What is X ?

chomwitt · 2025-06-09 07:27:01

In a funny twist of a personal perspective of a very influential dark shadow of politics ,cultural differences on libreland (with various recent news tending to reinforce that view leading to the collapse of the meritocracy camp :@1) here a is quote from a 2000 book on X giving an initial description that has a Unix philosophy aura :

X is a method for representing graphics operations as a stream of data . suitable for use as a network protocol. The concise guide to XFree86 for linux by Aron Hsiao

Contrast with an even older book 1993 The Joy of X (hitting the all time high ceiling of catchy promoting titles!!) that starts the introduction to X by focusing to the window nature of X :

X lets you run many simultaneous applications on your display , each with one or more windows of its own.

So forgetting for a moment that is named X, the question is ,is that idea (the networked graphic ops stream :-) ) worth existing as a libre alternative ? (if yes why is the least forkable idea in libreland?) .And is Wayland an incarnation of the same core idea and if not what is the Wayland's core idea ?

Later addition :
According to XLibre maintainer and initial forker Wayland's core focus was the composition component of the display server stack.

Note that Wayland itself is only about surface composition, nothing more (plus a little bit input routing). It was created as an experiment to explore how future composition component in the Unix/X11 stack could perhaps look like – the idea of building whole desktop directly ontop of it (without X) came much late. Enrico Weigelt's interview by Felipe Contreras, (06/2025)

--------------

@Question of Felipe Contreras on X11 future on Xorg mailing list (7/6/25)

@How X started. (An effort of mine to see the development of X from the view of the influence of bigger organizations.)

@Wayland''s creator interview in 2012 fosdem.

@Wkp/Wayland (protocol)

Last edited by chomwitt (2025-06-13 08:10:23)

Camtaf · 2025-06-09 08:29:56

'X' is a graphical windowing system, a GUI (graphical user interface), allowing multiple (graphics & terminal) programs to run on your desktop.

Anything that does the same is similar to the original 'X', like Wayland...

chomwitt · 2025-06-09 08:34:17

Project Athena was a joint project of MIT, Digital Equipment Corporation, and IBM to produce a campus-wide distributed computing environment for educational use. @wkp

So you see @camtaf the priorities of the organization that lead to X wasnt just a graphical gui.

Last edited by chomwitt (2025-06-09 08:36:11)

The officially official Devuan Forum!

#1 2025-06-09 07:27:01

What is X ?

#2 2025-06-09 08:29:56

Re: What is X ?

#3 2025-06-09 08:34:17

Re: What is X ?

Board footer