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Yes, this is sad. I remember integrating Cairo into a project I worked on a number of years ago.

At the time, pulling in an open source project was a big ordeal. You had to figure out how to build it, getting all the configuration options correct, pulling in all the dependencies, configuring them, etc. I set aside a whole afternoon to get it working.

Anyway, I pulled it down, built it, and was writing simple drawing programs in about 15 minutes. It was amazing.

> (Tip to any young people who read this far: take lots of full desktop screenshots as you work. You’ll enjoy looking at them in 20 years time.)

I uploaded a bunch of screenshots to r/unixporn just a few years ago and even those already carry some nostalgia :D

> Few projects ascend to the astral planes of immortality.

If even Xorg doesn't qualify, which are these few immortal projects?

Emacs, for instance. Now ~35 years and still going strong.

Shells, editors, programming languages, the most common core libraries.

In the 90s, SSLeay shipped with a cute little shell script that makes a self signed CA for you. It’s still shipped as part of OpenSSL, today.