How to configure X11 in a simple way

35 speckx 17 7/25/2025, 5:02:37 PM eugene-andrienko.com ↗

Comments (17)

anonymousiam · 2h ago
How much of this wonderful legacy configurability is supported by Wayback (https://www.phoronix.com/news/Wayback-0.1-Released), so that we can still do this stuff as Wayland replaces X11?
encom · 1h ago
I was there, Gandalf. I was there 3000 years ago, when we edited ~~x11~~ xorg config files by hand. I will gladly pay any price in bloat to never have to touch that nonsense again.
tonyarkles · 4m ago
And the perpetual underlying vague threat “if you get your modelines wrong you could destroy your monitor”. I suppose I started with XFree86 and switched to xorg whenever Gentoo did.
whalesalad · 5h ago
"in a simple way" proceeds to write a 300 page epic
exiguus · 4h ago
I also aspect a 1000 Word article and stopped reading after the TOC.
doublerabbit · 5h ago
I would call a 300 page epic simple.

300 pages on explaining things X. I wouldn't say that's bad. Could always be longer.

DonHopkins · 4h ago
At least I was able to keep it under 300 pages.

https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-x-windows-disaster-128d398...

xyzelement · 3h ago
Omg I literally stumbled upon the unix haters handbook off an old JWZ blog last night and was reading it till 2 in the morning. Thank you!
jcranmer · 3h ago
... somehow this is the first time I've realized that you contributed to the Unix Haters Handbook.

(And I've read it in its entirety at least twice!)

shmerl · 5h ago
Creating custom modelines is far from fun activity, bloat or no bloat.

The last time I had to look into that was to work around amdgpu bug that affected screen blinking in KDE Wayland session.

No comments yet

davydm · 5h ago
cool if you want to stay with 30-year-old desktops like fluxbox, but I'm not about to give up my KDE when I have plenty of ram to spare - the plasmoids for system monitoring alone are simple to set up and useful. Yes, I know there are standalone alternatives. Some things (imo) aren't worth optimising.

But to each their own - I'm sure someone will be all into "debloating" like the author.

gen2brain · 4h ago
I do not give up on my openbox. I use it with LxQt. Now there is a Labwc, similar to openbox. It uses its XML spec for config and is similar. But I am still on X until all issues are resolved. Can I use openbox on KDE now? It used to be possible, I can choose WM in LxQt. Back then every WM had a --replace option.
hulitu · 3h ago
> cool if you want to stay with 30-year-old desktops like fluxbox, but I'm not about to give up my KDE when I have plenty of ram to spare

KDE is slow. Fvwm is much faster.

Zardoz84 · 2h ago
What drug do you take ?
cbondurant · 5h ago
> For lightweight WMs there are lightweigh compositors exists.

I think that if you're going to take a holier-than-thou, software purity and perfection stance. You probably should make sure to proofread.

If you're gonna be judgemental about other peoples stances and refuse to admit to the existence of such a thing as a "reasonable tradeoff". Talk down to your audience with section headers titled "Compositor (no, not that thing from Wayland)". Maybe make sure what you've written is actually correct.

gen2brain · 4h ago
Does FreeBSD even support Wayland? I heard that there is some work.
eikenberry · 4h ago
Yes, they have official docs on how to set it up and use it.

https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/wayland/

Here's a 3 year old article going through their freebsd/wayland setup, so it seems like it's been supported for a while now.

https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/example-tutorial-pure-way...