Digital Research's GEM opens a new window on Linux
A radical new way to resolve the Gordian knot of X11 versus Wayland
Digital Research's GEM was one of the earliest graphical environments for PC compatibles, and an inspired hack has now resurrected it on Linux.
GEM for Linux is a port of the Atari ST's graphical desktop, created by prolific Slovenian developer Tomaž Štih.
Applications share a display server that can output directly through Linux's framebuffer or display the desktop in a window using Štih's SDL2-based Rasta framebuffer emulator.
In his Linkedin post, he says that it is "derived from OpenGEM and FreeGEM – now secure, optimized, stabilized, and source-compatible with Atari ST GEM."
It is derived from the Digital Research GEM source code released by Caldera in 1999, as the still-young Registerreported at the time.
GEM was among the first successful GUIs for MS-DOS PC compatibles. European readers may remember that it was the...
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