The X Window System is 40, archaic as heck, and still relevant
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Case in point: PyAutoGUI doesn’t work with Wayland.
As a hobbyist “programmer” who occasionally solve problems at work with Python and bash scripting, it’s a dealbreaker. I bet there are a lot more examples of easy to use, simple tools which rely on X11 or at least doesn’t support Wayland.
As a hobbyist “programmer” who occasionally solve problems at work with Python and bash scripting, it’s a dealbreaker. I bet there are a lot more examples of easy to use, simple tools which rely on X11 or at least doesn’t support Wayland.
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I remember bashing my head against my desk working with X in college. It's been a long ride.
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Considering it's such an unopinionated window system as to not even bother drawing the furniture, let alone any standard controls, which has lead to an interesting mix of UI designs, (often on the same screen) I think that's a fairly decent assessment.
The reality is it's probably still here because it was there, and you could either use it, or write something else, and that's harder.
I still can never forget chapter 7 though...
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The single biggest issue I had with getting Red Hat Linux 6.2 installed on my Dell Inspiron Laptop in the early 2000s was getting X to play nicely with my display. It was really easy (especially for a Linux newbie) to break it by putting a character in the wrong place in the config file. My father banned me from attempting to install Linux on the family Gateway 2000 PC because we had read that configuring the monitor settings wrong could literally fry the monitor! True or not, the family PC was too precious of a resource to risk it on one of my esoteric interests.
In the days of dial-up internet (and no secondary phone line), learning a different OS was a pretty big challenge for me. Fortunately I eventually got my feet under me. I remember wowing some of my friends and family members when I had Compiz installed with all it's fancy effects. Suddenly their Windows installs looked dated, and I could gleefully inform them that no, they couldn't install the same thing on Windows.
Things have certainly come a very long way since then. I use both Wayland and X in different places these days, and I have no strong feelings about either. I'm just glad how many things work without major tinkering as I see my computer as a means to an end, not a hobby unto itself. I just want my tools to work well and reliably.
In the days of dial-up internet (and no secondary phone line), learning a different OS was a pretty big challenge for me. Fortunately I eventually got my feet under me. I remember wowing some of my friends and family members when I had Compiz installed with all it's fancy effects. Suddenly their Windows installs looked dated, and I could gleefully inform them that no, they couldn't install the same thing on Windows.
Things have certainly come a very long way since then. I use both Wayland and X in different places these days, and I have no strong feelings about either. I'm just glad how many things work without major tinkering as I see my computer as a means to an end, not a hobby unto itself. I just want my tools to work well and reliably.
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WinternetHexplorer
Smack-Fu Master, in training
Nifty how the pdf that links to the intro to X11 is 11 pages long. Well, at least I found it nifty.
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I like the idea that Wayland could be good.
However on my OpenSUSE Tumbleweed system with Nvidia graphics and Plasma 6, the Kwin-wayland process pegs the cpu and everything crawls to a near halt.
I've had about 10 serious attempts (multi hour) at resolving, and I don't know which combination of things is to blame.
As such I'm very glad that X11 still works very very reliably!
Edit: in case my tone is off, I love Plasma/KDE and think the devs and community are awesome. Same with OpenSUSE, and the proprietary Nvidia drivers have been trouble free for me. I want to give Wayland a fair crack as there are some enhancements to Plasma that it allows, but for me the combo just doesn't play nice.
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At least personally, Nvidia just doesn't do too well with Wayland. I'm also on KDE, and fairly recently switched to an AMD GPU and it runs much smoother now. But there are still applications that only work with XWayland (or have reduced feature set on Wayland)...
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World class software, written by hobbyists for fun. I'm so thankful that this part of the future is great.
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Maybe we could get a concordance and geneology of *nix windowing and desktop systems one of these days?
