Why do I care about the state of the code? It works. Perhaps all these people complaining are really just sick of your proselytization.

To paraphrase Terry Pratchett, “You only get one life. You can pick up five causes on any street corner.”

That’s cool and all, but why would I want to? Display systems are invisible when they work right, and X has worked right for me (save for some pre-EDID config issues) since the 90s. I run a program, it pops up on my screen and I interact with it. That’s all I ask of it.

None of the issues I’ve had with X (drivers, mostly) will be resolved with Wayland. For me, it’s a solution in search of a problem. The only reason I have even a passing interest is that it’s (theoretically) easier to maintain and change as computing changes.

I’ll move to Wayland when I have to, but right now there’s no reason to not use X.

I wasn’t clear. I meant that the issues with X crashing were usually driver issues. I have no idea about Wayland - I don’t use it since it doesn’t do what I want by design.

X does the job well enough to be invisible to most people. Yes, we need a clean start in order to move forward efficiently (lots of assumptions about computer displays from the 80s no longer apply), but it’s good enough for most people’s needs.

Why bother with a display server? Some people - like myself - actually use that functionality. It’s not part of the design for Wayland. Personally, I think that’s a mistake - especially as things become more cloud-based - but I’m obviously in the minority.

Wayland wasn’t the first attempt at replacing X. It has made more traction than any other attempt, though. There’s no real hurry - it’s not like X eats your babies and runs over your dog.

As far as robustness goes, that’s mostly the driver. I’ve yet to see a bulletproof display system, commercial or non-commercial. If you cut out driver issues, X is on par with or more stable than other systems. It had better be, given that it’s had decades of bug fixes with few new features to cause new bugs.

That, and they might be using Object Pascal. I don’t know (I haven’t touched Pascal in thirty years) but I would not be surprised if there’s some overhead there.

You’re listening to loud asshats and assuming they’re the majority. They’re not.

One day Wayland will reach a tipping point where it will replace X. Until then, most users will just stick with whatever their distro installs. Most people don’t care one way or another.

As for me, I’m probably gonna to stick with X until I have no choice because I actually use the network features that Wayland isn’t replacing. That doesn’t mean I hate Wayland - I’ve never used it - it just means it’s not the best software for me at this time. Most people never do anything with X that Wayland can’t do and won’t notice when it becomes the default.

Naw, we just buy ones where the lattice is diagonal.

In other words, we install X Windows.

Damn straight. MIT license is where it’s at.

What’s that I hear? It sounds like Grace Hopper cackling from the grave…

Alt-x shell-mode

There you go.

I hate that logo. I glanced at the subject and thought the X Window System was standardizing remote audio over the X protocol.

A1: Sure, but why would we want to?

A2: Yes, it’s :q![Enter]emacs[Enter]

It has one. It’s called evil-mode.

If I remember right, it was sponsored by DARPA. It was in the early 80s, so it would have been on VAX. It wasn’t the first implementation (there were several prototypes), but it’s the design that stuck; all the major OS implementations of TCP/IP today use the sockets API (if not the source code directly; several identical network vulnerabilities on different OSs are due to the fact that BSD code was free to use and copy).

Ah, DEC. Some really cool stuff came out of Maynard, MA.

A few notable things about DEC:

• They made computers that were affordable by smaller businesses and universities.
• The PDP-10 - one of DEC’s only mainframes - was where the bulk of early Lisp development occurred, mostly for AI research.
• UNIX originated on DEC hardware (before VMS).
• The team that developed the Alpha (the successor to the VAX) was hired by AMD to develop the 64-bit Athlon architecture (what became X86_64 - i.e. what your computer is probably based on).
• Intel chose a little-endian architecture for the 8086 because that’s what the VAX used.
• TCP/IP was developed on UNIX running on a VAX.
• After the minicomputer market crashed, DEC was bought by Compaq, taken out behind the woodshed, and shot like a dog.

Ugh, I hate those things. I spend lots of effort cutting logs, sealing the ends, storing them where they can dry for a few years, and then my spindles are full of wormholes.

Sorry, too busy counting digital outputs on Modicon PLCs to think about that stuff.

Also indexes. Once you’ve been bitten enough by off-by-one errors this actually becomes a pretty handy double-check.

Honestly, the cat photos are just a bonus.

Sorry, but as soon as a website starts throwing pop-ups at me I close it. Why people tolerate that nonsense is beyond me.