15 ms·

One begins to understand the advantages of this approach after 10-15 years or so. I feel that I am constantly being forced into new "UI paradigms", and it isn'

by jwr 6y ago

One begins to understand the advantages of this approach after 10-15 years or so. I feel that I am constantly being forced into new "UI paradigms", and it isn't always a change for the better. I started with DOS (Norton Commander, anyone? to this day there is no comparable tool), then Windows 3.0 and 3.1 (which was mostly garbage and I did not enjoy the UI at all). I then started using Linux and discovered Emacs. When I could afford the extra megabytes of memory, I would also run X11. As years went by, I switched to the Mac. These days I'm worried about what will be taken away from me, especially with Apple and their insistence on removing ports, the idiotic "Touch Bar" instead of function keys — but also with Linux, where the shift away from X11 means no more remote applications, and the (increasingly broken) approach of gluing everything together into a big mudball means that if you're running anything that isn't "mainstream", things break and you are very much on your own. But I still have Emacs and I'm fairly confident that it will remain available and running on every platform I decide to switch to. And that I will be able to run it (with reduced functionality) on a text terminal.

drsopp 6y ago
> Norton Commander, anyone? to this day there is no comparable tool Directory Opus. I've used it for nearly 30 years. First thing I install on Windows.
- muro 6y ago
  Or total commander
- jjbinx007 6y ago
  The MS-DOS version of XTree Gold was the best piece of software I used in the early 90s.
  - ungamedplayer 6y ago
    So true.
- tluyben2 6y ago
  Or FAR.
  - bandie91 6y ago
    yeah FAR Commander is an underappreciated pearl
- tlavoie 6y ago
  Oh wow, there's a blast from the past. I used the Amiga version, never realized there had been a Windows version in the interim.
WanderPanda 6y ago
What is idiotic about the Touchbar that is not idiodic about function keys? You have to look at your keyboard to hit the function keys, why not use the glance for a visual feedback loop?
- codegladiator 6y ago
  > You have to look at your keyboard to hit the function keys No, you are doing it wrong. Never need to see keyboard except when using touchbar thanks to no feedback.
- zwirbl 6y ago
  I barely, if ever, have to look at the function keys to hit right one
- jcelerier 6y ago
  > You have to look at your keyboard no
- Symbiote 6y ago
  On any reasonable keyboard, the function keys are in groups of four (F1-F2-F3-F4 F5-F6-F7-F8 F9-F10-F11-F12), or sometimes three. It's not necessary to look to see where the keys are.
  - foobarian 6y ago
    I wish the external Mac keyboard had grouped function keys. I wish I didn't have to use an external keyboard in the first place, but touchbar is even worse. In my case debugging stuff becomes annoying with ungrouped keys because it's easy to mix up step into / step over / continue.
  - brnt 6y ago
    You're excluding pretty much every laptop there.
    - linspace 6y ago
antonios 6y ago
Sometime I also get in a pessimistic mood. I really would like to convince myself that X11 is not going away in the next decades.
- Bnshsysjab 6y ago
  Esoteric hardware won’t work first, then maybe browsers. I’d estimate 15 years. I was not using pulse or systemd until early this year, having used Linux since 2008 thats a pretty decent lifespan. It was finally required for Bluetooth headphones which weren’t really around in the age of alsa.
swiley 6y ago
I really honestly don’t like X11. I’ve poked around in the source a couple times and it confuses and scares me. I love the idea of moving entirely to just one graphics API and keeping the server simple. Until wayland has decent performance though I don’t think I’ll ever switch. None of the apps I use are native (except possibly Firefox and some EDA tools but only if gtk is set up right?) I thought my new phone would change my mind but surprisingly wayland is way way slower than X11 on it (running native gtk apps.) Do keep in mind though that modern X11 doesn’t really do remote applications either and many aren’t letting the server manage the scene graph /widgets anyway so remote rendering would be very slow.
- akho 6y ago
  Network transparency has grown a lot more important for me over the last few years. It’s not really network transparency, though, it’s more vm/container transparency: if your dev environment is in a vm, and includes anything graphical, you need it. With WSL wayland is not even an option.
  - cmiles74 6y ago
    Microsoft is actively working on adding Wayland support to WSL2. https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Microsoft-Writing-Wayland-Comp https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Microsof...
- pmoriarty 6y ago
  "I love the idea of moving entirely to just one graphics API and keeping the server simple" I'm all for that, if and only if Wayland doesn't force me to give up what I consider to be important features of X. Apart from the aforementioned remote access, a post titled "Why I'm not going to switch to Wayland yet"[1] goes in to some requirements that I also find important: - Programmatic output configuration (xrandr, arandr, etc.) - CLI clipboard access (xsel, xclip) - Third party app launcher/window switcher (rofi, dmenu, albert, docky). - Clipboard managers (parcellite, klipper, Gpaste, clipman, etc.) - Third party screen shot/capture/share (shutter, OBS, ffmpeg, import, peek, scrot, VNC, etc.) - Color picker (gpick, gcolor3, kcolorchooser) - xdotool That post is a couple of years old now, and I've been told in other HN threads on Wayland that some of this stuff is being worked on now, but until it's all there and it is actually mature and full-featured, I would not willingly switch to Wayland. [1] - https://old.reddit.com/r/wayland/comments/85q78y/why_im_not_going_to_switch_to_wayland_yet/ https://old.reddit.com/r/wayland/comments/85q78y/why_im_not_...
hpfr 6y ago
