26 Feb
2023
26 Feb
'23
2:27 a.m.
On Sat, Feb 25, 2023 at 05:49:36PM -0500, Dan Cross wrote:
Yep, this exactly. I was the weird who carried around an X10 tape,
then an X11 tape, and built all that so it ran on (Sun|DEC|HP|SGI).
I despised all those fancy guis that $VENDOR built, I just wanted
to get work done and I wanted to do it as much as possible the
same way on each box.
So when Linux came around, hello X!
--lm
- were there
any window systems popular on early Linux other than X?
Not really. The context at the time was that a lot of folks (well, me)
wanted a workstation-like experience, but on a machine we could
individually afford. That basically meant bringing over most of the
staples one was used to on a (Sun|DEC|HP|SGI) machine, which almost
universally implied X as a prerequisite. Folks wanted to be able to
use their customized shell startup files and so on, but also their
window manager configurations and the like.