What is Linux’s native GUI API?

Question

Both Windows (Win32 API) and OS X (Cocoa) have their own APIs to handle windows, events and other OS stuff. I have never really got a clear answer as to what Linux’s equival

Answer 1

Wayland

As you might hear, wayland is the featured choice of many distros these days, because of its protocol is simpler than the X.

Toolkits of wayland

Toolkits or gui libraries that wayland suggests are:

• QT 5
• GTK+
• LSD
• Clutter
• EFL

Answer 2

Wayland is also worth mentioning as it is mostly referred as a "future X11 killer".

Also note that Android and some other mobile operating systems don't include X11 although they have a Linux kernel, so in that sense X11 is not native to all Linux systems.

Being cross-platform has nothing to do with being native. Cocoa has also been ported to other platforms via GNUStep but it is still native to OS X / macOS.

Answer 3

The linux kernel graphical operations are in /include/linux/fb.h as struct fb_ops. Eventually this is what add-ons like X11, Wayland, or DRM appear to reference. As these operations are only for video cards, not vector or raster hardcopy or tty oriented terminal devices, their usefulness as a GUI is limited; it's just not entirely true you need those add-ons to get graphical output if you don't mind using some assembler to bypass syscall as necessary.

Answer 4

GUI is a high level abstraction of capability, so almost everything from XOrg server to OpenGL is ported cross-platform, including for Windows platform. But if by GUI API you mean *nix graphics API then you might be wandering around "Direct Rendering Infrastructure".

Answer 5

Linux is a kernel, not a full operating system. There are different windowing systems and gui's that run on top of Linux to provide windowing. Typically X11 is the windowing system used by Linux distros.

Answer 6

XWindows is probably the closest to what could be called 'native' :)