Wow, I’m weirdly close to the same age as the X Windows System
huh, just five months after the Macintosh:
X is an awful pile of garbage, but less awful than the alternatives out there.
I’m looking at you, Wayland. Reach feature parity (at least for stuff that users care about), then we talk.
It’s at feature-parity for me, personally
I’ve been using it for at least 2 years (via GNOME, then sway, now river), and it’s pretty rare now that I hit a rough patch or a paper cut
Even Zoom seems like it’s finally doing screen-capture via proper xdg-desktop-portal requests now, which is nice
And still buggy with an external monitor…
Yeah, I’ve been using Wayland for years now and haven’t looked back
Still doesn’t support XFCE.
But I do use gamescope, which runs a Wayland compositor inside X.
Ooof. And it’s still used by a wide majority…
It’s not a bad thing to be old. It’s tested, and works well. Is it the most effective? No. But that doesn’t mean that it still isn’t a fantastic windowing system.
In fact, while the original X was created 38 years ago, X.org, the most commonly used windowing system on modern desktop Linux, was released 18 years ago.
Emacs is a nice example of old but gold
It works
Except when it doesn’t.