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The UNIX Haters Handbook was funny at the time but doesn't make much sense these days unless you understand all the rival hacker groups and cultures that were l
by andyjpb 7y ago
The UNIX Haters Handbook was funny at the time but doesn't make much sense these days unless you understand all the rival hacker groups and cultures that were largely eventually unified under "Free Software" and, later, "Open Source". Even the LISPers have come in from the cold!
Much of this criticism of X was prescient for things to come. Autotools, dependency problems, modularity issues, compatibility, "DLL-hell", etc. Many of these problems don't have solutions today that are orders of magnitude better than then.
On the other hand, one thing that's really holding X back, especially on handhelds, is 'Myth: X is "Device Independent"'.
If the difference between a 75dpi screen and a 100dpi workstation screen was too much, today's "retina" displays really struggle to run a usable X. You're heavily reliant on the toolkits (Qt, GTK, etc) to scale things for you and they mostly understand about font scaling but not about widget scaling.
Lots of distributions that might want to use it, for example Maemo Leste, Ubuntu Touch or Gemian, are having to do a lot of UI work and hand-pick applications for "porting" to the screens and input devices (touch) that they want to use them on.
This means that Linux-on-the-smartphone is not yet in any position to give Android or iOS a run for it's money because it really struggles to effectively leverage its existing app ecosystem.
Even ignoring security models, X struggles to provide even a compelling visual of a vision for handheld devices.
Don't even mention Wayland: that has other economic incentives that are not yet properly aligned for widespread success (including X's app ecosystem ones).
- jcelerier 7y ago> If the difference between a 75dpi screen and a 100dpi workstation screen was too much, today's "retina" displays really struggle to run a usable X. I've been running X11 on retina displays since 2014 without much of an issue. The only big offenders were chrome and firefox. Nowadays everything just works.
- fsh 7y agoIt works if you have more or less the same pixel density across all screens. As soon as you mix very different ones, X becomes essentially unusable. Microsoft and Apple have solved that issue years ago.
- p_l 7y agoIt would be solvable with compositing XServer, like Xsgi. Unfortunatelyh X.Org is based on the lowest-common denominator code, and nobody dared to make a redesign that would really split from the X.Org mission of "providing a code dump for vendors to start working"
- tinus_hn 7y agoMicrosoft for certain is nowhere near solving this.
- fsh 7y agoLegacy applications are somewhat blurry when moved from high-dpi to low-dpi, but anything modern works perfectly well. In my experience, X with current gnome or KDE is completely unusable in the same scenario. Either everything is huge on the low-dpi screen, or tiny on the high-dpi screen.
- Izkata 7y agoThere is a third option: xrandr lets you choose different resolutions per-screen. Nothing ends up too large or too small, you just don't get the benefit of the high-dpi screen.
- fsh 7y agoThis makes it completely pointless to even have a high-dpi screen. I think it is a pretty common use-case to have a new 4K monitor together with older FHD ones, or a high-dpi laptop with a low-dpi external screen. X really shows its age in relying on everything having roughly the same pixel density.
- Izkata 7y agoNot completely; I do this while docked and the laptop screen is further away, when high-dpi doesn't matter as much, and go full-res when mobile. > or a high-dpi laptop with a low-dpi external screen Yep, that's where I am right now, which is why I wanted to mention the third option - our IT support people upgrading everyone's laptops didn't even know this could be done.
- andyjpb 7y agoI'd be interested to hear what you are using. Obviously the web browsers are a big requirement. ...but I've had trouble with the defaults for almost everything I've tried: xterm, libreoffice, browsers. Under KDE the menus are too small by default. Under non-Gnome-or-KDE window managers or desktop environments almost everything is rendered too small. The chances are that I can't just install an application with `apt-get` and have it do something sensible by default without a lot of fiddling and customisation.
- jcelerier 7y agoi3, I only set Xft.dpi: 144 in my .Xresources ; here's a screenshot with GTK3, Qt4, Qt5 and raw X11 apps : https://i.imgur.com/VfWisJ7.png https://i.imgur.com/VfWisJ7.png
- andyjpb 7y agoThanks! I really appreciate you taking the time.
- jcelerier 7y agoif you look at the date in the calendar, it's a time I took a good 6 months ago haha
- int_19h 7y agoThis forces fonts to scale, but what about bitmaps? They will scale if the increased text size causes the widget to grow (and also affect parent widgets in this manner). But pure icons aren't scaled - indeed, on your screenshot, there are some icons that are noticeably smaller than they should be proportional to the text.