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turtles
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 Posted: Wed Jan 31, 2024 4:11 pm Post subject: The History of X11 |
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Will 2024 be the year we retire Xorg? I see a lot of posts on here of people trying out Wayland.
Here is a cool video on the the History of X11, and towards the end it touches on Wayland and Xwayland:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-N-fgKWYGU
I think the first time I used an X11 system was around 1995 on a SGI/ IRIX.
What was the first X11 system you used?
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dmpogo
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| Posted: Wed Jan 31, 2024 4:40 pm Post subject: Re: The History of X11 |
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| turtles wrote: | Will 2024 be the year we retire Xorg? I see a lot of posts on here of people trying out Wayland.
Here is a cool video on the the History of X11, and towards the end it touches on Wayland and Xwayland:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-N-fgKWYGU
I think the first time I used an X11 system was around 1995 on a SGI/ IRIX.
What was the first X11 system you used? |
I recall (and surely not later) February 1992, X-terminal, University of Cambridge, staring on a plot drawn on the machine in Berkeley.
The end of X11 will be the end of desktop/laptop Linux for me, I'll just buy a mac and retire from maintaining my computers |
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eeckwrk99
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| Posted: Wed Jan 31, 2024 4:54 pm Post subject: Re: The History of X11 |
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| turtles wrote: | | Will 2024 be the year we retire Xorg? |
I don't think so. While Xorg days are certainly numbered, it will take many more years to reach EOL and actually disappear. Maybe in a decade?
| turtles wrote: | | I see a lot of posts on here of people trying out Wayland. |
I've been playing around with Wayland on an old laptop from 2008 (Compaq 6710b) with an integrated Intel GPU lately, no issue whatsoever. However, on my main machine with a GTX 970, last time I tried a couple of months ago it was -still- a disaster (with proprietary driver). Too many issues that make me stick with X11 for now. I know one day I'll have to ditch my AwesomeWM setup I slowly crafted over the years but I already accepted my fate. |
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turtles
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| Posted: Wed Jan 31, 2024 5:02 pm Post subject: Re: The History of X11 |
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| dmpogo wrote: |
I recall (and surely not later) February 1992, X-terminal, University of Cambridge, staring on a plot drawn on the machine in Berkeley.
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'92 you got me beat, I want an X-terminal LOL
| dmpogo wrote: |
The end of X11 will be the end of desktop/laptop Linux for me, I'll just buy a mac and retire from maintaining my computers |
Well with Gentoo, just like with systemd I imagine we'll always have a choice.
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turtles
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| Posted: Wed Jan 31, 2024 5:09 pm Post subject: Re: The History of X11 |
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| eeckwrk99 wrote: | | turtles wrote: | | Will 2024 be the year we retire Xorg? |
I don't think so. While Xorg days are certainly numbered, it will take many more years to reach EOL and actually disappear. Maybe in a decade?
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Not saying it will disappear, I think X11 will live forever under Wayland.
As we'll always have X11 -> Xwayland -> Wayland.
I suppose the question is will 2024 be the year Wayland become the 'default' option for new installs?
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szatox
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| Posted: Wed Jan 31, 2024 5:19 pm Post subject: |
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| Quote: | | Will 2024 be the year we retire Xorg? I see a lot of posts on here of people trying out Wayland. |
No. Wayland is not ready yet, some applications rely on X11 features that don't exist in wayland, and apparently won't be implemented for years to come because the folks behind wayland are a huge pain to work with, and also it kinda reminds me of systemd.
You know, "it's my way or my way".
Sure, X11 is old and has its own problems, but why pick a new enemy after you got know how to handle the old one? 
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dartleader
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| Posted: Wed Jan 31, 2024 5:27 pm Post subject: |
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| My main workstation has an NVIDIA card which does not play nicely with wayland; I get horrible flickering and tearing. I'm using wayland on a couple of laptops and love it, but I think my main workstation is stuck with xmonad for the foreseeable future. |
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turtles
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| Posted: Wed Jan 31, 2024 5:41 pm Post subject: |
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| szatox wrote: |
Sure, X11 is old and has its own problems, but why pick a new enemy after you got know how to handle the old one? |
Reminds me of the IPV4 to IPV6 conversion.
