- was there any discussion of alternatives to X? Discussions yes. But not much more than talk. There were vgalib apps that ran graphics on the console, but I never used them.

On Sun, Feb 26, 2023 at 04:50:34PM +0100, Leah Neukirchen wrote: screen(1) was my go to back in the days of limited resources. Especially screen -r so you could detach, come back the next day and have all your setup right there. Wasn't that fancy but oh so useful. I'm with Ted in that we just wanted a bunch of terminal windows.

On Feb 26, 2023, at 10:23 AM, Leah Neukirchen <leah(a)vuxu.org> wrote: Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> writes: Curiously, I learned about screen only way later, when I used remote systems. But I made getty spawn on 12 ttys, so that worked as well to multitask. -- Leah Neukirchen <leah(a)vuxu.org> https://leahneukirchen.org

Am I missing major initiatives in this space?

I think it's fair to say that in the very early days of Linux, most of the people who were using it were people who kernel hackers; and so we didn't have all that many people who were interested in developing new windowing systems. We just wanted to be able to have multiple xterms and Emacs windows.

In fact, support for X Windows predated the development of a networking stack; we had Unix domain sockets, so that was enough for X, but we didn't have a working networking stack at that point! I would be running X, and then running C-Kermit to download files from MIT over a dialup modem.

At that point, X windows wasn't *flaky* per se, but remember that back then monitors were very persnicky about exactly what resolutions and frequences they would accept. And this was before monitors supported EDID (Extended Display Identification Data), which allowed the X server to figure out what the parameters were of the monitor. So that meant that configuring the X server with the correct resolution, frequencies, etc., was tricky. There were long and complex documents explaining how to do it, and it was a very manual process. If you got the calculations wrong, the image might not be stable, but that wasn't a software bug so much as it was a configuration error.

There were programs (for example, the most famous was the graphical game "Tuxracer") which wrote directly to the frame buffer, but there wasn't anyone who was interested in developing their own compositor. We just wanted xterms and (later) Firefox to work!

As far as discussion about what should and shouldn't go into the kernel, most people agreed that as much as possible, especially in graphics land, should be out of the kernel. The fact that we didn't have a lot of graphics specialists in the kernel development community, and that in those early days the vast majority of Linux boxen where single user machines just sealed the deal.

We just wanted to be able to have multiple xterms and Emacs windows.

the calculations wrong, the image might not be stable, but that wasn't a software bug so much as it was a configuration error.

However, most configuration errors can't reduce your hardware to a useless pile of junk, whereas older CRT monitors could definitely be destroyed if the configuration was too far off nominal.

It is in stark contrast with developments at the lower/consumer end of the market. The original Mac, GEM and Windows all placed much more emphasis on being a graphical user interface, with standard widgets and UI design elements.

I wonder to what extent this is a generational thing though. Maybe today’s twenty-somethings spend their days in front of Xcode, VStudio, Eclipse, etc. more than using multiple terminals.

On 2/27/23 3:04 PM, arnold(a)skeeve.com wrote: Don't forget cargo-culting by pasting shell commands they got from the web and barely understand, if at all.

I see the wisdom in your last line there, I've typed and deleted a response to this email 4 times, each one more convoluted than the last. The short of my stance though is, as a younger programmer (29), I am certainly not a fan of these trends that are all too common in my generation. That said, I've set foot in one single softare-related class in my life (highschool Java class) and so I don't really know what is being taught to folks going the traditional routes. All I know from my one abortive semester of college is that I didn't see a whole lot of reliance on individual exploration of concepts in classes, just everyone working to a one-size-fits-all understanding of how to be a good employee in a given subject area. Of course, this is also influenced by my philosophy and biases and such, and only represents 4-5 months of observation, but if my minimal experience with college is to be believed, I have little faith that educational programs are producing much more than meat filters between StackOverflow and <insert code editor here>. No offense to said meat filters, people gotta work, but there is something lost when the constant march of production torpedoes individual creativity. Then again, do big firms want sophisticated engineers or are we too far gone into assembly line programming with no personal connection to any of the products? I'm glad I'm as personally involved in the stuff I work with, I could see myself slipping into the same patterns of apathy if I was a nameless face in a sea of coders on some project I don't even know the legal name of any given day.

