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Comment by leecarraher | Hacker News Reader

the authors understanding of X11 seems flawed. Or at least i don't agree with X11 being the thing holding linux back. There have been many proposed replacement, and finally it appears wayland may make some headway, but from a user experience, the windowing system has very little influence. Perhaps the author means desktop environments, gnome/kde/xfce... those certainly effect the user experience, and the fragmented culture of the user experience can be frustrating. However from my vantage that is by design, the classic make it whatever you want it to be. All-in-all a disappointing article.

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I really meant X11. The desktop manager fragmentation is an issue but not so much. It doesn't help for the end user if the system is difficult to maintain, if out of the box it's easy to break, it stutters, crashes, doesn't draw correctly, and overall is difficult to make fluid. Latency is high, one app can hang the windowing drawing, etc. So yes, it's a lot to blame on X11.

> one app can hang the windowing drawing

I have seen many things, but not that. My first suspicion is that it is not X11 that hangs, but the blasted compositor that whatever DE you were using insist on applying because "UX"...

Except that that's not why Apple avoided X11. Apple decided to build their own thing because they wanted to avoid also-ran cross-compatibility with other UNIX clones, and additionally they wanted fancy antialiased font rendering which X11 didn't support at the time.

Apple built Quartz while Xorg developed Xft. A couple years in and Quartz didn't have any compelling features over Xorg, just an alien API.

It's true that X11 is terrible but nearly all of its competitors have shown themselves to be worse. Wayland wasn't practical until recently (like 2014?) when GPU memory and latency has dropped to the point where actually running a full compositor is no longer expensive. And most people using Wayland will just host an Xorg inside for X11 backwards compatibility anyway...

You're right about that. I didn't want to extend too much on that part and I can see how it can be misinterpreted. I didn't mean that Apple's direct reason to build Quartz was because of X. But it is true that X didn't have any reasons to be used back then in the mid-90's as well, specially coming from NEXT with it's Display Postscript compositing manager.

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