Maybe a hint?

Posted Jan 16, 2026 7:54 UTC (Fri) by lunaryorn (subscriber, #111088)
In reply to: Maybe a hint? by LionsPhil
Parent article: Debian discusses removing GTK 2 for forky

I believe the story on Linux is a bit different. According to Wikipedia Linux only got proper USB support with kernel 2.4 in 2001, and X.org didn't support hotplugging until much later (Xorg 1.4 in 2007). So presumably, when Gtk 2.0 was released in 2002, USB input was the hot new thing on Linux, and hotplugging was not a thing for years to come.

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Maybe a hint?

Posted Jan 16, 2026 8:24 UTC (Fri) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (3 responses)

That's a little misleading - support for USB input devices had landed in fairly early 2.2 (my recollection is that Linus got irritated with the existing rudimentary USB support and replaced it with something he wrote, but this is my recollection from over 25 years ago - but I certainly had Linux running on USB-based Macs before 2.4 came out), and while hotplug wasn't directly supported by X, all mouse input was multiplexed into /dev/mice and all keyboard input went to the current terminal, so hotplug devices would just about work as long as X was configured appropriately.

Maybe a hint?

Posted Jan 16, 2026 17:53 UTC (Fri) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link] (2 responses)

I think the big thing that came with 2.4 was devfs, which made hot plug practical. In 2.2, /dev was static and had to be populated with every conceivable device when it was created, which wasn't really compatible with hotplug. With devfs, /dev became dynamic and could add new devices as they were connected. I certainly remember following 2.4 development very carefully because USB support was insufficient for ordinary desktop use. Fore example, I had to use my fancy new optical mouse through a USB-to-PS2 converter because USB support wasn't good enough.

Maybe a hint?

Posted Jan 19, 2026 10:27 UTC (Mon) by taladar (subscriber, #68407) [Link] (1 responses)

Devfs didn't last very long though before it was replaced by udev.

Maybe a hint?

Posted Jan 19, 2026 19:15 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

And eventually got replaced back by the new devfs :)

I actually used devfs way into 2010 on my own device (a RouterBoard) by porting the devfs. It was easier with a minimal userspace than udev.