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1. Embed this notice
   Alexandre Oliva (lxo@gnusocial.net)'s status on Monday, 08-Jan-2024 15:37:26 JST Alexandre Oliva

   in reply to

   • Charlie Stross
   there have been many eras of thin clients, and we're going through one of them right now. there were dumb text terminals, then there were dumb graphical terminals, then there were netbooks, and now there are javascrippled web sites, often packaged as TRApps. the pocket computers people carry are the dumb terminals of yore, capable of computing fonts and even doing turing-complete postscript, but artificially constrained to serving a remote master
   • Embed this notice
     Charlie Stross (cstross@wandering.shop)'s status on Monday, 08-Jan-2024 15:37:27 JST Charlie Stross

     in reply to

     • Rob Landley
     • hko 😷🪁
     • Khleedril

     @landley @khleedril @lonjil @hko Yup. X11 dates to the era of thin clients with bitmapped displays connected by ethernet because hard disks and CPUs were comparatively expensive. We turned the corner around 1993-96 when the price of RAM and hard disks dropped enough to make a single-user PC with an SVGA or better display running UNIX/X11 cheaper than X terminal plus a slice of a Sun or VAX server to drive it.

   • Embed this notice
     Rob Landley (landley@mstdn.jp)'s status on Monday, 08-Jan-2024 15:37:28 JST Rob Landley

     in reply to

     • Charlie Stross
     • hko 😷🪁
     • Khleedril

     @khleedril @cstross @lonjil @hko X11 was a network protocol. It came from project Athena, launched in 1983 as a joint project between MIT, DEC and IBM to produce a "campus-wide computing environment".

     X11 was designed to pop up GUI windows on a different physical machine than the program was running on, potentially with different OS on different hardware at each end. That was central to the design.

     The xfree86 clowns broke a lot of that over the years "optimizing", but that's not X11's fault.

   • Embed this notice
     Rob Landley (landley@mstdn.jp)'s status on Monday, 08-Jan-2024 15:37:28 JST Rob Landley

     in reply to

     • Charlie Stross
     • hko 😷🪁
     • Khleedril

     @khleedril @cstross @lonjil @hko Back at Rutgers I loved playing a game called "xbattle" which was implemented as 1 game process opening windows on a bunch of different machines (listed on the command line) so people could play against each other in a shared map.

     If you could trivially do that in 1992 on a LAN, one computer with 4 monitors does not require significant new plumbing from X11.

     Alas people wrapped the protocol with layers of shared libraries, each with "simplifying assumptions"...

   • Embed this notice
     Khleedril (khleedril@cyberplace.social)'s status on Monday, 08-Jan-2024 15:37:29 JST Khleedril

     in reply to

     • Charlie Stross
     • hko 😷🪁

     @cstross @lonjil @hko Yeh, sorry, I made a crap post there. Was trying to put across that it was designed to run on a system with *one* graphics sub-system, not several possibly disparate ones, but never mind my parabolicism.

   • Embed this notice
     Charlie Stross (cstross@wandering.shop)'s status on Monday, 08-Jan-2024 15:37:31 JST Charlie Stross

     in reply to

     • hko 😷🪁
     • Khleedril

     @khleedril @lonjil @hko

     You are Wrong. X11 had *nothing* to do with the VGA standard.

     X11 predates VGA graphics by three years and wasn't intended to run on PCs or deal with a BIOS at all—it was designed for workstations with a variety of graphics hardware. I remember it on Sun 3/60 kit circa 1989 ...

   • Embed this notice
     Khleedril (khleedril@cyberplace.social)'s status on Monday, 08-Jan-2024 15:37:32 JST Khleedril

     in reply to

     • Charlie Stross
     • hko 😷🪁

     @cstross @lonjil @hko The problem is X was architected around a single standard: VGA graphics provided by the system BIOS. But in this day and age monitors are driven by many different combinations of microprocessor extensions, graphics cards, and operating system facilities, and they are not to a single standard. It is unfortunately necessary to break everything to fix it again, and Wayland is an architecture which can work across the spectrum of modern display devices...

   • Embed this notice
     Charlie Stross (cstross@wandering.shop)'s status on Monday, 08-Jan-2024 15:37:33 JST Charlie Stross

     • hko 😷🪁

     @lonjil @hko I need compatability = I want to run X11. I am uninterested in whatever innovations Wayland is supposed to bring. I want a Linux desktop like it was in 1999, running KDE 3.5.8 or thereabouts!