# Unix GUI that did not use X-Windows



## Phishfry (May 18, 2018)

I am looking for the port of Tandy Deskmate. Where can I find it....

Just kidding, I am interested in any UNIX desktops that were/are not based on X-Windows.
It seems all of UNIX is/was using X-Windows.

Were there 'any out of the box' Unix desktops like Microsoft Bob?
Currently I see Hiaku which is not using X-Windows.

What lays between a ncurses desktop and xorg? Are there any OpenGL or SDL desktops?


----------



## Phishfry (May 21, 2018)

So where does NeXTSTEP stand? I see no mention of XWindows yet the screenshot looks like motif.


----------



## zirias@ (May 21, 2018)

Phishfry said:


> So where does NeXTSTEP stand?



It used Display PostScript ... an idea that feels quite weird to me. I'd say nowadays, something like Wayland will probably finally render X-Windows obsolete.


----------



## Phishfry (May 21, 2018)

Cool so something completely different.
Did it still use the Xserver-Xclient arrangement?


----------



## zirias@ (May 21, 2018)

I've never seen it myself, so I can only speculate. As OS-X GUI partially refers back to this idea, I'm pretty sure it didn't involve an Xserver -- but Wikipedia showing it in the X context is a bit strange -- (OTOH, Wayland is shown in this context as well).


----------



## Phishfry (May 21, 2018)

I dunno about Wayland/Weston. I can only hope it's better.
It is really interesting looking at old desktops and remembering how we used to get by with so little.
You can tell by the desktop that NextStep was ahead of their time. I only remember their cube box.


----------



## Phishfry (May 21, 2018)

So XFree86 was MIT licensed and with the Xorg switchover it became GNU licensed? Maybe it is dual licensed?
I thought Xorg is in OpenBSD base?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XFree86


----------



## Phishfry (May 21, 2018)

Nevermind I see they went different route:
OpenBSD brought all of X11 and put it in a tree. It organizes everything - into one tree. It is called Xenocara.


----------



## Deleted member 30996 (May 22, 2018)

Phishfry said:


> I am looking for the port of Tandy Deskmate. Where can I find it....



*sigh* I remember looking at a TRS-80 when I was 19 or 20 and thinking I'd like to have one, but didn't know what I'd do with it... It took me another 15-16 years to find out.


----------



## obsigna (May 22, 2018)

Zirias said:


> I've never seen it myself, so I can only speculate. As OS-X GUI partially refers back to this idea, I'm pretty sure it didn't involve an Xserver -- but Wikipedia showing it in the X context is a bit strange -- (OTOH, Wayland is shown in this context as well).


There is an informative article from 2003 by Mike Paquete (who was working on the Graphics system for the Mac) on Slashdot on "Why Apple didn't use X for the window system". IMHO, the reasons listed against X are still valid. Unfortunately there is no alternative for FreeBSD, see also this forums thread: FOSDEM 2013: The future of X.org on non-Linux systems



Zirias said:


> It used Display PostScript ... an idea that feels quite weird to me. I'd say nowadays, something like Wayland will probably finally render X-Windows obsolete.


Nowadays people take WYSIWYG for granted, however at that time, Display Postscript allowed a 100 % perfect Postscript/PDF workflow for producing publishing ready documents – I am talking about MicroMeter perfection which is a different world than MicroSoft perfection. There are users who care, and others who use Windows.


----------



## zirias@ (May 22, 2018)

obsigna said:


> Nowadays people take WYSIWYG for granted, however at that time, Display Postscript allowed a 100 % perfect Postscript/PDF workflow for producing publishing ready documents


Maybe I'm thinking too simple here, but .. is this a reason to draw _the entire screen_ from a PostScript dialect? This still sounds like overcomplicating things ... (just like X-Windows, only a different kind)

If you want perfect document rendering, just use such a renderer for some window contents?



obsigna said:


> a different world than MicroSoft perfection


Couldn't do without some bashing, eh?  But I don't really get how this is related here...


----------



## obsigna (May 22, 2018)

Zirias said:


> Maybe I'm thinking too simple here, but .. is this a reason to draw _the entire screen_ from a PostScript dialect? This still sounds like overcomplicating things ... (just like X-Windows, only a different kind)
> 
> If you want perfect document rendering, just use such a renderer for some window contents?



Up to OS X 10.6 we could have screen-, window- element-shots in PDF which scaled X-thousand-times in full sharpness. People who wrote manuals and HowTo's liked this feature. As Mike Paquete wrote in his article, the DPS was builtin to Quartz and was not a separate layer. Your suggestion would mean to have two or more rendering engines active at the same time.



Zirias said:


> Couldn't do without some bashing, eh?  But I don't really get how this is related here...



Windows 10 still doesn't get font rendering on the screen straight, e.g. respecting kerning of the characters.


----------



## Crivens (May 22, 2018)

If I remember correctly, enlightment can work on a simple frame buffer. But it also has plenty of cans of fishbait in stock for the one who tries.


----------



## zirias@ (May 22, 2018)

obsigna said:


> Up to OS X 10.6 we could have screen-, window- element-shots in PDF which scaled X-thousand-times in full sharpness. People who wrote manuals and HowTo's liked this feature.


Now, you bring a whole different use-case to the table, which I personally wouldn't consider useful enough to warrant for an unnecessary complicated way for rendering raster graphics.


obsigna said:


> Your suggestion would mean to have two or more rendering engines active at the same time.


