[toast0]

X11 has some tricky, imposible to fix (within the confines of the existing protoco) issues because of the seperation between Xserver and window manager. Things like (IIRC) initial window placement and what nots, where ideally the window manager would make choices about things before the process continues, but the reality of distributed systems makes everything hard. Combining some things into an integrated process fixes that, but comes with other issues.

There were probably other ways to fix those issues, but it would still be a fair amount of churn.

[vidarh]

> imposible to fix (within the confines of the existing protoco)

X11's extension mechanisms can - and has - been used to enable backwards incompatible protocol changes. E.g. BigRequest changes the length and format of every single protocol request.

Very few client libraries are only capable of speaking "the existing" protocol if you take that to mean the original unextended X11 protocol.

Adding an X11 extension that when enabled cleans up a lot of cruft would not have been a problem.

> where ideally the window manager would make choices about things before the process continues

Nothing stops you from introducing an extension that when enabled requires the client to wait for a new notification type before continuing, or re-defines behaviour. That said, using my own custom window manager, I don't know what you mean here. My WM does decide the initial window placement and size, and it's the clients damn problem if it can't handle a resize before I allow the window to be mapped.

The X protocol is crusty in places, but it is very flexible. People haven't fixed these things because they chose to invent compatibility hindrances that weren't real when their response was to invent an entirely new protocol with no compatibility at all.

[vidarh]

Too late to edit, but one minor self-correction: BigRequest changes the allowed length and format of every single protocol request. For small requests they are the same, but if length is set to 0, an extra 4 octets are inserted to allow encoding a larger packet length.

[ahartmetz]

Inverse second system effect: Doing everything problematic about the first system in the exact opposite way.

[FooBarWidget]

I think it's quite ironic that everybody nowadays complains about Wayland and the "good old days" of X. Back in the day, everybody and their dog complained about X being "archaic", "slow", "takes 20 operations to draw a line", etc. XComposite and XRender were just hacks. Everybody hated on X and anything else was considered better.

On a tangent, also very ironic that X (the successor of Twitter) has the exact same logo as X (the window system). It's like Elon Musk just Googled for the first X logo that came along and appropriated that and nobody seems to notice or care.

[ForHackernews]

They both appropriated the "blackboard bold" X https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/apps/a44641211/t...