On Thu, 30 Nov 2023 09:29:28 +1300, Peter Reutemann quoted:
'"Red Hat is going to do away with the X.Org server and support ...'
Another pithy comment from the aforementioned Don Hopkins <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17637483>: Jon Steinhart: "Had he done some real design work and looked at what others were doing he might have realized that at its core, X was a distributed database system in which operations on some of the databases have visual side-effects. I forget the exact number, but X includes around 20 different databases: atoms, properties, contexts, selections, keymaps, etc. each with their own set of API calls. As a result, the X API is wide and shallow like the Mac, and full of interesting race conditions to boot. The whole thing could have been done with less than a dozen API calls." This is relating to some other interesting ideas that were kicking around at the time (late 1980s) that X11 came out. In particular, Sun’s “NeWS”, which was based on loading an enhanced dialect of PostScript code into the display server to handle much of the mechanics of user interaction. That was not available for long, before Sun abandoned the idea to join in with all the other Unix vendors in embracing X11.