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by chrismorgan 210 days ago
Just so it’s clear:

The X Window System (X11) is a protocol with multiple implementations. Sure, the X.Org Server (Xorg) was the most popular by a huge margin, but there were quite a few others (e.g. XFree86, Xming, XWayland), though over time most were discontinued for one reason or another.

X11 and Wayland do differ in an important way: in X11 window managers (GNOME, KDE, i3, whatever) all sat atop the Xorg server; whereas in Wayland there’s only the compositor, so GNOME, KDE, Sway, whatever, all essentially include their own equivalent of Xorg (which could be fully integrated, or factored into a library, such as Mutter, KWin, wlroots).
1 comments
the_why_of_y 209 days ago
Every single X server you list is a fork of XFree86, and every X server I'm aware of is a fork of the original X11R1 (or later) release from MIT.

Please cite a single independent implementation of an X11 protocol server.

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marwis 208 days ago
There were plenty of those, including commercial ones.

It's pretty hard to find but ~25 years ago I was using Xi Graphics Accelerated-X which had 3D acceleration long before Xfree86.

Update: but yes I imagine it had some code from original MIT release.

For completely independent one you can have a look at WeirdX/WiredX, which was written in Java and even supported antialiasing and transparency for core protocol (something that Xfree86 people claimed to be impossible to implement).

It's surprisingly hard to find this stuff today: https://web.archive.org/web/20250220140358/http://www.jcraft...

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the_why_of_y 208 days ago
Oh, WeirdX, that's one I hadn't heard of.

The commercial ones (Xsun, Xsgi, Hummingbird, DESQView/X etc.) were all based on MIT code.

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