------- Original Message ------- On Monday, February 27th, 2023 at 12:22 PM, arnold(a)skeeve.com &lt;arnold(a)skeeve.com&gt; wrote: > Chet Ramey chet.ramey(a)case.edu wrote: > > > On 2/27/23 3:04 PM, arnold(a)skeeve.com wrote: > > > > > IMHO the dependence upon IDEs is crippling; they cut & paste to the > > > almost total exclusion of the keyboard, including when shell completion > > > would be faster. > > > > Don't forget cargo-culting by pasting shell commands they got from the web > > and barely understand, if at all. > > > Yeah, really. > > I do what I can, but it's a very steep uphill battle, as most > don't even understand that they're missing something, or that > they could learn it if they wanted to. > > I think I'll stop ranting before I really get going. :-) > > Arnold

As Dan said, this is nuanced.

While I'm sure there's lots of mediocre programmers writing mediocre code, (a) there probably always has been [think COBOL on mainframes] and (b) it is not universal.

I have generally been fortunate to find interesting and challenging work in a fairly long career; there's lots of interesting problems out there that need solving which can't be dealt with by just stringing together existing class libraries using an IDE on autopilot. You have to look for it, and then hope you're qualified enough that they'll hire you.

Or the horror show that is wget -O - https://some-random-place/random-script.sh | bash (or worse, | sudo bash). Seriously, people, just stop depending so completely on the kindness of strangers.

The official Rust book lists a blind script grab from a website piped into a shell as their "official" install mechanism.

Thanks all for the insights. Let me attempt a summary. What it boils down to is that X arrived on Linux very early, because what the Linux hackers needed/wanted was a familiar terminal multiplexer.

It seems that the pattern persists till the present day (and yes, it matches with my own dev setup/needs). I wonder to what extent this is a generational thing though. Maybe today’s twenty-somethings spend their days in front of Xcode, VStudio, Eclipse, etc. more than using multiple terminals.

This ties in with another observation on early window systems. The earliest Unix window system that I could find (i.e. documented) was NUnix from 1981/82. Its desktop was designed around the idea of a dozen or so top level windows, each one being either a shell window or a graphics canvas, with no real concept of a widget set, dialogs, etc., or even of sub-windows. This paradigm seems to have been more or less the same in the Blit terminal, and carried through in MGR, Mux and even as late as 8 1/2. In the context where this serves the needs of core user group, such makes sense.

It is in stark contrast with developments at the lower/consumer end of the market. The original Mac, GEM and Windows all placed much more emphasis on being a graphical user interface, with standard widgets and UI design elements. On Unix and X it remained a mess. It seems that this was both for technical reasons (X not imposing a standard) and for economic reasons (the Unix wars). Linux then inherited the mess and the core user/developer demographic had no need/wish/time to fix it.

It makes me wonder when true graphical applications started to appear for X / Unix / Linux (other than stuff like terminal, clock, calculator, etc.). The graphical browser certainly is one (1993). StarOffice and Applix seem to have arrived around 1995. Anything broadly used before that?

Dan Cross &lt;crossd(a)gmail.com&gt; writes: My guess is that it was probably 'xaos'? Certainly i had fun with it: https://xaos-project.github.io/