The shift away from X11 means no more forwarding X11 applications over ssh, which is slow at best and buggy and insecure at worst. A small price to pay for eliminating tearing and actually-secure screen locking. There are valid criticisms of the move to Wayland but I don’t really think this is one of them; if you really need remote access to graphical applications you almost certainly should not be using X forwarding.
- znpy 6y ago
  > The shift away from X11 means no more forwarding X11 applications over ssh, which is slow at best and buggy and insecure at worst. Yes but sometimes you really need that and it's a life saver. EDIT: I just remembered about LTSP (Linux Terminal Server Project) which many schools used to lower the TCO of computing infrastructure. That relied heavily on Xorg's network transparency. I wonder what will happen to LTSP
  - hpfr 6y ago
    Honestly, I think people's reliance on X forwarding is just due to the fact that it happens to exist, not because they really need it. There's nothing like X forwarding on Windows to my knowledge. If X forwarding didn't exist people would have figured out how to do what they needed over SSH with text or when GUI's are irreplaceable sysadmins would have set up an actual remote desktop solution like on other modern operating systems.
    - worik 6y ago
      It was the original reason to invent X. Literally
      - oblio 6y ago
        And the adoption has been huge outside of Unix circles... MacOS doesn't use it, Windows doesn't use it. Even Linux is moving away from it. That's pretty damning for X as a technology during a time when even Windows has started to offer native curl and ssh, just saying.
chillfox 6y ago
Doesn’t Midnight Commander do pretty much everything Norton Commander did?
- tartoran 6y ago
  Yes it does but the idea was that UI/UX has been in decline
roel_v 6y ago
"(Norton Commander, anyone? to this day there is no comparable tool)" If you're on Windows, try xyplorer. I can't remember anything NC did that xyplorer doesn't, and it does a lot more, too.
boogies 6y ago
> Norton Commander, anyone? to this day there is no comparable tool What’s the problem with Midnight Commander and/or the 23 other programs at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norton_Commander#Norton_Commander-inspired_software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norton_Commander#Norton_Comman... ?
- oblio 6y ago
  Midnight Commander is not covered by the "nostalgia clause" :-)
- jwr 6y ago
  Midnight Commander is nowhere near where Norton Commander was in terms of usability. Some of that is because of platform restrictions (terminal and keyboard access limitations) and some because of a difference in philosophy. Norton Commander was simple, but it got the simple things right.
  - boogies 6y ago
    I don’t understand what you’re talking about — my terminal accesses as much from my keyboard as I’ve ever wanted it to, and everything I can imagine it wanting to short of flashing my (Num|Caps|Scroll) lock lights or something (and other terminals support more features than I even use, eg. image previews in ranger et. al.) Could you give an even more specific and concrete example?
  - HeadsUpHigh 6y ago
    What exactly was so useable about norton commander? I tried a split fm and I just found it cumbersome.
  - BeetleB 6y ago
    While I don't like Midnight Commander's keybindings, do note that it can do quite a bit that Norton couldn't (e.g. ssh - incredibly handy). If you want a closer clone to Norton Commander, try FAR Manager: https://www.farmanager.com/ https://www.farmanager.com/ (Windows only)
  - 6y ago
sevensor 6y ago
> the shift away from X11 means no more remote applications This is a long, gentle transition. Although I believe it to be possible, I still haven't ever run a pure-Wayland system. Most graphical applications for Linux still need an X server, and Wayland provides one. Under sway, I can still run ssh -Y and start X clients on the host I'm connected to. This works just fine. It's going to be years until Wayland kills off X11 on the wire, and alternatives are already under development. I worry about a lot of things, but this isn't one of them.
msla 6y ago
> where the shift away from X11 means no more remote applications Plus the death of all non-mainstream window managers, it seems. Realistically, I'm not moving away from X11 if it will create a UI regression for me. This means that unless I can get Window Maker and application forwarding, I'm not moving to Wayland, and I doubt I'm alone in this general feeling, even though other people use different window managers.
- HeadsUpHigh 6y ago
  Define mainstream. Most tilling wm we all know have a wayland branch now. Some abandonware will probably be lost but nothing prevents anyone from re-implementing them.
  - badsectoracula 6y ago
    He already mentioned Window Maker. In any case X11 isn't going anywhere even if Xorg developers decide to abandon ship, others will pick it up and continue. It isn't like Xorg was the first and only server, it already the third or fourth fork from the original server.
- hpfr 6y ago
  > Plus the death of all non-mainstream window managers, it seems. Thanks to wlroots, many new window manager projects are starting, often inspired directly by particular X window managers: https://github.com/swaywm/wlroots/wiki/Projects-which-use-wlroots https://github.com/swaywm/wlroots/wiki/Projects-which-use-wl...
selftest 6y ago
I took years off from Linux and recently hopped back in. What a convoluted mess it’s all become! I’m currently using a “packaged” version of Arch (arcolinux) and the whole thing is just a hodgepodge of things that might work together but probably don’t. I like to tinker as much as the next person on HN, but editing configs all day truly takes away from doing “real” work. However, the Mac problem is also annoying... not having $1200+ every two or three years to spend in new hardware is limiting. While it’s true that you can “code on anything”, resource overhead becomes a consideration at some point... which is why I switched back to Linux, but then I’m back at my first complaint.

