Understanding the working of X11 from the ground up (2017)

Re:Understanding the working of X11 from the ground up (2017) by hota_mazi on Sunday September 22, 2019 @11:15AM (#21041716)

What's fascinating to me is that X11 and Windows started at complete opposite ends of the spectrum.

Then X11 never managed to be a really effective window manager on a local workstation while Windows became really, really good at remote displays.

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Re:Understanding the working of X11 from the ground up (2017) by asveikau on Sunday September 22, 2019 @01:59PM (#21042806)

I feel like this is short changing X. I have seen it as a good local solution over 20 years or so.

Did you ever see those 90s commercial Unix workstations? Like from SGI?

How about a Nokia N900? X on a smartphone. It ran pretty well. Today's smartphone hardware would run circles around that thing so I can only assume if somebody ported X to those it would also do fine.

I feel like people see things they don't like or imperfections and bash the whole thing as useless. X had a lot of mileage. I use it frequently today and don't see a lot of problems.

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Re:Understanding the working of X11 from the ground up (2017) by ttkciar on Monday September 23, 2019 @02:03PM (#21051610)

I am fascinated by the economy of packing three inaccuracies into that one sentence.

(1) X11 is not a window manager,

(2) There have been several really effective window managers for X11,

(3) MS-Windows has never been good at remote display.

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Re:Understanding the working of X11 from the ground up (2017) by josteink on Sunday September 22, 2019 @01:05PM (#21042440)

That can be explained by economics alone.

There were no financial driver to make X11 a more optimal local solution.

There were huge financial incentives for MS to make their terminal-server offering more appealing.

And that’s all you need to explain the outcome.

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