Berlin Packages Released For Debian

A reader writes: "Berlin ^? testing packages for Debian are available from the Debian website and should soon be moved to unstable, according to their the Berlin consortium website." The Berlin website (which looks great, IMHO) has an excellent architecture FAQ - the Berlin vs. X is very well done.Update: 09/01 12:41 PM GMT by H : A number of people have e-mailed me about some....wonkiness...if you view the Berlin vs X page using Internet Explorer. I'd advise using something else.

Comments

Berlin is a nice concept...

[jd]

But even if it works, and works well, it -still- has to overcome the nausiating, frustrating barrier of becoming accepted.

There's nothing out there for it! People are working on porting Gtk/Glib over, but can they port enough of Gnome to be useful, and still offer any advantage over using X in the first place?

Then, there's KDE. I know of no work on porting Qt or KDE over to Berlin, although that might actually be easier than Gtk, as I think Berlin is C++.

As for the other window managers & environments (CDE, Motif, OpenLook, QVWM, WindowMaker, 3dwm, etc), you're going to irritate a lot of people if these don't get ported. And I'm not just talking a simple Berlin->X11 layer, either. Nobody is going to put up with the speed loss.

Using OpenGL as a central element was interesting, and potentially very useful, but how well can you make use of it? If you've still got a 2D world, but a 3D algorithm generating it, you've just blown a whole lot of clock-cycles on nothing. It doesn't even have a coolness factor. Now, if you can rotate -into- the screen, -that- would be cool.

Last, but by no means least -- CORBA as the communications layer???? And I thought I could be stupid, at times. CORBA is a wash-out, due to too many corporations wanting to have proprietary extensions to make it usable. It would have been a great technology, but either you use the standard and have a gazillion lines of code to work round the limitations, OR you "enhance" the standard, making it impossible for other systems to talk with it.

Also, with CORBA, the overheads are VAST. X is bad enough, but CORBA is a nightmare. One of the important considerations in a system like this is who will use it. If you're talking home users, then you need a protocol with as close to zero overhead as possible, whilst still allowing as much flexibility & dynamicism as possible. CORBA doesn't cut it, either way.