GLXGears was my command of choice to verify if my graphics drivers were installed. Either they would run smoothly (when installed) or choppy and broken. Can’t use that anymore because the APUs and generic drivers got so good that everything runs smoothly. Good times.
It says last updated in 2022 but I swear this list reads like it's from 1997.<p>I appreciate it nonetheless.<p>I browsed around the site and I found this collection which I like a bit more<p><a href="https://cyber.dabamos.de/88x31/index3.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://cyber.dabamos.de/88x31/index3.html</a><p>It appears to be in roughly alphabetical order by topic, which is quite an accomplishment
Some not so obscure ones too. Seems like a general app listing of the X11 days.<p>Who doesn't remember XEyes, XBiff, XClock, XEdit, Xev, XKill (!), Xv (!!), XMosaic (!!!) ... many others on there.<p>Granted I did not know FSV2 and some others.<p>Nice collection, glad to not have to run any of them. Not saying they weren't useful for their time!
> XLennart<p>> XLennart is a modification of the arcade game XBill. An evil and unpopular computer hacker named “Lennart” tries to install his malicious init system on various BSD and Linux systems. Like in XBill, the player has to hit him and restore infected machines.<p>Hah! Poor Poettering tho. He really gets a lot of hate '=(
`xneko` brings back memories. My freshman year at university we were on X terminals where they came in a little pack of several stations. Each of them had X authority on the others within the same pack.<p>People quickly learned they could open a billion `xneko`s on another person's screen to completely lock them up.
Mad props for Hans Ecke’s XPlanet Resources page:<p><a href="http://hans.ecke.ws/xplanet/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://hans.ecke.ws/xplanet/</a><p>For a year or three, I ran this setup on my Linux background desktop. Our team was returning to the United States after working with our colleagues at the European Southern Observatory <a href="https://www.eso.org/public/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.eso.org/public/</a> and a flight attendant noticed the image of Earth, Moon, sun on my computer.<p>She asked if I were interested or involved in space exploration, and I told her that we looked at stars from the ground, but could get pretty far. She bent closer to me and murmured, “The pilots have just heard from the radio, there has been an explosion of the Space Shuttle.”<p>2003, somewhere over Greenland.<p>Anyway: XPlanet rocks.<p><a href="https://xplanet.sourceforge.net/maps.php" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://xplanet.sourceforge.net/maps.php</a>
This list is how I discovered xsunclock. which quickly became my poster child for everything I love about computing. It is very clearly a labor of love. It follows no ui guideline known to man(I like to refer to these sort of programs as following the R'llyeh school of design). It is just barely on this side of usable but offers an unmatched set of timekeeping options. It is pretty great.
Definitely a blast from the past. I haven't really been using a linux desktop the last 10 years.<p>Especially in college in the late 90s I remember using/trying a lot of these application.<p>Some of these like XBiff were standard things almost all of us setup as we configured out desktops. Mostly we were using FVWM but you had to basically build your own environment.<p>When I was in school the campus computers were basically a mix of Sun, IBM RS6000, and SGI, and the IT department had everything configured extremely nicely where you could log onto any machine and your desktop appeared and all your files were there and everything just kind of transparently worked as if you were always using the same computer, even though the machines were all different versions of Unix. For non programming work it just worked. For my CS stuff you would just have to recompile on the current arch you were on.<p>Gnome and KDE didn't appear till about my 3rd year.. I don't think any of them were really available on the school machines unless you built it yourself and did the work to configure your environment to use them. So we used a lot of these old school X11 programs.<p>I never had any money for a TV, game console, etc.. at that point and actually played some of these amateurish X11 games for fun. None of them were good enough to hold your attention very long but there were a lot of them to try. Some were really good for the time, like Netrek. The graphics were not amazing but the multiplayer gameplay was well ahead of it's time.
Speaking of FSV2, I remember randomly discovering fsn on the SGI Irix as an intern and realizing it was the cool 3D file browser from Jurassic park. I thought it was a special effect prop for the movie and then to my surprise it was an actual working application.
For me xfishtank would top the list. I still use it sometimes.<p>Xblast was also cool. It would transform the mouse pointer into a crosshairs and if you clicked it would shoot a hole in the window that you could actually see through. It was really fun to annoy first year students at uni before xauth was implemented.<p>Xeyes too of course with some --geometry to make it full screen. Did that with a huge video wall once (nearly got me fired but I was just an intern. So worth it)
Not that obscure but I recently started doing "xeyes debugging".<p>We have so many debug logs that trying to find your log of a background task, takes a non zero amount of time.<p>So just inserting system("xeyes"); is actually way easier, to get instant feedback, and you can just use system("xmessage msg"), if you need a message.
When I see screenshots with window decorators like that I always wonder if there's someone actually using an ancient computer or if the screenshots are just really really old. I tend to guess it's the latter.
How can a page like this miss out on Xaos, one of the coolest fractal programs for X11 :-D<p><a href="https://xaos-project.github.io/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://xaos-project.github.io/</a>
I sometimes wonder what a modern desktop would look like if every app had the Motif look. I wonder if the consistency of this experience would surpass the subjective ugliness of it.
TIL about XLennart, which it's somehow funny but I still think is undeserved<p>On the other hand I knew XBill for decades and that was totally deserved.
