Hacker News Reader

Comment by fmntf | Hacker News Reader

While I totally agree with you in a desktop-like scenario, please note that X is totally inadequate and bloated for other domains (e.g. automotive).

View on HN

As the other poster mentioned, X11 used to run on really old resource-constrained systems. Nothing about it precludes using it for embedded automotive applications. A tiny MCU could manage it. The MCUs used for current automotive stuff are powerful enough to run Linux with Vulkan for crying out loud.

Though I think for many of these embedded applications both X11 and Wayland are overkill when EGL direct works just fine. A full windowing system is massive overkill.

Why? X originally ran on machines far less powerful than even the shittiest automotive head units around today.

Because the problem isn't with X, it's that all the toolkits people want to use were written basically to use X as a glorified framebuffer. Wayland is a reorienting of the underlying stack to accomodate this. You could absolutely make an automotive stack with something like X and Motif, but nobody in the industry really wants to use those tools.

Nokia n900 had a touch screen smartphone UI based on gtk with X, with a 600mhz arm core and 256mb ram. I had one. It was pretty good.

I turned my N810 on recently and played a bit, so I can compare it directly to modern devices. "Pretty good" is a big understatement.

Most embedded graphical Linux applications don't use X (X Windows System), instead they use framebuffer directly or any library such as Qt Widgets or QtQuick/Qml that draws on top of the framebuffer device file. So, there is no need for developing a new Window system that can work on both Desktop or embedded systems.

Back in the day, I used to run XFree86 on a Pentium 150 with 64MB of RAM and an S3 Virge graphics card.

Don't tell me that X is bloated.

Before that, 8 MB was iffy, 16 MB good in the early Linux days.

I ran it on a 386/25MHz, 8MB of RAM. It was much faster than Windows on the same machine.

Enlightenment was fast on that machine. The desktop switcher in the panel had old-school desk lamps pointing at the active desktop.

I miss that theme, and I can’t find any screenshots.

Making life easier for Ford sounds like a low priority goal.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com