The X Window Stytem, originally developed at MIT, is now owned by The Open Group. Softwarewise, it consists of Xlib, the X toolkit (Xt), and a number of clients. The X Protocol specifications are also considered to be part of the X Window System. Things like X servers are added by the vendor, which for Linux systems is typically XFree86. At one time, motif (which is not available under a free licence, though clones such as lesstif exist) was considered almost a de facto part of X; now that the XFree86 has acheived massive popularity, however, this is not so much the case. Most proprietary Unix vendors that ship with X still include motif, though.
One of X's greatest assets is its network-transparence. Of course, it's really only transparent over a medium-speed connection or better; X over a modem is very sluggish. Most people who do not have philosophical objections to the entire X model feel that the colour model and font handling are its weakest points.
Those who do feel that the entire design of X is fundamentally broken usually point to NeWS; 8 1/2, the Plan 9 windowing system; Berlin; and whatever Apple's latest offering might be. They may be right. Quite possibly the only reason X triumphed over NeWS was that X was much more open.
The X window system is a client-server based GUI environment. It was first developed as part of the Athena project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with the help of DEC. First released in 1984.
The version most commonly used nowadays is XFree86 which is based on X386.
Now that powerful processors and video cards are common, the client-server functionality of the X Window System is starting to fade. It's still implemented, but the main use now is on desktop computers.
Many people complain about X, and it is crufty, but I like it.
Sure, as a programmer I've seen the horror that is the result of Xlib, colormaps, and some really obscure and outdated things. But GDK abstracts that pretty well. And hey, if you can find any other graphics library with these many applications that's streamable over a network (I do use remote X sometimes, and it is great!), I'd like to see it.
As for all this talk of desktop shit, I don't care about that. My computer is used as a workstation, not a desktop. It's running fvwm2 for chrissake.
Dear Frater 219/tftv256 and X Consortium, while we innocent, ignorant end users respect your right to call your software as you want, we hope you would also sometimes consider us and our needs.
Let me clarify: Using a single letter, especially such letter as 'X' that has been attributed to be the most mysterious character and is in general considered one of the more significant letters, implies certain importance your software may possess. Single letter always sounds more striking than a long string of letters such as this one (865 so far). Now, the supply of single-letter names is very scarce. In english, there are no more than 26 such available!
Conclusion: Although letter 'X' to refer to this software is the most common practise today, it carries implied superiority to competition with more elaborate names, such as Berlin or Microsoft Windows.
Attempt to create a short form name: 'X Windows System', hmm, well, if we choose 'X', we lose any connection to purpose of software, in addition to problems mentioned in item one. 'Windows System' loses identifier and thus is unacceptable, 'X System' is still too generic since there can be many systems. 'Windows' is taken, and 'System' is, as name, worth null. Thus, 'X Windows' would be the most logical choice. Alternative spellings might be X-windows, Xwin or a software disaster of biblical portions. And lo!, so we see why and how the common populace reached name 'x-windows'.
In addition to above, name 'X version 11' is too long and commonly collapses back to 'X', which turns this into item one.
Finally, a question: Why is 'X-windows' such a bad name? Are you afraid that it will get confused with Microsoft Windows? Admittedly Microsoft's choice of operating system name was among the most poor naming choices ever made, at least to the software community, but instead of yielding, fight. Do you, a proud defender of your home nation, stop calling yourself chauvinist because the treasonous feminists have given this proud term an undeserved implication of misogynia? Does a circus geek with long traditions of being laughed at by the audience stop calling himself a geek, simply because some pencil-necked kids who like computers and have pale skin have caused the term 'geek' to be overloaded with ideas of obsession with computers? No! Call yourself 'X-windows', and do it with pride, and one day they will be confusing Microsoft Windows with X-Windows, not the other way around.
As an afterthought, the developers thought they'd throw in a window manager to let people move things around. They produced the Tab Window Manager, twm. It's still included with the base X distribution on any Unix machine. Try running it sometime, it's pretty sad.
The reason X sucks so much at being a GUI is because it was not actually designed to do anything but run a few minor graphical hacks that were hardly better than ASCII graphics (read: xload, xmh), and to allow people to run two terminals side by side. It doesn't support innate drag and drop. It doesn't have any OS-level human interface conventions. It doesn't even have an active desktop without the aid of programs which run cheap hacks to give it one.
This is why X-Windows is so user-hostile compared to MacOS...and even Microsoft Windows. Funny that I should have such opinions, when my own nick is a play on the naming convention of X applications...
The following can be found in the default xinitrc file (/usr/X11R6/xinit/xinitrc), dated August 22nd, 1991... (note: this is still included in current distribution of XFree86 3.x)
# start some nice programs twm & xclock -geometry 50x50-1+1 & xterm -geometry 80x50+494+51 & xterm -geometry 80x20+494-0 & exec xterm -geometry 80x66+0+0 -name login
Try creating a new user account. Log in with that, and rm -f ~/.xinitrc. Then, startx. AND WITNESS THE SUCK.
MIT created a network protocol for graphical application presentation, and called it "X". (It was an improvement over an earlier protocol called "W". Hence the name -- they weren't just trying to sound cool.) The software that ran X was called the "X Window System", but people commonly called it "X Windows". It caught on with Unix vendors, who shipped it on their workstations. Meanwhile, on the other side of the continent, Microsoft created a crude graphical shell for MS-DOS, and called it "Windows". Microsoft got a trademark on the name "Windows" as applied to graphical software.
When someone has a trademark on a name, nobody else is allowed to sell or distribute a similar product with a similar name. That's trademark law for you -- and "Windows" and "X Windows" are rather similar names, especially to a lawyer. The consortium that had come to maintain X got worried, and stuck a warning in the documentation saying that "X Windows" was not what their product was called.
According to the X manpage, the X Consortium requests that the following names be used for the current release of their software:
(Actually, the X Consortium is not in any position to request anything, seeing as it no longer exists.)
The X Window System is the foundation of the graphical environments on Unix and Unix-like operating systems, such as Linux. Since Unix predates the graphical user interface and widespread availability of computer graphics, it has no built-in facility for graphics at the lowest levels of the system. However, as the de facto standard for graphical applications under Unix-like systems, X has been near-ubiquitous on such systems for the last 10-15 years. Unlike most graphics layers, the protocol between applications and the system is network-transparent, allowing programs from multiple machines to appear on a single display without requiring external support.
The X Window System was originally developed at MIT as part of their pioneering computing access program, Project Athena. X originated as an adaptation of Stanford University's W network window system to a much more efficient network protocol, completed by Bob Scheifler in May 1984. Unlike other graphics systems of the time, such as the Macintosh's QuickDraw, X was designed to be both hardware-independent and vendor-independent, since Project Athena intended to connect all systems at MIT regardless of their origin.
The initial implementation of X was quite limited, and over the next year it was extended in a number of backwards-incompatible ways. The result was X Version 9 or X9, which was the first version released under the permissive 'MIT License' in September 1985. This license would have an important effect on the future of the X Window System, allowing anyone to use and modify the code for any purpose whatsoever, provided that the original author's copyright notice is preserved and the recipient understands that the original author provides no warranty of any kind. These permissions have been broadly abused in the intervening time, but also ensured
