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Questions tagged

This tag can be used for questions regarding the X Window System. For X Version 11 you can use the tag .

I guess people know they are running X, but they are less confident about the exact version. I think this tag description is misleading: it will always be "X Version 11".[*]

Anything that asks about different versions of X11 is probably a question about how came to be. Or a question about some successor to X. These uses don't seem important enough, to justify preserving the tag.

I asked about this on Chat. Jeff Schaller suggested a Meta question to gather consensus. Stephen Kitt noted that there is a site privilege that allows you to propose tag synonyms, but that this particular case is only allowed to be handled by a moderator. (The system detects as a "version-specific synonym" of ).

Please up-vote, down-vote, comment or answer accordingly :-).

[*] See "Why do we never hear of X10 or X12?", answered by the very same Stephen Kitt on Retrocomputing StackExchange. (I was told my original explanation of why was misleading, due to omission of essential details).

As per the link, X11 has been used since 1987. And there will probably not be an X12. In the unlikely event that X12 does appear, I expect we can easily sort out any resulting problem when it happens.

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    Thank you for posting on Meta! If/when you feel consensus has been reached, feel free to ping me for the moderator side of things.
    – Jeff Schaller Mod
    Commented Jun 25, 2019 at 13:01
  • Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat.
    – Jeff Schaller Mod
    Commented Jun 29, 2019 at 0:18
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    Not sure if this should be in discussion or here ( so I also posted there). I may be a little late to this discussion, but it's the "X Window System", and X11 is version 11 of the X Window System. And, of course, there are revisions of this version (X11R4, X11R5, X11R6...). Since XFree86 and X.org are (were) common implementations, I feel "X" should be the "real" tag, and "X11" an alias.
    – Stephen Harris
    Commented Jul 2, 2019 at 1:02
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    @StephenHarris [x] feels too short to me. E.g. you don't use it as a search term. "X Windows" is not formally accepted, so it's very common to use "X11" as the abbreviation. And in practice "X11" is appropriate 99.9% of the time, as detailed in the question. It's about as fossilised as "System V", "OS X" etc :-). I think the real reason is we should "pave the cowpaths", and [x11] has been used much more than [x]. I'll wait a bit longer to see if anyone agrees with you. I'm fine with here, your main point is in service to the question, although you could post it as an answer if you like
    – sourcejedi
    Commented Jul 2, 2019 at 7:43
  • @StephenHarris I'm not watching the specific discussion, but you could ask in the main chat if anyone would be interested in seconding your answer. Assuming my response hasn't convinced you to withdraw it :-).
    – sourcejedi
    Commented Jul 2, 2019 at 7:45
  • @JeffSchaller ping :-). Can we do this now? See also the comment on the answer post.
    – sourcejedi
    Commented Jul 4, 2019 at 15:21
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    @sourcejedi pong! :) the x tag has been aliased to the x11 tag.
    – Jeff Schaller Mod
    Commented Jul 5, 2019 at 18:15

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I think it's a bit of a moot point. I skimmed through the questions tagged , and the vast majority are Linux systems (so running X11), with the rare exceptions for X11 on macOS. There's no question here that's about X but using something other than X11, so the very existence of can't be justified.

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    I think that practically everyone using X is actually using X11. And I'd prefer X11 just because I think one-character tags are too short.
    – U. Windl
    Commented Jul 2, 2019 at 12:47

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