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pa4wdh
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| Posted: Wed Jan 31, 2024 6:09 pm Post subject: Re: The History of X11 |
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| turtles wrote: | | Will 2024 be the year we retire Xorg? |
For me absolutely not.
As far as i know wayland doesn't have the network transparency X11 has and they have no plans to implement such a feature.
| Quote: | | What was the first X11 system you used? |
I think that was SuSE Linux somewhere in the mid '90's.
I also have some HP Envisex and HP Envisex II X terminals which i used later, but the hardware predates the SuSE release i used.
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Fitzcarraldo
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| Posted: Wed Jan 31, 2024 6:11 pm Post subject: |
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1990, with Interactive Unix.
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turtles
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| Posted: Wed Jan 31, 2024 7:00 pm Post subject: |
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| Fitzcarraldo wrote: | | 1990, with Interactive Unix. |
Fitzcarraldo's in the lead with 1990!
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logrusx
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| Posted: Wed Jan 31, 2024 7:39 pm Post subject: Re: The History of X11 |
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| turtles wrote: | | Will 2024 be the year we retire Xorg? |
Definitely not. Not even in 2034 I guess.
| turtles wrote: | I think the first time I used an X11 system was around 1995 on a SGI/ IRIX.
What was the first X11 system you used? |
A couple of acronyms here: S.u.S.E, YaST. It must have been late 1999. I only regret I didn't sit and read the man pages. All of them. I was taken away by Gnome, KDE and so on. Then there were a whole bunch of distributions. Then it was Slackware. Then I got fed up and moved to Gentoo. Then I got fed up and moved off of Linux. Then I got fed up and moved back to Gentoo.
Best Regards,
Georgi
p.s. Gentoo Chat might be a more appropriate form for this thread. |
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NeddySeagoon
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| Posted: Wed Jan 31, 2024 7:50 pm Post subject: |
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Mid 80's on an Apollo workstation.
At least, it looked like twm on Xfree86.
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depontius
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| Posted: Wed Jan 31, 2024 8:08 pm Post subject: |
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In 1990 I was working for IBM and my area got a half-dozen of the brand new RS-6000 workstations. I was put in charge of them. At the time we had three pages of typewritten instructions of how to install AIX 3.0 on them, and there was one tape drive and ASCII terminal that the various areas passed around to do the installation. When done it came up to a text login window and I believe we ran "xinit" and it came up to X11R3 and mwm.
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turtles
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| Posted: Wed Jan 31, 2024 9:04 pm Post subject: |
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| NeddySeagoon wrote: | Mid 80's on an Apollo workstation.
At least, it looked like twm on Xfree86. |
Neddy is in the lead with mid 80's!
Thats is interesting never had herd of Apollo, what were they used for? CAD ?
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NeddySeagoon
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| Posted: Wed Jan 31, 2024 9:13 pm Post subject: |
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turtles,
Schematic capture for ASIC design where I was.
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dmpogo
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| Posted: Wed Jan 31, 2024 9:20 pm Post subject: |
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| turtles wrote: | | NeddySeagoon wrote: | Mid 80's on an Apollo workstation.
At least, it looked like twm on Xfree86. |
Neddy is in the lead with mid 80's!
Thats is interesting never had herd of Apollo, what were they used for? CAD ? |
As I read on wikipedia, it does not seem Apollo was actually using X (11 or pre) ? It was full of proprietary solutions, perhaps graphics was one of them ? |
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NeddySeagoon
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| Posted: Wed Jan 31, 2024 9:35 pm Post subject: |
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dmpogo,
It looked very like twm. It wan even called The Window Manager, as it was the only window manager. :)
We had three monchrome workstations and one colour one, which everyone hated as the screen resolution was so bad compared to the monochrome.
I don't recall the colours though.
I don't recall if it was late enough to be UNIX based.
