[TUHS] Re: Early GUI on Linux

[Steffen Nurpmeso <steffen@sdaoden.eu>]

Warner Losh wrote in
 <CANCZdfrmiq0qxKxrEWVAwTa5RjNG_Tq-9JATAA7qR2=cva_4+w@mail.gmail.com>:
 |On Sat, Feb 25, 2023, 2:31 PM Paul Ruizendaal <pnr@planet.nl> wrote:
 ...
 |> - were there any window systems popular on early Linux other than X?
 ...
 |No. Mgr was available but harder to setup than X. This is from like 0.98pl5
 |or so days, so very early on...
 |
 |- was there any discussion of alternatives to X?
 |
 |Discussions yes. But not much more than talk.
 |
 |There were vgalib apps that ran graphics on the console, but I never used
 |them.

There was (and is) directfb.  It seems it never really started
over, but i actually track its successor [1] due to interest.  It
was one of my plans, over twenty years ago (there was an article
in either German Linux Magazine or German computer magazine c't on
it), to have nothing but myself, it and the kernel.  (And PDF
viewer and image viewer that existed and i think exist.  Graphical
browser was not soo much necessary by then.)  (That sprung into
existence when after a Halloween Linux Red Hat clone update
i suddenly found myself in a graphical framebuffer.  My "desktop"
is a full-window screen->tmux session with multiple windows, and
sometimes firefox beside it; rxvt-unicode earlier, but basically
the same.)

  [1] https://github.com/directfb2/DirectFB2.git

--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer,                The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter           he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter  wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)