I just got around to installing Mint (again) on an ancient laptop and a moderately ancient (but still Win11 capable) desktop. As before, it just works (Cinnamon this time rather than MATE for the UI). Interesting that Cinnamon offers a couple of options including Cinnamon on Wayland, but that's not the default. Not sure what vanilla Cinnamon is based on (some flavor of Gnome?). In any case, the system is small (uses 1/2 the memory of Win10 on the laptop, 1/4 of Win11 on the desktop), quick (pleasantly surprised that Cinnamon works well on the laptop; in a previous generation, it was a slug on that machine and I had to use MATE instead, ultimately returning to Win10 full time), and has versions of most of the software I've been using in Windows (need to get WINE working, though, and hope, for the rest).
I just got around to installing Mint (again) on an ancient laptop and a moderately ancient (but still Win11 capable) desktop. As before, it just works (Cinnamon this time rather than MATE for the UI). Interesting that Cinnamon offers a couple of options including Cinnamon on Wayland, but that's not the default. Not sure what vanilla Cinnamon is based on (some flavor of Gnome?). In any case, the system is small (uses 1/2 the memory of Win10 on the laptop, 1/4 of Win11 on the desktop), quick (pleasantly surprised that Cinnamon works well on the laptop; in a previous generation, it was a slug on that machine and I had to use MATE instead, ultimately returning to Win10 full time), and has versions of most of the software I've been using in Windows (need to get WINE working, though, and hope, for the rest).
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It worked well on various platforms including Windows. We used Reflection X in the mid 1990s, it was quite the feat to run workstation software (such as Mentor Graphics) on my dinky laptop in my dorm room. Could even secure it in an ssh tunnel. Ah, the good old days…
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opened an x window on another dudes computer back in highschool, i remember that day like yesterday, i was fascinated by X @ 15.. im not 15 anymore 
X is a masterpiece of implementing a very specific model, very well [engineers bigup]
the utter absurdity that this engineering opus to network based ui/ux.. is relegated to looping back on itself, severed to serve only its local purpose, and still it has been 'not bad' that it's only decades later that people collectively get together and say ok this has got to stop
things continue with their natural moementum until they breach the utter absurd, [ref: human history] its hard to get us to act collectively, X is still around because Lupton gave a sh.t, and that, thankfully to our grace is also enough to entice an army of people to build on top of their ideas, until they become utterly absurd
X is a masterpiece of implementing a very specific model, very well [engineers bigup]
the utter absurdity that this engineering opus to network based ui/ux.. is relegated to looping back on itself, severed to serve only its local purpose, and still it has been 'not bad' that it's only decades later that people collectively get together and say ok this has got to stop
things continue with their natural moementum until they breach the utter absurd, [ref: human history] its hard to get us to act collectively, X is still around because Lupton gave a sh.t, and that, thankfully to our grace is also enough to entice an army of people to build on top of their ideas, until they become utterly absurd
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When something is simple and just works, people a loath to change it or move to something else.
As the limits of the thing become more obvious, people with edge cases will look for something new, however the replacement always is a more complex beast with birthing problems, outright fails and premature moves to it before it is ready.
It will always be more resource heavy, have problems and vulnerabilities due to the complexity, stuff will break more, have features that most people don't need or use.
People will then hanker for the old thing that just worked.
Everyone who has worked in IT for several years/decades will have seen this.
As the limits of the thing become more obvious, people with edge cases will look for something new, however the replacement always is a more complex beast with birthing problems, outright fails and premature moves to it before it is ready.
It will always be more resource heavy, have problems and vulnerabilities due to the complexity, stuff will break more, have features that most people don't need or use.
People will then hanker for the old thing that just worked.
Everyone who has worked in IT for several years/decades will have seen this.
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That is 100% some sort of GPU driver issue. Every time I see a Wayland compositor or X server behave as you describe it's due to a missing, broken, or outdated driver. The weirdest one was probably trying to get Xorg working on DragonFly BSD on an old Thinkpad. It was maddeningly slow until I got it to switch from software rendering to the i915 driver.
