Talk:Windowing system

"A windowing system enables the computer user to work with several programs at the same time."

It is possible to run several programs at the same time without any windowing system, so what this sentence exactly means? 16@r 16:12, 12 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

How does it work?

How is the graphics hardware abstracted and virtualized by the windowing system? It seems to me like a mystery, especially in cases when one window content is drawn with OpenGL and others in standard 2D mode at the same time. And how is the access to the video memory managed? Some clients may access it directly, and the others? ... shared memory and the windowing system copies their content to video memory?
I'd be happy if somebody could elaborate or point me to some helpful documentation or literature on that matter.

The windowing system provides a single API for programs to use, which provides drawing primitives (drawing lines, rectangles, etc.), font support, color management, clipping and those sorts of things. For each graphics card, a specialized driver implements those functions in terms of what the graphics card supports and how it supports it. This way, programs don't have to worry about the details of the graphics cards. As for your other questions, in more traditional windowing systems, programs will ask the windowing system to perform some graphics operation and the windowing system alone has access to video memory. There's generally no copying from program to video memory directly. But now there are ways to allow clients to access portions of the graphics memory directly, using kernel-mode shims that act as gatekeepers to hardware resources. On X, it is kind of a mess, and I don't know much of the details of Windows or OS X. Any windowing system, however, that has buffered windows usually has the programs paint their contents onto bitmaps/pixmaps in RAM or video memory and then the windowing system composes those pixmaps together and puts the result in video memory, or uses OpenGL/DirectX to map the windows to 3d surfaces and goes from there. 69.134.122.21 (talk) 02:58, 7 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

What does it mean by telling that Android Linux kernel has no windowing system?

Does that mean Android linux kernel doesnt support application windows? Sen4u nav (talk) 04:36, 15 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

List of windowing systems

I've cleaned up the list a bit. I removed all the comments when the item is linked to an article anyway, some of these comments read like advertising blurbs. I left all the acronym expansions.—Graf Bobby (talk) 22:30, 23 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The list of windowing systems for Windows NT-family operating systems is wrong. Except for DWM, these are shell enhancements, not windowing systems in the same class as what X11 is to Unix. 107.205.135.122 (talk) 02:11, 3 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]

This page tells it wrong

Guys it's not windowing system, it is Operating system. Windows is a name of a company which produces OS. — Preceding unsigned comment added by V rocks the World (talk • contribs) 22:45, 11 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

It is a windowing system. Some operating systems (Like Unix or server versions of Linux) don't have a windowing system and only support command line. Windows (which is not a company) is an OS yes. It has a built-in windowing system. If Windows did not have a windowing system built-in all you would see is what you see when Windows shuts down abruptly and starts back up again. Hungryce (talk) 17:01, 3 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Display server merge

Proposal to merge Display server and Window system, given that much of the content overlaps. While technically separate most window systems are implemented as display/window servers, indeed the list of windowing systems on this article lists display servers. My personal recommendation would be to have a 'Display server' subsection in the Windowing system article. While the trend on Wikipedia is to have separate articles for technically separate terminology, I beleive Display server fails WP:Notability. Added Merge templates to both articles. 104.228.101.152 (talk) 16:27, 22 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Merger complete. Klbrain (talk) 14:40, 23 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]