News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:DESQview/X: Forgotten mid-1990s OS from the future by DonHopkins on Tuesday November 30, 2021 @06:22PM (#29398724)
https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-x-windows-disaster-128d398...

>X will not run in these 4 bit overlay planes. This is because I’m using Motif, which is so sophisticated it forces you to put a 1" thick border around each window in case your mouse is so worthless you can’t hit anything you aim at, so you need widgets designed from the same style manual as the runway at Moscow International Airport. My program has a browser that actually uses different colors to distinguish different kinds of nodes. Unlike a PC Jr, however, this workstation with $150,000 worth of 28 bits-per-pixel supercharged display hardware cannot display more than 16 colors at a time. If you’re using the Motif self-abuse kit, asking for the 17th color causes your program to crash horribly.

Re:DESQview/X: Forgotten mid-1990s OS from the future by vickm on Wednesday December 01, 2021 @03:32AM (#29401921)
I couldn't stop laughing/crying reading this trip into high school and college. As a kid I thought I was the dense fool who couldn't make sense of X. Nope, it just sucked. Thanks for keeping this history alive :)

As a matter of fact, the mess with widgets and X APIs was the turning point for me where I started to understand why these suits spent so much damn $$$ on Win32