Exactly. As I don't see it as the job of my graphics system to provide good on-screen rendering of documents, that's something the application should do, on top of something much simpler. If you do it the other way around, each and every thing/window on the screen has to go through this PostScript processing, doesn't sound very sane to me, but maybe that's just me ....


obsigna said:


> Windows 10 still doesn't get font rendering on the screen straight, e.g. respecting kerning of the characters.


So? It's doing it good enough to look ok for typical desktop use. If you have very special requirements (like, preparing professional print documents), you'll use specialized systems, which could very well also be applications doing the font rendering themselves.


----------



## obsigna (May 22, 2018)

Zirias said:


> Now, you bring a whole different use-case to the table, which I personally wouldn't consider useful enough to warrant for an unnecessary complicated way for rendering raster graphics.
> 
> Exactly. As I don't see it as the job of my graphics system to provide good on-screen rendering of documents, that's something the application should do, on top of something much simpler. If you do it the other way around, each and every thing/window on the screen has to go through this PostScript processing, doesn't sound very sane to me, but maybe that's just me ....



You take the ...Script part of Display PostScript too serious. Of course DPS is not working by interpreting PostScript text files generated by the UI. The UI generates DPS system calls for it's drawing requirements which invokes the rendering according to the PostScript specifications. These system calls do have a 1:1 counterpart in the PostScript language specification, and for this reason, generation of PostScript output is nothing else than redirecting the DPS primitives doing script-text assembly instead of graphics rendering - and this makes WYSIWYG perfect by 100 %. Calling a DPS command of Quartz is not less effective then calling a GDI+ command of Windows.



Zirias said:


> So? It's doing it good enough to look ok for typical desktop use. If you have very special requirements (like, preparing professional print documents), you'll use specialized systems, which could very well also be applications doing the font rendering themselves.



I said already: _„There are users who care, and others who use Windows.“_


----------



## zirias@ (May 22, 2018)

obsigna said:


> Calling a DPS command of Quartz is not less effective then calling a GDI+ command of Windows.


Not that I ever said GDI / GDI+ were "better". Or X-Windows. IMHO, they _all_ take an overly complicated approach. If you're designing a GUI system, your job is drawing pixels. You have to support layering of windows, so a simple global framebuffer won't do -- some applications will require "compositing" or "overlays", which would be difficult to do outside the system, so you have to support this as well. But everything else should IMHO be kept out of the GUI system.


----------



## kpedersen (May 22, 2018)

I guess you could use something like libvncclient to make an svgalib based VNC viewer. Then you can connect to a standard UNIX desktop running in a VNC session on the localhost. This would likely remove the need of an Xserver (or at least Xorg, I suppose Xvnc is still an Xserver).


----------



## Phishfry (May 23, 2018)

Trihexagonal said:


> I remember looking at a TRS-80


Same with me. I was around 20 in the Navy and got a temporary assignment to Tech Library aboard a Sub Tender.
Guess what we used for writing job packages. Good old Tandy. Not ruggedized, just regular gear with the printers and everything.

I do come from a computer family and my mom was office manager of an advertising firm that did work for British Aerospace.
So they were a classy client and I got to see the inside of post processing and using drum scanners and all the old ways.
All on a Wangs.
Some of you younger tykes probably never heard of Wang, but they had a great office suite circa 1979.
https://tedium.co/2017/02/14/wang-computers-history-demise/


----------



## Deleted member 30996 (May 23, 2018)

I got a job somewhere they had an AppleII and they gave me my own floppy disk like I knew what I was doing. I would rather have died on the spot than tell them I had never touched one.

When they upgraded I set it up and had to show them how it boot it up as you had to flip the floppy during the boot process on this one.


----------



## Phishfry (May 23, 2018)

Around 1990 I built my first machine. First modem shortly after and on the BBS, I kept finding /X11R5 directories.
What the heck, that's not p*rn! Now I finally know what those files were....

So nothing else existed? No GEM? I do see Desqview/X. I remember using Desqview/386 myself.

Was NextStep hackable onto commodity hardware? AKA DTK i386 or other limited options of the day.


----------



## aragats (May 23, 2018)

Principally Qt works directly with framebuffers, no x11 needed. I haven't tried it that way in FreeBSD, but it works very well in BeagleBone Black's Debian.
One can simply run a QWebView frameless widget (or several of them as different workspaces) and display everything rendered as webpages.


----------



## aragats (May 23, 2018)

Just tested Qt applications without x11 in FreeBSD. They can be launched directly from console by running:
`<a_qt_program> -platform bsdfb`, for example graphics/xpdf.
However, it's not clear how to use the keyboard and mouse since they continue being used by the console. In Linux I just disable _tty1_, and Qt takes care of the input.


----------



## Phishfry (May 23, 2018)

That was impressive. It did seem to run it at a large size.
Fully usable though. Kiosk only until I figure out the tty keyboard situation.


----------



## ralphbsz (May 25, 2018)

Rumor has it that the Kivy graphical UI toolkit can be run directly on a frame buffer (useful for raspberry pi and the like).

Not exactly Unix, but VMS (Digital Equipment) had a very good windowing system called VWS which was not X based (and ran much faster and worked better).


----------



## Crivens (May 25, 2018)

Would an attempt to have GEM on a frame buffer be a) possible and b) compliant with anti-necromancy laws?


----------