by jwr 6y ago

drsopp 6y ago

> Norton Commander, anyone? to this day there is no comparable tool Directory Opus. I've used it for nearly 30 years. First thing I install on Windows.

muro 6y ago
Or total commander
jjbinx007 6y ago
The MS-DOS version of XTree Gold was the best piece of software I used in the early 90s.
- ungamedplayer 6y ago
  So true.
tluyben2 6y ago
Or FAR.
- bandie91 6y ago
  yeah FAR Commander is an underappreciated pearl
tlavoie 6y ago
Oh wow, there's a blast from the past. I used the Amiga version, never realized there had been a Windows version in the interim.

WanderPanda 6y ago

What is idiotic about the Touchbar that is not idiodic about function keys? You have to look at your keyboard to hit the function keys, why not use the glance for a visual feedback loop?

codegladiator 6y ago
> You have to look at your keyboard to hit the function keys No, you are doing it wrong. Never need to see keyboard except when using touchbar thanks to no feedback.
zwirbl 6y ago
I barely, if ever, have to look at the function keys to hit right one
jcelerier 6y ago
> You have to look at your keyboard no
Symbiote 6y ago
On any reasonable keyboard, the function keys are in groups of four (F1-F2-F3-F4 F5-F6-F7-F8 F9-F10-F11-F12), or sometimes three. It's not necessary to look to see where the keys are.
- foobarian 6y ago
  I wish the external Mac keyboard had grouped function keys. I wish I didn't have to use an external keyboard in the first place, but touchbar is even worse. In my case debugging stuff becomes annoying with ungrouped keys because it's easy to mix up step into / step over / continue.
- brnt 6y ago
  You're excluding pretty much every laptop there.
  - linspace 6y ago

antonios 6y ago

Sometime I also get in a pessimistic mood. I really would like to convince myself that X11 is not going away in the next decades.

