X Window System.
Sep. 20th, 2005 10:04 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
reddragdiva
X-Windows (colloquially known as the X Window System) is the standard graphical interface for computers running Linux. It is a technological marvel, constructed by geeks far deeper than thou. It does amazing and wonderful things that you wouldn't have thought possible. It runs on every operating system you can think of and several you wish you hadn't. It will display your applications to the same computer, the one next to you or one running on the friggin' moon.
It doesn't run your new video card, though it might next year or the year after. Maybe. Why don't you write a driver for it?
X-Windows does not determine the look and feel of applications running on it. As such, it affords the sufficiently technical user almost unlimited powers to customise it, though it somehow remains impossible to get it looking as nice as Mac OS X or even Windows XP.
An interface smorgasbord!
X-Windows (spelt with a hyphen and with an S on the end) works on the basis of "mechanism, not policy." This means that no application quite works with any other, and each one shows the artistic flair and graphic design skills of a furry-toothed programmer whose computer permanently displays a screen full of green-on-black terminal windows and a minimised Firefox for his porn. This is a feature, not a problem.
Just as X-Windows reverses the meaning of "feature" and "problem", it reverses the meanings of "server" and "client" (your screen serves resources to programs, making them the clients. You have to be a very deep geek with amazing powers of contemplation indeed to see why this is obviously and elegantly sensible), "black" and "white", "up" and "down" and "good idea" and "bad idea."
Minor problems with X. Insignificant, really. Don't worry yourself.
X is ridiculously overengineered and top-heavy and was famed around the time of its inception in the 1980s for its ability to make a $10,000 50MHz graphical workstation work almost as fast as a 4.77MHz PC-XT. Fortunately, over the last twenty years Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X have become as stupidly overblown and bloated as X started out, further demonstrating how X has led the way. These deep geeks, they can see technology twenty years ahead.
The X server manipulates the video card directly. (Assuming you can get a driver for your video card this year instead of next year.) So if X goes down, it not only TAKES ALL YOUR WORK WITH IT, it means you have to reboot your otherwise-uncrashable PC to get the screen working again, even though Linux hasn't actually crashed itself. This makes the whole system as reliable in practical use as the Windows install you thought you were blissfully rid of when you put in the Ubuntu CD. But technically, Linux itself hasn't crashed. So that's all right then.
Every X application looks different to every other X application. This is less of a problem now that everyone programs to GNOME or KDE, so now you only have to choose between two completely different and clashing interface styles instead of ten. Yay. But, as mentioned above, this is a feature rather than a problem.
There's not one but two clipboards, and three if you're using GNOME or KDE. They're reasonably easy to keep separate unless you're using Firefox or Opera — which everyone does — because they deliberately mangle them. HA-ha!
Design principles of X-Windows
In 1984, two mad scientists at MIT set out the early principles of X. We here translate these into modern terms for your convenience:
- Do not add new functionality until an implementor threatens to pull your funding without it.
- It is as important to decide what a system is not as to decide what it is. Do not serve all the world's needs; rather, support what you feel like and tell them they just need to write extensions themselves if they want to actually do anything useful. (See Mozilla Firefox.)
- Worse is Better leads to faster ship dates.
- If a problem is not completely understood, don't bother solving it.
- Make complexity someone else's problem if at all possible. If not, see the above principle.
- Provide mechanism rather than policy. We know we're not graphic designers. (Though why we're presuming other deep geeks are is a mystery for the ages.)
X has largely kept to these principles since. This combination of eternal crapness and pie-in-the-sky theoretical fixability is the same stick-and-carrot addictive formula that's made the Microsoft Window System the hit it is today. Every attempt to fix or replace X has failed for this reason: to replace X, a new thing would need to become X, and it could not become X without being as crap as X. Thus the virus perpetuates itself.
