
Why X Is Not Our Ideal Window System (1990) [pdf] - type0
http://www.std.org/~msm/common/protocol.pdf
======
thg
_I have never seen anything fill up a vacuum so fast and still suck. \-- Rob
Pike, on X

Steve Jobs said two years ago that X is brain-damaged and it will be gone in
two years. He was half right. \-- Dennis Ritchie

Dennis Ritchie is twice as bright as Steve Jobs, and only half wrong. \-- Jim
Gettys_

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rbanffy
X is a great example of good enough software. It is there and does what it
should. Any candidate to replace it should, at least, be out there and do what
it does.

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cs702
1990!

I have yet to come across _anyone_ who thinks X is great...

Yet, somehow, despite all its shortcomings, intertwined hairballs, and
sedimentary layers of ancient code, X has survived for decades and gradually
become widely used in free open-source desktops. I'm typing this on a state-
of-the-art (ha-ha) Ubuntu Linux 16.04 desktop running Unity on top of... X.

Now we're all hoping Wayland will successfully replace it.

Is X another example of "worse is better"?

[https://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html](https://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-
is-better.html)

~~~
destructionator
I'm not hoping Wayland will replace it...

"Is Wayland network transparent / does it support remote rendering?

No"

Then it is useless to me. As crappy as X is (and I agree that it sucks pretty
hard), at least it works for my use cases.

~~~
cs702
No worries, you will be able to run X on top of Wayland.

Quoting from
[https://wayland.freedesktop.org/faq.html#heading_toc_j_8](https://wayland.freedesktop.org/faq.html#heading_toc_j_8)
:

 _" This doesn't mean that remote rendering won't be possible with Wayland, it
just means that you will have to put a remote rendering server on top of
Wayland. One such server could be the X.org server, but other options include
an RDP server, a VNC server or somebody could even invent their own new remote
rendering model. Which is a feature when you think about it; layering X.org on
top of Wayland has very little overhead, but the other types of remote
rendering servers no longer requires X.org, and experimenting with new
protocols is easier."_

No, the irony is not lost on me.

~~~
Spivak
It seems like they don't _want_ people to use X on top of Wayland but are
trying to assure people that a distro shipping Wayland wont break their
ability to ssh -X.

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dsr_
X may be crap, but it's more resilient crap than any other windowing system
has proven themselves to be so far.

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TremendousJudge
What I wonder is who came up with naming the local machine the 'server' and
the remote (who runs the software) the 'client'

~~~
mannykannot
It is completely logical: a server manages shared resources (in this case, the
displays and input devices of your local machine) so they can be used
concurrently by multiple clients (your applications, which are not constrained
to be on a single machine.)

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lunchables
So I wonder how many of these issues have been fixed since then?

~~~
ape4
In case you don't know, Wayland is the replacement...
[https://wayland.freedesktop.org/](https://wayland.freedesktop.org/)

~~~
TremendousJudge
and it only took 27 years!