Thank you for highlighting that! Several folks had already hinted at such, but your comments make clear that by 1991 the X ecosystem had come out on top in a winner-takes-all dynamic: people wanted X because that had the apps, and the apps were for X because that was the most prevalent. This also explains that MGR on Linux was so short-lived: although it provided the terminal multiplexing that was the key use case, it did not have the application ecosystem that was apparently already important enough to motivate people to make X run on Linux very early in its existence. I had always thought of those early X applications as little more than gimmicks, but apparently they were more appreciated than I thought. > On 27 Feb 2023, at 21:30, Dan Cross &lt;crossd(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: > > On Mon, Feb 27, 2023 at 12:22 PM Paul Ruizendaal via TUHS &lt;tuhs(a)tuhs.org&gt; wrote: >> Thanks all for the insights. Let me attempt a summary. >> >> What it boils down to is that X arrived on Linux very early, because what the Linux hackers needed/wanted was a familiar terminal multiplexer. > > While that was literally true, I think it was a little more nuanced. > I'd perhaps put it that people wanted their familiar environments. > Many people were used to running a lot of xterms on their > workstations, of course, but there were other X applications people > used regularly. > > Some I remember where `gv` to look at PostScript documents, `xv` to > view image files, `gnuplot` could generate plots in a window, `xdvi` > to look at TeX/LaTeX output, and text editors like `emacs` had X > front-ends that offered syntax highlighting and the like; some folks I > knew liked `nedit`. `exmh` was my preferred email client for a while, > and things like `xman` (was there a `tkman`, too?) was nice. Some > system monitoring tools `xload` were considered essentials; `xbiff` > could be useful (I could have sworn there was a `tkbiff`, too). A > clock like `xclock` or `oclock` or something was also nice. Some folks > liked graphical newsreaders, chat programs (I guess IRC was a thing > back then, and I believe some `talk` client had an X front-end). There > was a fractal viewer that I thought was fun, but I don't remember it > much anymore (even the name...). Oh, and lots of games; I had a nice > Solitaire version that I can no longer recall the name of. `xeyes` was > cute, and running `xroach` was a popular (?) prank for an unsuspecting > (but amenable) colleague. > > A lot of us spent a lot of time customizing our environments, and many > eschewed the vendor-standard environment. For instance, a lot of > people I knew used `twm` and derivatives (`ctwm` and `tvtwm` were > popular), and spent a lot of time tweaking menus and stuff to set > things up the way we liked. A lot of folks also wrote custom tools > using `tk` or `expectk`. Giving all of that up to run on Linux was a > bitter pill to swallow, so there was a real impetus to get X running > quickly. Personally, I kept my `tvtwm`-based environment going until I > switched to plan9 and then to the Mac as a daily driver. I'm not sure > I miss it, but at the time it was head-and-shoulders above anything > you could get on Windows or (classic) MacOS. > > So it wasn't just that people wanted a "familiar terminal multiplexor" > as that people wanted the environments they had put a lot of time and > energy into building up for themselves, and again, that often meant X. > >> It seems that the pattern persists till the present day (and yes, it matches with my own dev setup/needs). I wonder to what extent this is a generational thing though. Maybe today???s twenty-somethings spend their days in front of Xcode, VStudio, Eclipse, etc. more than using multiple terminals. > > I think it probably depends on what people are doing. I more or less > switched to using VS Code for my editor, and I'm using a Mac Studio to > write this, but my desktop is still littered with terminal windows, > I've got a `drawterm` session open to my local Plan 9 network, and am > logged into a bunch of old systems (Multics, TOPS-20, VMS, an IBM > mainframe, CDC Cyber, RSTS/E, PR1ME), etc. > > But the way we write software has changed pretty dramatically in the > last 3 or so decades. I used to start with an empty C file and write > my stuff. Things like linked-lists? Mostly implemented by hand. These > days, there are other languages and vast collections of libraries for > almost anything imaginable; much of what "programming" is today is > glueing together different libraries and making them interact in > sophisticated, often quite complex ways. I don't know that it's > better, nor that it's always worse, but it is qualitatively different. > So almost necessarily the toolsets and environment have changed > accordingly. > >> This ties in with another observation on early window systems. The earliest Unix window system that I could find (i.e. documented) was NUnix from 1981/82. Its desktop was designed around the idea of a dozen or so top level windows, each one being either a shell window or a graphics canvas, with no real concept of a widget set, dialogs, etc., or even of sub-windows. This paradigm seems to have been more or less the same in the Blit terminal, and carried through in MGR, Mux and even as late as 8 1/2. In the context where this serves the needs of core user group, such makes sense. > > It may be instructive to look at the early X window managers in this > regard. One I remember was `uwm` (I think); I recall being struck > that it reminded me of rio when I saw it. > >> It is in stark contrast with developments at the lower/consumer end of the market. The original Mac, GEM and Windows all placed much more emphasis on being a graphical user interface, with standard widgets and UI design elements. On Unix and X it remained a mess. It seems that this was both for technical reasons (X not imposing a standard) and for economic reasons (the Unix wars). Linux then inherited the mess and the core user/developer demographic had no need/wish/time to fix it. > > I remember the X mantra was, "mechanism, not policy." Which was fine, > except that there wasn't much of even a default policy, which made X > (IMHO) a bit of a bear to program and meant that interfaces were > pretty wildly inconsistent across programs. By contrast, writing > simple programs to draw lines on the Mac was easy. > > Interestingly, frustration with this caused an almost cambrian > explosion of new windowing environments within a few years of Linux's > arrival on the scene. From larger efforts like Gtk (and then GNOME), > KDE, GNUStep (which I guess might predate Linux, but not by much...), > etc, to less ambitious things components like fvwm and Enlightenment, > we kind of went from "OpenWindows or Motif or roll your own stuff > around twm or something" to a whole plethora of things. It's still a > bit of a mess, though. > >> It makes me wonder when true graphical applications started to appear for X / Unix / Linux (other than stuff like terminal, clock, calculator, etc.). The graphical browser certainly is one (1993). StarOffice and Applix seem to have arrived around 1995. Anything broadly used before that? > > Lots! See above. > > - Dan C.

