4 ms·

While I totally agree with you in a desktop-like scenario, please note that X is totally inadequate and bloated for other domains (e.g. automotive).

• quotemstr 6y ago
  Why? X originally ran on machines far less powerful than even the shittiest automotive head units around today.
  • stonogo 6y ago
    Because the problem isn't with X, it's that all the toolkits people want to use were written basically to use X as a glorified framebuffer. Wayland is a reorienting of the underlying stack to accomodate this. You could absolutely make an automotive stack with something like X and Motif, but nobody in the industry really wants to use those tools.
    • asveikau 6y ago
      Nokia n900 had a touch screen smartphone UI based on gtk with X, with a 600mhz arm core and 256mb ram. I had one. It was pretty good.
      • owl57 6y ago
        I turned my N810 on recently and played a bit, so I can compare it directly to modern devices. "Pretty good" is a big understatement.
• rleigh 6y ago
  As the other poster mentioned, X11 used to run on really old resource-constrained systems. Nothing about it precludes using it for embedded automotive applications. A tiny MCU could manage it. The MCUs used for current automotive stuff are powerful enough to run Linux with Vulkan for crying out loud. Though I think for many of these embedded applications both X11 and Wayland are overkill when EGL direct works just fine. A full windowing system is massive overkill.
• michaelmrose 6y ago
  Making life easier for Ford sounds like a low priority goal.
• metroholografix 6y ago
  Back in the day, I used to run XFree86 on a Pentium 150 with 64MB of RAM and an S3 Virge graphics card. Don't tell me that X is bloated.
  • fulafel 6y ago
    Before that, 8 MB was iffy, 16 MB good in the early Linux days.
  • hedora 6y ago
    I ran it on a 386/25MHz, 8MB of RAM. It was much faster than Windows on the same machine. Enlightenment was fast on that machine. The desktop switcher in the panel had old-school desk lamps pointing at the active desktop. I miss that theme, and I can’t find any screenshots.
• edsac_xyzw 6y ago
  Most embedded graphical Linux applications don't use X (X Windows System), instead they use framebuffer directly or any library such as Qt Widgets or QtQuick/Qml that draws on top of the framebuffer device file. So, there is no need for developing a new Window system that can work on both Desktop or embedded systems.