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Still remember that day in 2001 when I installed Mac OS X 10.0 beta on a candy-colored imac with a one-button puck mouse and realized that it could start up X11 and run all the unix apps. My thought at the time was that OS X was going to kill all the very expensive SGI, Sun and other unix workstations that were being sold at a premium. That was because now you could get the power of unix on a cheap desktop computer and leave your heavy duty computing for an hpc facility. It wasn't an insightful observation I think, just obvious.
I still use Xquartz on macos frequently to run various scientific softwares, or old software (like nedit that has a very easy-to-use square edit; easier than vim's anyway, which I seem to always to get wrong).
Comparing the way I felt in the 90s after learning what X11 did (relative to Win3.1 or OS 8), compared to what I see developed now: the power of making goofy ai images with messed up hands and eyes, or delusional chatbots. Those new softwares really don't hold a candle to being able to log onto a computer 1000 miles away and port just the freaking window you wanted drawn to your computer, and not have to have anything special needed to do it. Just X11 and ssh, and an understanding how tunneling and ports work.
I still use Xquartz on macos frequently to run various scientific softwares, or old software (like nedit that has a very easy-to-use square edit; easier than vim's anyway, which I seem to always to get wrong).
Comparing the way I felt in the 90s after learning what X11 did (relative to Win3.1 or OS 8), compared to what I see developed now: the power of making goofy ai images with messed up hands and eyes, or delusional chatbots. Those new softwares really don't hold a candle to being able to log onto a computer 1000 miles away and port just the freaking window you wanted drawn to your computer, and not have to have anything special needed to do it. Just X11 and ssh, and an understanding how tunneling and ports work.
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My comp sci professor got a bunch of people in the department mad at me one day when he came over to my Sun workstation and wanted to show me the cool booby-trap he set up in his personal directory. If you tried to open something innocuous looking in his directory, it opened an X-window that trapped the mouse cursor within the content portion of the window.
"OK... how do I turn it off."
He power cycled the workstation. That was back in the days when you'd leave a big project running on one of the workstations overnight. He killed a bunch of people's processes, and downtime was so rare that no one bothered with setting up any kind of daemon to restart their overnight project. Of course, they all could figure out who was logged on physically at the workstation when the power was cycled. That was my introduction to the "flexibility" of X. Coincidentally, that was also my introduction to being flamed over email.
"OK... how do I turn it off."
He power cycled the workstation. That was back in the days when you'd leave a big project running on one of the workstations overnight. He killed a bunch of people's processes, and downtime was so rare that no one bothered with setting up any kind of daemon to restart their overnight project. Of course, they all could figure out who was logged on physically at the workstation when the power was cycled. That was my introduction to the "flexibility" of X. Coincidentally, that was also my introduction to being flamed over email.
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I've been using both Cinnamon & KDE for quite a few years and have kept up on these things. Cinnamon is basically a fork of modern versions of Gnome by the Linux Mint team. They reuse Gnome code where they can and try to rewrite where they need to & find it useful. Their Wayland support on Cinnamon is a fair bit behind KDE & Gnome from what I can see, though they have a transition plan that included at least a couple more years of X as an option.
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Sometimes the bugs in Weyland aren't bugs but policy decisions. For example, if you want to query the monitor size to get a clue how big you can make your default window, well, Wayland doesn't do that. So you see stuff like ksudoku's game selector window being minimally sized because it had no way to guess what a good starting size might be. The Weyland folks don't see this as a valid use case so they're not going to implement it.
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Really the biggest objection to X11 that I'm aware of...besides the fact that it is so unopinionated and flexible that a world of very stupid things to do is open to you...is its terrible security model.
It's hinted at by the X11 author's comment that all processes are equal in X11. Indeed, they are: all of your windows can see the contents of all of your other windows. If VLC wants to see what Firefox is doing, it can.
