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Comment by ericfrederich | Hacker News Reader

I thought X was on its way out?

It has been on the way out for the last 10 years. I suspect that X11 outlives Wayland simply because the latter will be replaced by yet another technology but X11 applications will still be supported.

Someone mentioned GTK3's Broadway backend in another comment.

Try this (the two mentioned commands come with the gtk3 package):

- In one terminal, run 'broadwayd'

- In another terminal, run 'GDK_BACKEND=broadway BROADWAY_DISPLAY=:0 gtk3-demo'

- In _your Web browser_, go to http://localhost:8080/

- Reattach jaw

Oh boy

What could be a real use case for that

X has been dying for possibly longer than Apple. Which is quite impressive.

X, along with FreeBSD and Lisp have been dying for a few decades now at least. I think the quote goes "doesn't look any deader than usual".

I think the eventual goal is to get the major DEs and toolkits to stop supporting their X backends in the near future. Then X would be effectively dead but for ancient legacy applications.

This has already happened for ALSA with some applications. If you want to use BlueZ or Firefox, your options are either PulseAudio or no sound at all under Linux.

They will still support X as an independent server application no different than running Xorg in Windows or MacOS. That can never be obsoleted.

TIL the PS4 ran a dead OS

What about FreeBSD is dying?

I believe it's referring to the old 'It is official; Netcraft confirms: *BSD is dying' statement.

For the past 30 years or so...

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