However, I still field plenty of questions from lots of people about this, and a lot of the time, it’s extremely simple stuff: “What is X?” “How does it interact with my graphics card and mouse/keyboard?” “What do apps use X for?” “What is Wayland, and how does it fit into the picture?” “What problems did X have that made us want to write new display server technologies?”
These sort of questions were what inspired me to write “The Linux Graphics Stack” in the first place, but there’s really never been a comprehensive, historical writeup of our display server technologies in general. So, I chose to spend my free time at Red Hat writing it.
A very fun look at what X actually is – including embedded X server sessions running in your browser using HTML5 canvas. Fancy.
X can’t be a plane as it’s only one dimension. A plane requires two dimensions. So it should be the XYplane.
😀
(for the humor and math impaired, that’s a joke)
So, I think you are proposing renaming X11 to XY11 (or probably X11Y11, or XY11,11 or… etc.
I upvote you!
Edited 2014-07-11 20:30 UTC
Math humor is lost on you as any display output is height plus width. (2D). Or perhaps it is not, and my comment is redundant.
Please ignore if that is the case.
Edited 2014-07-12 00:02 UTC
I think that X should damn well as’plane itself… then go its room for a very long time to think about what it’s done.
What is it with RH these days?
Every time someone from that company makes some kind of statement, they seem hell bent on pissing on *nix for some reason or other.
Maybe because as UNIX vendor they are aware not everything is as perfect as people sell it.
Even UNIX creators moved on, sadly the world didn’t want their UNIX improvement.
I would not have a problem with them, if they didn’t insist on cramming their changes down everyones throat.
Experiment at home, not in the middle of the plaza.
It’s hardly PH’s fault that other distros are taking their experiments like Pulseaudio and Systemd and using them. I hate the things as much as anyone but we should put the blame where it belongs.
I think as users it will be a few years before systemd can be judged properly.
I do think, maybe, systemd will allow for more flexibility.
For example, it looks like a lot of Linux operating systems might end up being built around containers, like LXC and Docker:
http://lwn.net/Articles/602579/
For example to allow for things like CoreOS and Project Atomic:
http://major.io/2014/05/13/coreos-vs-project-atomic-a-review/
If that belongs on your Linux desktop, I don’t know yet. I don’t think improving the user-facing devices is like desktops is dead either. Maybe the top layer work like mobile devices is strange thinking which a few tried, but seemed to have mostly failed.
It does allow for things like creating a btrfs snapshotting before updating/upgrading the software and going back to the versions very easily.
Or updating the whole operating system in one step, systems like ChromeOS or servers systems, like those Google uses already do this. I believe they use 2 separate partitions. And switch between them.
Which can still be useful on your desktop.
It could be useful on embedded devices as well.
For example it could mean people creating embedded devices didn’t have to re-invent their own solutions.
Edited 2014-07-12 13:02 UTC
By modern I assume you mean animations, transparency and the like? Those functions don’t map well to X semantics, as you’re probably aware.
However, if you use something like xfce X can be fantastic on a LAN as it can be very responsive.
From my perspective as a casual audio using, non audio engineer, but as a systems guy. I *like* both pulse and systemd. They seem to do things the right way, and are a huge improvement in usability over what previously existed.
The only arguments against systemd that make sense to me is the whole Unix philosophy thing. SystemD is just so good, that other projects want to rely on its feature set. There isn’t a viable alternative in getting that feature set, and thus a dependency is established. At somepoint someone might create an anti-systemd that provides the same features. But if they do, it very well might just end up being an alternate implementation of systemd.
X should die in horrible agony. This crap can barely render modern user interface through 100MBit/s LAN – I’m talking about simple Gnome Terminal. When using Windows RDP on the other hand, you may even watch a movie on HSDPA connection.
Edited 2014-07-12 07:50 UTC
X should die peacefully of old age, after working tirelessly for so many years.
It shall be always remembered as a really useful piece of software, with many quirks but good character overall.
Actually I use remote X over the public internet (25Mbps down/6Mbps up) to remote servers and an even gnome-text-edit is usable. Not snappy, but usable. Occasionally I even fire up firefox for a download. I certainly would not recommend remote firefox for regular usage.
Note that I use ssh tunneling with compression enabled. I am betting that uncompressed it would be entirely unusable.
Really nice to see an article like this on OSNews, I especially enjoyed the XSever running in my browser using JavaScript
Why dose this comment sound so sarcastic? I didn’t mean it to be, the internet is strange.