[TUHS] Early GUI on Linux

[David Arnold]

I think this has its roots in the goals for the system.

Linux was developed (let’s say, in the pre 2.x era) as a way to make the PCs that many people could afford into the workstation they couldn't.

There was very little effort to make Linux a better operating system, let alone a better Unix: it was “is it good enough to do what I can/could do on Solaris at work/college?”

And so, it moved through a pragmatic subset of V7/Minix to a rough POSIX/Solaris syscall interface, and grew an ecosystem of cobbled-together userland that enabled that goal.  For the vast majority of its users, X11 was a pre-requisite for serious use: there was more-or-less zero impetus for a competing UI.  Perhaps the closest thing to it was GNUstep, which to this day, limps along with very little use (and is implemented over X11 anyway).

Look at how drawn-out the adoption of Wayland has been as evidence of how little interest there has been in alternative graphical models.

None of that is a bad thing, per se — give me Ubuntu 23.04 over Solaris 2.4 (or even 11) any day: mostly libre, mostly gratis, cheap hardware, and it just works.



d

> On 28 Feb 2023, at 07:56, Will Senn <will.senn at gmail.com> 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:
>> I think discussion of early Linux is in scope for this list, after all that is 30 years ago. Warren, if that is a mis-assumption please slap my wrist.
>> 
>> Following on from the recent discussion of early workstations and windowing systems, I’m wondering about early windowing on Linux. I only discovered Linux in the later nineties (Red Hat 4.x I think), and by that time Linux already seemed to have settled on Xfree86. At that time svgalib was still around but already abandoned.
>> 
>> By 1993 even student class PC hardware already outperformed the workstations of the early/mid eighties, memory was much more abundant and pixels were no longer bits but bytes (making drawing easier). Also, early Linux was (I think) more local machine oriented, not LAN oriented. Maybe a different system than X would have made sense.
>> 
>> In short, I could imagine a frame buffer device and a compositor for top-level windows (a trail that had been pioneered by Oriel half a decade before), a declarative widget set inspired by the contemporary early browsers and the earlier NeWS, etc. Yet nothing like that happened as far as I know. I vaguely recall an OS from the late 90’s that mixed Linux with a partly in-kernel GUI called “Berlin” or something like that, but I cannot find any trace of that today, so maybe I misremember.
>> 
>> So here are a few things that I am interested in and folks on this list might remember:
>> 
>> - were there any window systems popular on early Linux other than X?
>> 
>> - was there any discussion of alternatives to X?
>> 
>> - was there any discussion of what kernel support for graphics was appropriate?
>> 
>> 
>