A programmer with an interest in transit, making music, and building things of all types.

I have dysgraphia which makes writing difficult for me. I hope you can figure out what I mean despite my issues.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • A terminal is something like a DEC model Vt220, or IBM 3270. These are physical machines with a keyboard, and a display. Most often the display was a CRT, but some were just a printer, I supposed some must have had a LCD but I’ve never seen one. A few did have a mouse, but that was rare. They might look like a computer, but they do not have a CPU (or they do but the CPU is very under powered). The point is you can have 100 cheap (cheap as in 4x the cost of a modern PC, without factoring in inflation) terminals connecting to an expensive powerful computer (expensive as in millions of not inflation adjusted dollars, powerful as in a modern smart phone is faster by nearly any measure). Every terminal had some special commands that programs could use to do something more fancy than plain text, but different ones had different abilities.

    These days a powerful PC is cheaper than any terminal could be and vastly more powerful than those old computers, so it doesn’t make sense to have one except as a collectors item. However terminals themselves did leave a useful of program design. Most command line programs know how to control a terminal to do some pretty printing. Thus we often use terminal emulators which let our computer pretend to be one of those old terminals. The DEC vt100 for whatever reason ends up being the most commonly emulated terminal when someone says terminal emulator - there really was a model vt100 terminal at one time.

    Note that a web browser counts as a terminal emulator by the above definition. Nobody thinks of them that way, but they fit.





  • Because the people who developed X11 (that is Xorg) haven declared that. Maybe they should have named it X12, but they didn’t for whatever reason. However the people doing the work have already given up on working on X11 they gave up on X11 beyond the bare minimum almost 10 years ago because some real issues with X11 as a protocol are not fixable.

    There were other attempts to a successor to X11, but they never got the support of people doing the work on X11 (in part because they didn’t understand the problem with X11 and so kept many bad things while ‘fixing’ things that were not broken)

    Which is to say: you have two choices: get involved with continuing X11 development, or jump to Wayland. Throw a couple million $$$ per year at X11 (either pay developers, or convince a dozen developers to maintain X11) and I’ll retract my statement, until then X11 is dead. If you cannot do that then Wayland is your only option.