This is why easy coding is important. It opens the floodgates of creative production.<p>In the fine arts we call it a plastic medium. A medium that's easy to edit. It's why we sculpt out of clay instead of beercans.
Surprised not to see Xpdf on this list. I actually used it until fairly recently as I just wanted a simple, no-frills PDF viewer (I now use Zathura instead).
I remember spending some non-insignificant amount of time playing 3dpong, because that was the first time I got exposed to a wireframe game. I thought the formalism was delightful, it felt very cyberpunk. My first 3d game was probably Stunts, a racing game that used flat shading (there was also Abrahams tank, but I never got into it as much as some of the older people in my circle), and then there was a lot of games that used a kind of hybrid sprite, flat shading, texturing mapping approach, from wolfenstein to Daggerfall. I got 3dpong from a Slackware cd, which was also my first linux install, back when linux was cool :> I was democoding, so probably implementing phong reflection on a sierpinski cube which was a style at the time, and here was a game that established an entire 3d experience space with just a handful of lines.<p>(some might ask "how the hell did you not know about Elite or Tempest??" before pervasive internet discovery was a non-linear process, I think I learned about these games in the early 2000s, from the internet)
Strangely enough, I have run and used every single item on that list, with the exception of xwpe.<p>How did I not know that this existed?<p>TIL that:<p><pre><code> sudo apt-get install xwpe
</code></pre>
actually works!<p>Will have to play with this later.
There was one called xlsfonts which would list all the available fonts.<p><a href="https://www.x.org/archive/X11R7.5/doc/man/man1/xlsfonts.1.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.x.org/archive/X11R7.5/doc/man/man1/xlsfonts.1.ht...</a>
OpenBSD has a ton of obscure x11 games and apps in their ports collection if you want to play with a different subset than FreeBSD's ports includes. I spent a whole evening enjoying the UNIX archaeology contained in their repo.
NEdit was perfect when I was transitioning from Windows to Linux in the late 90s early 2000s. It was even in Slackware.<p>Also, I miss the large clear, 16/256 color icons from the win 3.0 and 1990's unix era.
Actually I hear about GLX Gears pretty often, usually as a test step in setting up graphics drivers. But personally I am super fond of TiEmu because that's what I used all through college. As I got more and more into my CS coursework I found that I really didn't need my TI-84 _most_ of the time but I still needed it _some_ of the time. TiEmu helped shave about 1lb off my heavy backpack and let my brother use my Ti-84 for HS/College.
Possibly not old enough to be included in that list, but my oldest piece of desktop software I always run on my main machine is GKrellm with BubbleFishyMon as system load monitor.<p><a href="http://gkrellm.srcbox.net/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://gkrellm.srcbox.net/</a>
Ah, I love these posts. There's always some gems popping up in the comments.<p>My top 3 are Xaos (previously mentioned above), XEphem (<a href="https://github.com/XEphem/XEphem);">https://github.com/XEphem/XEphem);</a> an absolutely lovely ephemeris, and predict (<a href="https://www.qsl.net/kd2bd/predict.html);" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.qsl.net/kd2bd/predict.html);</a> the satellite tracker--which has a bunch GUI versions--for example
gpredict, which I guess is more relevant for this story.
Seeing GLXGears is giving me a panic attack thinking about setting up linux on a shitty old laptop years ago and trying to get world of warcraft to boot up.
Wow. I know most of those (and used a CDE desktop environment, so the window decorations really take me back).<p>Kind of weird to realise so much time has past.
Not necessarily obscure, still rather useful. xterm & xv remain my daily tools, and xosview is still maintained here:<p><a href="https://www.pogo.org.uk/~mark/xosview/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.pogo.org.uk/~mark/xosview/</a>
Back in 1994 I remember playing an X11 clone of missile command that alternated the traditional defense wave with an offensive wave when you attacked the attacker's cities.<p>I've long since forgotten what it was called.<p>I was kind of hoping it might have been on this list, but sadly it wasn't.
Anyone here use <a href="https://github.com/google/xsecurelock">https://github.com/google/xsecurelock</a>?<p>I found it while going through reddit.com/r/unixporn and looking at other peoples tiling window manager setups.
I was working on a small bash notification client, and I wanted some simple universal apps to use in the examples for actions (run a command when a notification, or a button on it, is clicked) and was shocked to discover that xterm is no longer a safe assumption.
> <i>A simple RTF editor for X11. [...] Prone to crashing.</i><p>That makes is pretty useless as a word processor, unless it has a really robust auto-save system.<p>Anyway, the Plan calendar thing looked neat, but I don't think it's packaged in Arch.
I also remember a lot of these from the 90s. But I didn't see xphoon, that was a pretty cool one to display a (fairly) detailed picture of the current phase of the moon in your root window/desktop.
When I first learned about xmosaic in 1993 my first reaction was "nice hypertext tool though not sure why anyone would want to load documents over the Internet"....
Oh gee, I still have my TI-92 Plus in some drawer!<p>So many memories, what do I do what that? So obsolete now but can't just throw away that piece of working hardware.
xev is extremely useful; a natural counterpart to xbindkeys and very useful when you're trying to reconfigure your keyboard mappings. xsnow is maybe my favorite from this list, I install it every winter for the holidays.
In what way are these "X11 apps"? Aren't those just "GUI apps that support X11"? Which is not a particularly special trait, because it applies to every Linux compatible Desktop app?