Bnshsysjab 6y ago
Esoteric hardware won’t work first, then maybe browsers. I’d estimate 15 years. I was not using pulse or systemd until early this year, having used Linux since 2008 thats a pretty decent lifespan. It was finally required for Bluetooth headphones which weren’t really around in the age of alsa.

swiley 6y ago

I really honestly don’t like X11. I’ve poked around in the source a couple times and it confuses and scares me. I love the idea of moving entirely to just one graphics API and keeping the server simple. Until wayland has decent performance though I don’t think I’ll ever switch. None of the apps I use are native (except possibly Firefox and some EDA tools but only if gtk is set up right?) I thought my new phone would change my mind but surprisingly wayland is way way slower than X11 on it (running native gtk apps.) Do keep in mind though that modern X11 doesn’t really do remote applications either and many aren’t letting the server manage the scene graph /widgets anyway so remote rendering would be very slow.

akho 6y ago
Network transparency has grown a lot more important for me over the last few years. It’s not really network transparency, though, it’s more vm/container transparency: if your dev environment is in a vm, and includes anything graphical, you need it. With WSL wayland is not even an option.
- cmiles74 6y ago
  Microsoft is actively working on adding Wayland support to WSL2. https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Microsoft-Writing-Wayland-Comp https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Microsof...
pmoriarty 6y ago
"I love the idea of moving entirely to just one graphics API and keeping the server simple" I'm all for that, if and only if Wayland doesn't force me to give up what I consider to be important features of X. Apart from the aforementioned remote access, a post titled "Why I'm not going to switch to Wayland yet"[1] goes in to some requirements that I also find important: - Programmatic output configuration (xrandr, arandr, etc.) - CLI clipboard access (xsel, xclip) - Third party app launcher/window switcher (rofi, dmenu, albert, docky). - Clipboard managers (parcellite, klipper, Gpaste, clipman, etc.) - Third party screen shot/capture/share (shutter, OBS, ffmpeg, import, peek, scrot, VNC, etc.) - Color picker (gpick, gcolor3, kcolorchooser) - xdotool That post is a couple of years old now, and I've been told in other HN threads on Wayland that some of this stuff is being worked on now, but until it's all there and it is actually mature and full-featured, I would not willingly switch to Wayland. [1] - https://old.reddit.com/r/wayland/comments/85q78y/why_im_not_going_to_switch_to_wayland_yet/ https://old.reddit.com/r/wayland/comments/85q78y/why_im_not_...

hpfr 6y ago

The shift away from X11 means no more forwarding X11 applications over ssh, which is slow at best and buggy and insecure at worst. A small price to pay for eliminating tearing and actually-secure screen locking. There are valid criticisms of the move to Wayland but I don’t really think this is one of them; if you really need remote access to graphical applications you almost certainly should not be using X forwarding.

znpy 6y ago
> The shift away from X11 means no more forwarding X11 applications over ssh, which is slow at best and buggy and insecure at worst. Yes but sometimes you really need that and it's a life saver. EDIT: I just remembered about LTSP (Linux Terminal Server Project) which many schools used to lower the TCO of computing infrastructure. That relied heavily on Xorg's network transparency. I wonder what will happen to LTSP
- hpfr 6y ago
  Honestly, I think people's reliance on X forwarding is just due to the fact that it happens to exist, not because they really need it. There's nothing like X forwarding on Windows to my knowledge. If X forwarding didn't exist people would have figured out how to do what they needed over SSH with text or when GUI's are irreplaceable sysadmins would have set up an actual remote desktop solution like on other modern operating systems.
  - worik 6y ago
    It was the original reason to invent X. Literally
    - oblio 6y ago
      And the adoption has been huge outside of Unix circles... MacOS doesn't use it, Windows doesn't use it. Even Linux is moving away from it. That's pretty damning for X as a technology during a time when even Windows has started to offer native curl and ssh, just saying.

