X11 Turns 25 Years Old Today

[garegin]

with vista they moved part of the stack into userland and made it more resilient to crashes. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/wind...re/gg487368#E2 also as i mentioned earlier, when x.org crashes it takes all the app to its grave. in windows a misbehaving window does not usually crash all other windows.

[bug77]

>How exactly can you "assure" it?
*boggle* Have you seen a Windows graphics driver crash?! It is a BSoD. Apps don't survive that.

>And note that a driver crash in Linux means a kernel panic or at least an X server crash.
No shit. Happens to mean a kernel panic in Windows as well!

ATI drivers for Windows had a failsafe self-restart feature for a while. I expect nvidia has had something similar as well. And please note that last I used ATI, it was a Radeon 8500LE on WindowsXP.

[Thatguy]

with vista they moved part of the stack into userland and made it more resilient to crashes. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/wind...re/gg487368#E2 also as i mentioned earlier, when x.org crashes it takes all the app to its grave. in windows a misbehaving window does not usually crash all other windows.

BeOS implemented many of these ideas in the 1990's. They were good ideas then, and they are good ideas now.

[RealNC]

>How exactly can you "assure" it?
*boggle* Have you seen a Windows graphics driver crash?! It is a BSoD. Apps don't survive that.

Here, the screen just blinked a few times, then I got a message that the driver had stopped working and that it was reset. That was all.

>And note that a driver crash in Linux means a kernel panic or at least an X server crash.
No shit. Happens to mean a kernel panic in Windows as well!

Not in my experience. The Windows 7 kernel doesn't seem to affected by a graphics driver crash.

[Veerappan]

>But remote access ive never ONCE used. I've always gone for a full desktop via an RDP-like protocol. Just seems like a better solution to me because you do get the full desktop available to you.
I haven't yet happened to use a single app remote connection... I have used the whole desktop over X11/NX. Lately I have not had 2 computers running X...

In a shared environment, per-App network sharing is a god-send. Especially when you've only got network access to a single machine on a secure network that you have to run things on, and that machine is the machine that EVERYONE has to run them on. If you've got the possibility of multiple users logging into a single server, none of them should run the risk of someone else seeing what they're working on.

[KellyClowers]

Here, the screen just blinked a few times, then I got a message that the driver had stopped working and that it was reset. That was all.


Not in my experience. The Windows 7 kernel doesn't seem to affected by a graphics driver crash.

Weird, I have not seen that at all on 7. Our Win 7/Quadro machines have had some gfx driver crashes with our CAD apps, it is always just a regular BSoD.

[Ardje]

My Dec Imagestation 2000 would probably still run fine running X11R5 with todays applications like chrome or firefox.
The essence of X11 is that it's more a network protocol. It doesn't really matter what hardware you are using, just as long as you adhere to the standard.
Of course, gnome and kde have been designed to break the standard, doing inter application communication in a horrible non-standardised way, while enlightenment still would work on the X11R5 imagestation. (X11R5 misses the shape extension, but enlightenment can corretly handle that).
So what is X11:
0) a network protocol doing:
1) a set of primitives to draw
2) a set of higher level primitives for windowing and blitting
3) an event model, and an object oriented windowing model.
4) having a lot of meta information on windowing, especially useful for:
5) most important: allow client-applications running on whatever server talk to other client-applications on whatever server.

We can see more about that here: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...tem&px=MTE4NzE
where E17 just starts to adhere to a protocol.

When somebody talks about trying to run the latest Xorg on the older X-terminals has completely missed the point about X11.
Xorg is an implementation of the X11 specification. If you have old hardware running X11, you don't have to upgrade anything, just log into your new server as you would do with any X-terminal. Even better: You would probably be able to get a black-and-white NCD X-terminal, configure your NAS (network audio, which was normal on an NCD) as part of a pulse-audio, and you can run your new mp3 player application on your server, with the display and audio output on your 20 year old X-terminal.

(Probably some of the techniques used in X11 have been patented by Apple because they invented it for the iphone)

[daniels]

I still don't understand how we haven't reached something like x15 by now. considering the immense changes in X even within the past 5 years, I highly doubt the very first release of x11 can operate modern desktop environments or GPUs within 10 years old. compatibility must have broken well over a decade ago yet they keep using the same name. at this point, going to x12 seems like it won't break compatibility any more or less than another major release of x11. where do they draw the line between what makes a new version and what doesn't? the Linux kernel was the same way, but that's a topic for another day.

Compatibility didn't break, the core X11 protocol still works as well now as 25 years ago. That's why we keep using the same name, and makes it pretty easy to know where to draw the line.

[daniels]

>But remote access ive never ONCE used. I've always gone for a full desktop via an RDP-like protocol. Just seems like a better solution to me because you do get the full desktop available to you.
I haven't yet happened to use a single app remote connection... I have used the whole desktop over X11/NX. Lately I have not had 2 computers running X...

>Also, isnt X11's remote protocol REALLY inefficient for modern applications?
It has its inefficiencies unfortunately, yes. Thus NX. I wouldn't be opposed to X12 or something that kept the good ideas but made things more efficient.

And you're 100% dead certain that Wayland's remoting is inherently less efficient than X? And definitely won't actually be quite a bit more efficient, especially over slower links?

>if they are taking the time TO write their own UI, let them do it.
That's a negative. If I wanted that, I would use Chrome and all those windows apps like RealPlayer that do that. But I don't!

If you only run apps with a totally consistent UI, then you don't have to worry about inconsistent app UIs - no problem.

[satoshi]

The X server architecture, designed long time ago by some happy hippies who just thought all the people apps are good and non-malicious, simply allows any GUI application to control any other one.

From: The Linux Security Circus: On GUI isolation

How secure is the newer "Wayland" compared with X11?