ANandsoitis·Feb 2, 2024Submission
1 points · Open discussionghaerr
microwindows
C2021–2024
ghaerr / microwindows
microwindows
The Nano-X Window System
5Distinct people
6Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
866GitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
The Nano-X Window System
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 1:49:46 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year6 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2021-03-17 12:59:22 UTC to 2024-02-02 14:48:19 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 1 | 2 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
What Hacker News says
6 sourcesInteresting link!
If we look at this directory:
https://github.com/ghaerr/microwindows/tree/master/src/drive...
Most notably the source files that start with 'scr_', and of those most notably: scr_sdl2.c, scr_win32.c, scr_x11.c, scr_djvesa.c, scr_fb.c -- we see that this windowing system can apparently run on top of an existing windowing system, whether that system is SDL2, Win32, X11, VESA, Linux's framebuffer -- or several others.
Which makes it interesting and worthy of study...
Note that I am sure there are probably a whole lot of other windowing systems out there that also support these, let's call them "back-end" (for lack of better terminology) pre-existing windowing systems.
In other words, a windowing system -- on top of another windowing system...
Sort of like running X on top of Win32, or Win32 on top X...
But the posibilities
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of higher level and lower level windowing system are really unlimited -- mix and match, basically...
In conclusion -- excellent link!
As someone who "tried to invent the tablet" (we were not first, and we'd all seen Star Trek and the like; nobody at the time thought we were inventing anything new), it was very much the hardware.
It's possible software would have stopped wide adoption, but software was a solvable problem - porting Linux apps to our platform was comparatively easy, for example, and we could run Flash, so we could show fairly fancy demos.
But it never got far enough for most of these platforms for software to become a problem, other than for Palm who had apps, but stumbled in all kinds of other ways, not least in never shaking the image as a serious PDA, which instantly made it a niche product.
The devices were hampered by all kinds of hardware limitations. Screens were awful. The touch panels were awful. Even really expensive devices felt like toys becaus
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e of it. CPUs were awfully slow. Lack of wifi was a big issue with the first generation tablets and solved in all kinds of awful ways. Flash was ludicrously expensive - we agonised over 16MB vs. 32MB storage. We used NanoX [1] rather than X11 for our windowing system because the engineering cost of adapting NanoX and writing our own widgets for it was worth it to save a few MB of flash and a few MB of RAM.
And so getting distributors and retailers and the like to commit crashed and burned before you got to the point of what software you could launch it with.
[1] https://github.com/ghaerr/microwindows
Microwindows or the Nano-X Window System
37 points · Open discussionI worked on this [1] Linux tablet 20 years ago, and we had working versions, but it doesn't really count as they weren't put into mass production. I don't know how many were built in the end (I left to co-found a webmail service). Sometimes it's depressing how long it takes for something to actually come to fruition. The screenshots in [1] are our custom UI based on NanoX [2], and an Opera port for the web browser screenshot (it worked). I wanted a production version for years after I left...
[1] https://linuxdevices.org/freepad-norways-alternative-to-swed...
[2] https://github.com/ghaerr/microwindows
In JingPad A1 – Consumer-level Linux Tablet