Re: Another XLibre and/or Wayland subthread

The Natural Philosopher <[email protected]> wrote:
> On 27/07/2026 22:47, Farley Flud wrote:
>> On 27 Jul 2026 21:22:16 GMT, rbowman wrote:
> 
>> Also, faithfully following the latest fashion trends, they eschew
>> the standard configuration files in favor of CSS markup.  Modifying
>> a simple font or color now requires a weeks-long odyssey of exploration.
>> 
> 
>> 
>> 
>> But it's not only GTK+ and Qt but also the plethora of other other
>> graphical toolkits, such as Xforms, Fltk, Motif, Tk, etc., that
>> will suffer with the enforced demise of X11.
>> 
> Thank fuck for that.
> 90s cruft, all off it.
> The fact that they all exist shows that X was never a solution by itself

X (the low level wire protocol and xlib the library) was never meant to 
be a "solution by itself".  It supplies the underlying basic building 
blocks (windows, intersections between windows, event detection, etc) 
but leaves the task of converting that into a GUI to the code utilizing 
it.  Those alphabet soup of toolkits listed all provide various 
different abstractions over the raw X building blocks so the programmer 
can request that, e.g a button be placed on screen vs.  having to 
assemble a button from the underlying primitives.  A similar analogy is 
that you can "build a cake" from flour, sugar, eggs, flavorings, etc.  
or you can buy a ready made cake.  Raw X gives you the flour, sugar, 
eggs, flavorings, and it's up to you to mix them in the right 
proportion and then bake them for the right time.  Qt or Fltk or Tk let 
you "buy a ready made cake" instead.