Seriously, if Apple copy Microsoft with a stunt like this, that'd be my cue to buy a Framework laptop and switch 100% to Linux for work.

(Which would be enormously painful as Scrivener isn't supported on Linux and it's been my work platform for the past 15 years.)

NB: only distributions with X.org ranther than Wayland and sysv init instead of systemd need apply.

@cstross @hko

It seems like a waste of CPU cycles to me (that is: I have no use case for it).

Huh, but you just said higher up that you need compatibility?

@khleedril @lonjil @hko

You are Wrong. X11 had *nothing* to do with the VGA standard.

X11 predates VGA graphics by three years and wasn't intended to run on PCs or deal with a BIOS at all—it was designed for workstations with a variety of graphics hardware. I remember it on Sun 3/60 kit circa 1989 ...

@khleedril @cstross @lonjil @hko X11 was a network protocol. It came from project Athena, launched in 1983 as a joint project between MIT, DEC and IBM to produce a "campus-wide computing environment".

X11 was designed to pop up GUI windows on a different physical machine than the program was running on, potentially with different OS on different hardware at each end. That was central to the design.

The xfree86 clowns broke a lot of that over the years "optimizing", but that's not X11's fault.

@khleedril @cstross @lonjil @hko Back at Rutgers I loved playing a game called "xbattle" which was implemented as 1 game process opening windows on a bunch of different machines (listed on the command line) so people could play against each other in a shared map.

If you could trivially do that in 1992 on a LAN, one computer with 4 monitors does not require significant new plumbing from X11.

Alas people wrapped the protocol with layers of shared libraries, each with "simplifying assumptions"...