Re:Wayland vs. X – Overview
by vetinari on Wednesday December 20, 2023 @10:27AM
(#38709688)
> XFree86 is what everyone used and it more or less the only realistic option.
Not really; in the 90s, there were many X servers, each implementing a different set of extensions. Not just for other Unices, even for Linux, you could purchase a proprietary ones.
For XFree86, it was a monolith, that you had to compile for a specific chipset. Distributions shipped with many binaries, each intended for a specific graphic card and the installer symlinked the right one for you. It was only later, that XFree86 became modular and everyone converged on it.
Re:Wayland vs. X – Overview
by arp242 on Wednesday December 20, 2023 @10:48AM
(#38709941)
That's what I mean with "more or less", and they were all more or less compatible and was mostly a "Vim vs. Emacs" type situation, not a "plz rewrite your entire stack"-type situation. That's really the key difference here.
Not really; in the 90s, there were many X servers, each implementing a different set of extensions. Not just for other Unices, even for Linux, you could purchase a proprietary ones.
For XFree86, it was a monolith, that you had to compile for a specific chipset. Distributions shipped with many binaries, each intended for a specific graphic card and the installer symlinked the right one for you. It was only later, that XFree86 became modular and everyone converged on it.