Re: why X

Ivan Shmakov <ivan@siamics.netremove.invalid> wrote:

       Finally, there's the amount of code involved, both overall
       (affecting filesystem space requirements) and for specific
       code paths (affecting performance and /predictability/ of
       the behavior.)  For compatibility reasons, the former isn't
       particularly good, and likely cannot be improved /without/
       your own effort to tailor it down to your own needs.

XFree86 and later X.org used to include the TinyX servers that
stripped out all but the bare essentials for a small, relatively
self-contained, executable which worked (and still works) with most
X software. The X.org developers lost interest in it many years ago
and removed it, though some forks exist. After fixing various
compiler/architecture compatibility issues, I've built the XFree86
Xfbdev TinyX server for the Raspberry Pi and it runs fine on a RPi
Zero. Interestingly seemingly every one of the X libraries built
from the XFree86 sources was significantly smaller than those built
from recent X.org on the Pi as well.

The point is that efforts really haven't been directed at making X
smaller in the recent years up to when the paid developers switched
to Wayland, in fact the opposite has been happening. It's therefore
unlikely that the same developers really care about improving that
with Wayland.

       This is something that GUI environments out there seem to be
       lacking in general.  You might say that GTK supports this, or Qt
       supports that,

I sure wouldn't, various Qt programs that I've used got dropped
from the Debian package repo because they didn't support newer Qt
releases and the old ones reached EOL. GTK is only better because
people seem to find it easier to build old versions on newer Linux.
I use various GTK1 and GTK2 applications, and the only newer one I
use regularly with the still-supported GTK3 is Firefox.

       but can you really take a GTK or Qt application
       from 2004, build it on a contemporary system, and still have
       all that advertised support?  The thing is: a modern toolkit's
       lifetime is ten years or so.  Then it's discarded and replaced
       with something with the same name, yet entirely new API.

Indeed, and to little if any obvious benefit for the GUI software I
see. When an old program just uses Xlib directly, it takes away a
lot of potential obstacles to making it work on a modern system.

--
__          __
#_ < |\| |< _#