Looks like I'm disqualified :)
For amusement only
Older readers, like me will recall the events described there.
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Zucca
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| Posted: Wed Jan 31, 2024 9:56 pm Post subject: |
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Moved from "Desktop Environments" to "Gentoo Chat".
I hope you don't mind. ;)
My first X experience has to when I finally managed to install GUI on my first Gentoo install. :)
It was 2004 or 2005. Did we still had xf86 in general use?
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sublogic
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| Posted: Wed Jan 31, 2024 10:36 pm Post subject: |
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| Xqvss on Digital Equipment Corp. workstations, in 1987. Maybe 1986. (qvss refers to DEC's graphics adapter; it was X11.) |
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turtles
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| Posted: Wed Jan 31, 2024 10:38 pm Post subject: |
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| sublogic wrote: | | Xqvss on Digital Equipment Corp. workstations, in 1987. Maybe 1986. (qvss refers to DEC's graphics adapter; it was X11.) |
sublogic is now in the lead!
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flexibeast
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| Posted: Thu Feb 01, 2024 1:00 am Post subject: Re: The History of X11 |
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| pa4wdh wrote: | | As far as i know wayland doesn't have the network transparency X11 has and they have no plans to implement such a feature. |
There's waypipe and wayvnc.
i'm currently using Wayfire, and was previously using Sway; before that, i was using i3. First started using Linux (and X) around late '97.
X isn't going away soon, for various reasons. i mostly don't need Wayland myself, and would be fine with going back to using X/i3 if i had to, but given there are decreasing numbers of people interested in continuing to maintain X - various Wayland people are also X devs - i suspect there's going to be increasing amount of bitrot in X (due to it not being updated to reflect changes elsewhere in the systems people are running). Choice can only be provided where there are people actively willing to volunteer to put in the time and work to provide it.
i feel it's significant that there's active work in OpenBSD to get Wayland working there, involving people like Matthieu Herrb, who is a primary dev for X on OpenBSD, and an X dev more generally. |
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szatox
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| Posted: Thu Feb 01, 2024 2:24 am Post subject: |
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| turtles wrote: | | Reminds me of the IPV4 to IPV6 conversion. |
Great comparison, yes, how many years has it been by now? 20? 30? It just makes sense to get more addresses, yet I am still on ipv4.
Honestly I didn't think it would take THIS long.
| NeddySeagoon wrote: |
For amusement only
Older readers, like me will recall the events described there. |
Exponential approximation doesn't work very well on a finite population, er? Gotta start subtracting at some point.
There are some interesting effects in crowd dynamics though... Linux is actually approaching the critical mass (crowd-wise) while being torn apart by politics. I wonder which process will win... Is linux going big or going out?
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dmpogo
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| Posted: Thu Feb 01, 2024 5:33 am Post subject: |
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| szatox wrote: | | turtles wrote: | | Reminds me of the IPV4 to IPV6 conversion. |
Great comparison, yes, how many years has it been by now? 20? 30? It just makes sense to get more addresses, yet I am still on ipv4.
Honestly I didn't think it would take THIS long.
| NeddySeagoon wrote: |
For amusement only
Older readers, like me will recall the events described there. |
Exponential approximation doesn't work very well on a finite population, er? Gotta start subtracting at some point.
There are some interesting effects in crowd dynamics though... Linux is actually approaching the critical mass (crowd-wise) while being torn apart by politics. I wonder which process will win... Is linux going big or going out? |
Basically, ipv4 restrictions on the number of IP addresses were solved by private subnets of 192.168.x.x and similar. Somehow people realized that not every computer needs to have a unique, globally identified, IP address. |
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Zucca
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| Posted: Thu Feb 01, 2024 8:36 am Post subject: |
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| turtles wrote: | | sublogic wrote: | | Xqvss on Digital Equipment Corp. workstations, in 1987. Maybe 1986. (qvss refers to DEC's graphics adapter; it was X11.) |
sublogic is now in the lead! |
Certainly. I had been around for 5 years at that time.
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