XFree86
Are completely insane now. Really. They've become the open source equivalent of the homeless guy with the tinfoil hat screaming at invisible alien tormentors. Just ask them about X.Org and watch 'em go. "YOU! YOU'VE BEEN TALKING TO THEM, HAVEN'T YOU! YOU'RE CONSPIRING WITH THEM! THOSE GUYS! THEY STOLE IT ALL! THEY PUT A RADIO IN MY HEAD! LINUX/BSD WEENIES! I'LL SHOW 'EM! HELL YES!" The Cathedral and the Bizarre. The best theory anyone's come up with is that David Dawes finally lost it trying to edit his own modelines.
The X.Org Foundation
One of the MIT mad scientists started this. He is very, very sorry for everything to do with X and is working very hard indeed to fix it, with the help of everyone else who was kicked out of XFree86 for not being batshit insane. Sorry. Sorry. They're currently in a lard-ass competition with Mac OS X, but should end up about as shiny eventually. But really fat.
External links
- The X Window System Disaster (UNIX-HATERS Handbook — but don't worry, all the stuff they were complaining about in 1994 will be fixed by 2010.)
Another from Uncyclopedia, which is read-only right now so I can't do the edits I was going to this morning with new ideas from ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
vatine and so forth. Feel free to put more ideas in the comments or, indeed, in the article itself. Released under CC by-nc-sa, you know the drill. Inspired by alexmc's xorg.conf problems and, of course, having written the Wikipedia version.
Update: Uncyclopedia is writable again. Article updated with several of your wonderful ideas. Still need interface screenshots. An NT blue screen, an Atari ST bomb screen, the Cindy Crawford pic (NSFW! Naked ch1xx0r!) with an xclock over the n*pples ...
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(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-20 09:10 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-20 09:11 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-20 09:25 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-20 10:15 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-20 10:37 am (UTC)The best-looking widget set I have seen of that time was OPEN LOOK. Sun apparently hired some professional graphic designers with a clue to make that one. Pity that they killed it and went with Motif.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-20 09:25 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-20 10:08 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-20 09:17 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-20 09:40 am (UTC)So you're detoxed from writing the original now?
(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-20 09:47 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-20 10:04 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-20 10:04 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-20 10:16 am (UTC)Bravo ++
(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-20 10:23 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-20 10:39 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-20 10:58 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-20 11:06 am (UTC)Especially as it is possible to do reasonably with minimal resources. Take the Amiga, for example. Yes yes, it was a proprietary system, but how have we gone from 8MHz to 1800+ and only seen a (say) two-fold increase in usability?
(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-20 11:12 am (UTC)I suspect this is actually nostalgia, which is another word for brain rot. I distinctly remember using Mac System 7 in 1994 and thinking how amazingly usable it was and then using it in 1999 and going "oh dear, that's a bit crap and clunky, isn't it." I submit that if you tried doing the exact same things on the Amiga that you do on a modern system, you would realise it was falling short in a number of ways.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-20 11:15 am (UTC)But I still maintain we have not seen anywhere near a 225-fold increase in usability - ten times is pushing it!
I suppose the main question is - is all the work and expense justifiable? Not that it will make the blindest bit of difference what we think.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-20 11:42 am (UTC)Intuition was pretty damn smart for 198-whenever (6? 8?), and since I leaned GUI coding on it, I still care for it in an entirely irrational manner. (Yes, I probably will end up with a DragonflyBSD machine sooner or later) However, as regards looks, consistency and completeness of API, Win3.0 pissed on it completely.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-20 11:45 am (UTC)And X11R6.9/7.0 will finally run on Dragonfly, thus completing the squared circle.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-20 10:41 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-20 10:57 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-20 11:03 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-20 11:13 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-20 11:17 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-20 11:36 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-21 12:51 am (UTC)Oh my.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-21 05:56 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-21 08:35 am (UTC)*nods*. Gets my vote as well.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-20 12:04 pm (UTC)They (http://www.arouse.net/despair-linux/)'re all the work of lj user="pdx6">, if you'd like to know who to blame.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-20 10:48 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-20 10:55 am (UTC)Reboot linux to get X back?
Date: 2007-05-14 04:37 am (UTC)Re: Reboot linux to get X back?
Date: 2007-05-14 07:23 am (UTC)