That is very quick. X10R3 came out in Feb 1986 (which I understand was the first ???outside' release) and by 1987 it was already the dominant windowing system? Or did you mean that it had won prior to 1991? > On Wed, Mar 01, 2023 at 05:39:48PM +0100, Paul Ruizendaal wrote: >> Thank you for highlighting that! >> >> Several folks had already hinted at such, but your comments make clear that by 1991 the X ecosystem had come out on top in a winner-takes-all dynamic: people wanted X because that had the apps, and the apps were for X because that was the most prevalent. >> >> This also explains that MGR on Linux was so short-lived: although it provided the terminal multiplexing that was the key use case, it did not have the application ecosystem that was apparently already important enough to motivate people to make X run on Linux very early in its existence. I had always thought of those early X applications as little more than gimmicks, but apparently they were more appreciated than I thought. >> >> >>> On 27 Feb 2023, at 21:30, Dan Cross &lt;crossd(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: >>> >>> On Mon, Feb 27, 2023 at 12:22 PM Paul Ruizendaal via TUHS &lt;tuhs(a)tuhs.org&gt; wrote: >>>> Thanks all for the insights. Let me attempt a summary. >>>> >>>> What it boils down to is that X arrived on Linux very early, because what the Linux hackers needed/wanted was a familiar terminal multiplexer. >>> >>> While that was literally true, I think it was a little more nuanced. >>> I'd perhaps put it that people wanted their familiar environments. >>> Many people were used to running a lot of xterms on their >>> workstations, of course, but there were other X applications people >>> used regularly.

Whether I had brought it up or not at UW-Madison, I had been using some version of X for years, at least 5 years and probably more, prior to going out in industry in 1987. And that wasn't my doing, UW-Madison was very much a hackers school, a good one, and they had X-something running on everything, micro vaxen, RTs, Suns, everything.

This also explains that MGR on Linux was so short-lived: although it provided the terminal multiplexing that was the key use case, it did not have the application ecosystem that was apparently already important enough to motivate people to make X run on Linux very early in its existence. I had always thought of those early X applications as little more than gimmicks, but apparently they were more appreciated than I thought.

> It makes me wonder when true graphical applications started to > appear for X / Unix / Linux (other than stuff like terminal, > clock, calculator, etc.). The graphical browser certainly is one > (1993). StarOffice and Applix seem to have arrived around > 1995. Anything broadly used before that?

Thanks all for the insights. Let me attempt a summary. What it boils down to is that X arrived on Linux very early, because what the Linux hackers needed/wanted was a familiar terminal multiplexer. It seems that the pattern persists till the present day (and yes, it matches with my own dev setup/needs). I wonder to what extent this is a generational thing though. Maybe today’s twenty-somethings spend their days in front of Xcode, VStudio, Eclipse, etc. more than using multiple terminals. This ties in with another observation on early window systems. The earliest Unix window system that I could find (i.e. documented) was NUnix from 1981/82. Its desktop was designed around the idea of a dozen or so top level windows, each one being either a shell window or a graphics canvas, with no real concept of a widget set, dialogs, etc., or even of sub-windows. This paradigm seems to have been more or less the same in the Blit terminal, and carried through in MGR, Mux and even as late as 8 1/2. In the context where this serves the needs of core user group, such makes sense. === It is in stark contrast with developments at the lower/consumer end of the market. The original Mac, GEM and Windows all placed much more emphasis on being a graphical user interface, with standard widgets and UI design elements. On Unix and X it remained a mess. It seems that this was both for technical reasons (X not imposing a standard) and for economic reasons (the Unix wars). Linux then inherited the mess and the core user/developer demographic had no need/wish/time to fix it. It makes me wonder when true graphical applications started to appear for X / Unix / Linux (other than stuff like terminal, clock, calculator, etc.). The graphical browser certainly is one (1993). StarOffice and Applix seem to have arrived around 1995. Anything broadly used before that?

On 28 Feb 2023, at 07:56, Will Senn &lt;will.senn(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Paul, While the background information on X alternatives is interesting, I think there's some conflation going on. The distance in time between the linux kernel being posted and X being available on it was an eyeblink, even back then. There was no serious effort to look at other windowing systems in between "hey, what do y'all think of my new kernel - it runs gnu stuff" to "here it is with X and X apps". That said, it was a pain to configure, required just the right mix of video hardware and other hardware, and wasn't for the faint of heart. As X was becoming available on linux licketysplit, some folks either couldn't get it running or didn't have the hardware - those folks were probably the first to go looking at alternatives, but that didn't precede the x on linux effort. Will On 2/25/23 3:31 PM, Paul Ruizendaal wrote: