen sharing tech seems to be mainly single user. And it seems you have to have a computer, at least to make it easy, plugged into a monitor all of the time so you can't just have a server you remote into with the graphical desktop. At least not easily. And it's not multi-user.

[@esra_erimez]

Watching on KDE Neon with X11

[@lenOwOo]

You may want to change the channel name from Al to AL

[@Kneedragon1962]

5 seconds into this ~ so why do we need Wayland? Because our code-base for X is 40 years old ~ and that is exactly as bad as it sounds. No ~ I'm not religious about Wayland, I have a long relationship with gnome2 / Mate and I don't want to lose it. If they can get Mate running properly under Wayland ~ that's great! I do love Mate. I don't love Xorg. No, I don't want to try dark themes, or a tiling window manager, or a desktop that was written on and for a mobile phone. I started on DOS and went to Win-3.11 and I rather liked the win-95 desktop. No, I didn't like Win-95, I liked the user interface for it, and also on NT4. When I came to Linux, I found gnome2, and that was very familiar. I like gnome2. If you can give me Mint + Mate, but built on a completely new set of graphic foundations ~ I will be forever in your debt. Fry : Futurama : "Shut up and take my money!"

[@AlsGeekLab]

I take it you didn't watch until the end where I talk about Wayland then ? 😁

[@Kneedragon1962]

@@AlsGeekLab [grin] I typed first, then watched. You didn't say anything I disagreed with.

[@swedishpsychopath8795]

We should thank Norway for inventing Object-Oriented-Programmin (OOP) in 1967!

[@HksjJkdkd]

Rivaly with Wayland? Dude.... Xorg is since 2006 dead and Wayland is suposse tp replace it.

[@AlsGeekLab]

It hasn't replaced it yet! Maybe in the next few years! As per the end of this video!

[@HksjJkdkd]

@@AlsGeekLab is the default now tho so it kinda replaced it already but its only still there because of compatibilty until everything is ported to Wayland and the last xorg features are implemented.

[@AlsGeekLab]

@@HksjJkdkd not the default for many distros. My daily driver is Pop!_OS and it's not yet using Wayland, for example

[@RogerioPereiradaSilva77]

Ah, yeah! The wonderful Wayland... 15 years successfully replacing X11. And counting!

[@HksjJkdkd]

@@AlsGeekLab they are littarly replacing Gnome DE with their own Wayland only DE called COSMIC. Do you even check Linux News.

[@SteveHazel]

x windows is why we have Qt and GTK so we can even use a gui at all. Lord knows I wasn't about to make a gui on xwindows. it's why i hung out on windows sooo looong. it's really kind of held linux back. thank god for wayland. now some progress can be made. although I think we're stuck with gtk vs qt forever. ah well. that's linux for ya. always weird. (that's a good thing I think)

[@rchltmedia]

this X is good, not elon musk one. this X actually makes graphics meanwhile elon just destroys further.

[@laharl2k]

40 years of being crap.....