I still use xev regularly and xkill pretty much everyday? Along with xclip (everyday too), xdotool (for automation workflows)... glxgears very often too to check if for some reason the GPU driver bailed out
Do they also not include telemetry or forcefully installed software you never asked for but cannot remove anyway and will remind you of their existence ar every opportunity?
Windows has a Ctrl+Shift+Win+B shortcut to restart the graphics driver if it bails out.
The fact that Windows has a built-in shortcut to restart the graphics driver illustrates that graphics drivers are not as faultless as the parent poster believes.
I don't know... Sometimes I've to pull Windows into safe mode and run DDU. The reasons are varied.
I assume macOS might run into similar things, all software has bugs
glxgears was/is useful if you use a proprietary graphics driver. Those are prone to getting broken when you update to a new kernel. With in-kernel drivers for most GPUs this is much less of a problem today. Probably still a problem for Nvidia owners.
i'm happy for you if you never have any application that hangs and ends as a zombie process but for me it happens very, very regularly (generally because of some stuff being on a network share or some hardware being plugged in an out a bit too much.. like unplugging an USB soundcard when it's being actively used, this one always causes some mess)
aha, I just used it for a very simple reason: it was simpler for me to type "<meta+d> xkill" and point & shoot than to go through the save & exit confirm dialogs of a GUI app I was about to close
> It's 2023 and there are stable graphical operating systems that don't make you check 'if the GPU driver bailed out' every 15 minutes...
In my experience it's got nothing to do with the operating system and everything to do with who wrote your graphics card driver. (NVidia is stable everywhere, AMD is... not).
We are not in the Radeon times with GATOS project any more. Since the radeon(4) driver, Radeon cards might work much better with open drivers and a current MESA release than NVIDIA except for machine learning.
Also, I can reliably tell based on the fact that the contents of the XWayland windows are fuzzier.
I can do that because I have had lots of practice discerning fuzziness, because I am using a old monitor (as opposed to a HiDPI display) and because I have a fractional (non-integral) scaling factor declared in my monitors.xml file--when the scaling factor is set to 1.0 there is no difference in fuzziness as far as I can tell.
how does xeyes help with that? does it fail to track the mouse on wayland apps? i can see that would be useful.
i actually have problems with XWayland, it frequently (every few days), goes to a 100% CPU and locks up the screen. then i have to remote login and kill it, at which point i see which apps die, so i know what is using XWayland from that. :-)
I still use xv to look at images, GLXGears to debug GL issues, and xev to debug any weird keymapping issues, and xterm as a visually different terminal for things like monitoring console output.
It's such a quick and handy tool that I became habituated to xv over a decade of use. Some years ago though, I found it was no longer available to install after an upgrade. I was eventually able to fudge a working version from old code and patches and taking hints (iirc) from some patches for MacOS, but now that has suffered bitrot.
So I'm curious what OS you're running and where your xv is from? Still miss it!
For those who are relatively new to X, it is likely very obscure. People seem to be using desktop environments these days, and desktop environments come with their own terminal application. Those seeking out replacement terminals would probably stumble across xterm, but how many would actually try it? It's feature list isn't exactly designed for those with modern sensibilities.
(I was using xterm until very recently, mostly because it used sharp rasterized display fonts. Now that I have a reasonably high DPI display, it is easier to use nearly anything else.)
> For those who are relatively new to X, it is likely very obscure. People seem to be using desktop environments these days, and desktop environments come with their own terminal application. Those seeking out replacement terminals would probably stumble across xterm, but how many would actually try it?
It's really very configurable. My problem with mate-terminal and similar is that they don't often let me set a cursor color independent of the foreground color.
I like to code C projects in a single vim session running in a terminal; by having a bright green fast-blinking block cursor I can visually locate where my cursor is after reading code in a different split.
So, yeah, I use xterm (or uxterm) because of this single feature that I value of any other feature it might be missing.
with that argument every X11 app that isn't gnome/gtk or kde/qt is obscure. but then that is pretty much what the list shows, so maybe that's the authors definition as well.
I wanted to test something on a "normal" system so I started a new Fedora 38 vm. gnome 44.2.
What an incredibly obtuse, unhelpful, un-useful interface. I don't know about kde but definitely gnome does not get to charge anyone else with any words like janky.
Who doesn't remember XEyes, XBiff, XClock, XEdit, Xev, XKill (!), Xv (!!), XMosaic (!!!) ... many others on there.
Granted I did not know FSV2 and some others.
Nice collection, glad to not have to run any of them. Not saying they weren't useful for their time!