chillfox 6y ago

Doesn’t Midnight Commander do pretty much everything Norton Commander did?

tartoran 6y ago
Yes it does but the idea was that UI/UX has been in decline

roel_v 6y ago

"(Norton Commander, anyone? to this day there is no comparable tool)" If you're on Windows, try xyplorer. I can't remember anything NC did that xyplorer doesn't, and it does a lot more, too.

boogies 6y ago

> Norton Commander, anyone? to this day there is no comparable tool What’s the problem with Midnight Commander and/or the 23 other programs at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norton_Commander#Norton_Commander-inspired_software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norton_Commander#Norton_Comman... ?

oblio 6y ago
Midnight Commander is not covered by the "nostalgia clause" :-)
jwr 6y ago
Midnight Commander is nowhere near where Norton Commander was in terms of usability. Some of that is because of platform restrictions (terminal and keyboard access limitations) and some because of a difference in philosophy. Norton Commander was simple, but it got the simple things right.
- boogies 6y ago
  I don’t understand what you’re talking about — my terminal accesses as much from my keyboard as I’ve ever wanted it to, and everything I can imagine it wanting to short of flashing my (Num|Caps|Scroll) lock lights or something (and other terminals support more features than I even use, eg. image previews in ranger et. al.) Could you give an even more specific and concrete example?
- HeadsUpHigh 6y ago
  What exactly was so useable about norton commander? I tried a split fm and I just found it cumbersome.
- BeetleB 6y ago
  While I don't like Midnight Commander's keybindings, do note that it can do quite a bit that Norton couldn't (e.g. ssh - incredibly handy). If you want a closer clone to Norton Commander, try FAR Manager: https://www.farmanager.com/ https://www.farmanager.com/ (Windows only)
- 6y ago

sevensor 6y ago

> the shift away from X11 means no more remote applications This is a long, gentle transition. Although I believe it to be possible, I still haven't ever run a pure-Wayland system. Most graphical applications for Linux still need an X server, and Wayland provides one. Under sway, I can still run ssh -Y and start X clients on the host I'm connected to. This works just fine. It's going to be years until Wayland kills off X11 on the wire, and alternatives are already under development. I worry about a lot of things, but this isn't one of them.

msla 6y ago

> where the shift away from X11 means no more remote applications Plus the death of all non-mainstream window managers, it seems. Realistically, I'm not moving away from X11 if it will create a UI regression for me. This means that unless I can get Window Maker and application forwarding, I'm not moving to Wayland, and I doubt I'm alone in this general feeling, even though other people use different window managers.

HeadsUpHigh 6y ago
Define mainstream. Most tilling wm we all know have a wayland branch now. Some abandonware will probably be lost but nothing prevents anyone from re-implementing them.
- badsectoracula 6y ago
  He already mentioned Window Maker. In any case X11 isn't going anywhere even if Xorg developers decide to abandon ship, others will pick it up and continue. It isn't like Xorg was the first and only server, it already the third or fourth fork from the original server.
hpfr 6y ago
> Plus the death of all non-mainstream window managers, it seems. Thanks to wlroots, many new window manager projects are starting, often inspired directly by particular X window managers: https://github.com/swaywm/wlroots/wiki/Projects-which-use-wlroots https://github.com/swaywm/wlroots/wiki/Projects-which-use-wl...

selftest 6y ago

I took years off from Linux and recently hopped back in. What a convoluted mess it’s all become! I’m currently using a “packaged” version of Arch (arcolinux) and the whole thing is just a hodgepodge of things that might work together but probably don’t. I like to tinker as much as the next person on HN, but editing configs all day truly takes away from doing “real” work. However, the Mac problem is also annoying... not having $1200+ every two or three years to spend in new hardware is limiting. While it’s true that you can “code on anything”, resource overhead becomes a consideration at some point... which is why I switched back to Linux, but then I’m back at my first complaint.