Perhaps this has been kludged somewhere along the way, and I'm unaware of it, but I was under the impression that this is inherent in how X11 works. ("Was" since I'm running on memories from an extended curiosity illness from a number of years ago.)
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It's fascinating the way modern Linux keeps adopting systems that no one seems to like, but everyone* uses. Wayland and systemd are examples.
Meanwhile, some other "solutions" to the bad old software seem to get widespread, enthusiastic adoption. Wireguard really seems to have conquered the world, for instance.
*not you, Internet people, of course. I mean everyone else.
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I wonder if you could have switched to another console or whatever (ctrl-alt-f<whatever> nowadays) and then killed the offending program.
Anyway, rude prank, especially from a professor, who should know better.
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All you had to do was login on the x-server one over, rlogin across to the machine that was not working and kill -9 -1.
The X server process is firmly in userland, and restarting it after it died without a reboot was piss easy. Which actually was part of the flexibility of X.
(Darnit - ninjad)
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Yeah... But I didn't know any of that when it happened, and the prof cycled the power before I could even do anything. Whole episode played out over like 30 seconds.
I mean really, it's also not that big a deal that a few people's overnight runs got hosed. It wasn't like final projects were due the next day. This was like the third day of the semester. It's just my one X-Windows anecdote.
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My wife is an astronomer. The data center is linux, all the workerbees use Macs or laptops that are predominately linux, though some windows. More old Python code than you can count. X11 will live on there until the proverbial heat death of the universe, which they'll be able to watch through their telescopes.
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I'm sure Wayland is cool & such, but it doesn't work with VirtualBox's shared clipboard and drag & drop files to VMs, and that's most of what I play with. I'm aware that this is a VirtualBox/Oracle issue, but, this is the code I have to use.
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Lots of people that complain about Wayland don't seem to remember (or weren't there for) all the X11 troubleshooting posts years ago. X didn't always "just work" either. Wayland has worked very well for me for at least 5 years now on various non-nvidia GPUs. The biggest issues left with it seem to be related to proprietary drivers, and accessibility support.
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I used to do all my UIs in X- running on suns before there was such a thing as Linux. Still run the occasional imagemagick pipeline with xview. Some of my applications in the early days would have hundreds of buttons and sliders and input windows so the non computer people could twiddle with all the algorithm variables. I gave up my sun workstation (ultra 5) 7 years ago- mostly the tools got to the point where they could be ported to macOS X or run through Xquartz. I won’t miss the days of troubleshooting X- it pretty much let you do anything without really any error checking unless you did it explicitly - so sometimes I’d code a UI element and never get it rendered in the window. Good times! I’d take X over Java UIs any day- at least X was always the same - if you had the same resolution monitor and set the default window right!
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mr lawson -- sizing problem on the getty images / door. advantage of a slower connection: you see this stuff...
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My first real experience using X was a decade after it was invented, in 1994 on a NeXT computer. Before then, I'd always just connected to the Sun and SGI servers using a terminal or terminal emulator; suddenly, in the NeXT interface, I could run a server that connected to clients on all the mainframes, allowing me to offload the compute but still keep relatively snappy UI. And it worked perfectly alongside the native UI. In fact, I used very few native NeXT apps at the time, because it was easier to just telnet over to a mainframe, compile some software, wait a minute or so and then run it via X. Sure beat 30-minute to 3 hour compile times on the local workstation, especially during an iterative design cycle.
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What surprises me is that the manual does not start with the explanation why is X server called server, even if it is run on the client computer. No matter that is has a sound logic behind it, it is very strange when you hear it the first time.
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What I really want is something like Wayland that sits on top of an X-like abstraction layer. So you CAN use all the nifty features of Wayland, but if they're not hardware supported, you can fall back to something that doesn't care at all about your hardware, and will just deliver interface data in a reasonably efficient manner. Same issue I had with the Aqua/Cocoa display system when it came out. It always seemed rather odd to run X inside Aqua instead of the other way around.
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