Merry Christmas, folks! I hope everything is well for you. It’s been a while, hasn’t it…

So, last year, you might remember that I wrote The Linux Graphics Stack. I’ve since wanted to do a followup for that, as more of a detailed history lesson on X11, but there’s a lot to explain. I’ve been working on it off and on since January, and I got burned out on it.

Last month, I was thinking about finally publishing it, so I opened it up, and read the words “last year, I wrote an article on The Linux Graphics Stack”. Obviously, I needed to publish it before it went out of date, and that was enough motivation to just get it done. I’ve been working hard on this for the last month, doing research, coding demos, and writing prose. It’s a lot of fun, and quite rewarding when you sit down and write a bunch of code to let the user drag windows around in your mock-Xlib equivalent, and it works first-try.

As of now, I only have a page or so of text about very basic window behavior, but my eventual plan is to go over the window tree, how WMs work, COMPOSITE, RENDER, focus management, input grabs, selections, everything.

Because I wrote interactive demos so that people can play around, I need to have a bit more control over the layout and content, so I chose not to do this as a series of blog posts, but instead as a series of articles that I’m hosting these over on GitHub. Don’t worry about missing anything, though. Whenever I publish a new article, I’ll write a blog post about it over here.

So, without further ado:

(For those of you on RSS readers that strip images, the link to the articles are this way)

If you have any questions, I’d prefer if you email me at jstpierre@mecheye.net. I’d really like a margin comment system like Medium or Gawker have, but I couldn’t find a free service like Disqus that integrates into my articles like that. If anybody knows of any, please shoot me an email and I’ll try to investigate it.

I plan on releasing at least one of these a month. I’m currently on track to finishing the next article for the third week of January, about the window tree and how WMs work. If you have any ideas for what you’d like me to write about for February’s article, again, please shoot me an email. I guess I should also take this time to announce that I’ve spent some time to create a work-oriented Twitter for the GNOME/Linux audience over at @JasperGNOME.

Let’s hope I write more blog posts in the coming year. Besides this, I plan on doing a lot more regular blogging about new GNOME features, and Wayland progress (oh yeah, I should talk about that at some point, shouldn’t I?). See you around!