Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 12th May 2008 20:35 UTC, submitted by diegocg
The X Windowing System is the graphical backbone of most UNIX-like operating systems (and OpenVMS) - despite lots and lots of criticism, the system has withstood the test of time. Despite its age, development on X has not slowed down - in fact, it only seems to have picked up. A few weeks ago, we had kernel-based mode setting, and today we have the X server running as user instead of root.
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Member since:
2005-07-06
indeed, xfree didnt add much new for ages.
but i think it was a modified license that was the final nail.
end result, a forked xfree from before the license change and xorg picked up speed after that.
and with things like beryl, multi-input x servers (perfect for multitouch setups), and others, its fast catching up to or overtaking the tricks that osx and windows can show of.
and all this while retaining the core ability to do things over a network connection and you have one impressive package.
one can even turn a single home computer into a multi user machine with these abilities. a kind of mini-mainframe if you will.
i suspect that as kernel mode setting becomes more of a norm in the drivers, the biggest reason for running X as root goes away. makes me a bit nostalgic as i always liked the idea of pre-95 windows, that ability to drop in and out of the gui as needed.