Xfree86 4.2.0 Out

According to david_eliasson, Xfree86 v4.2.0 is out, but it'll probably be awhile before all the mirror sites have sycned up with the release, so you may want to just enjoy reading that changelog for a couple days before you bother getting the whole archive.

Comments

Moving away from X

[demaria]

Here's a question that I want to address carefully, because it does sound a bit like flamebait.

Should the Unix/Linux world move away from X? Redesign a graphical layer from the ground up, supporting antialiasing, transparency, enhanced programming environment, and a new, well defined and examined user interface? This would be going the Mac OS X route. In this model, I am not advocating abandoning X completely, but instead for backwards compatability run a rootless X server.

Re:Moving away from X

[pthisis]

X extensions shouldn't be thought of as just being tacked on, they're a good and efficient way of doing things. The whole point was that the rendering engine would be replaced via an extension, this was anticipated and designed for.

In fact, when X was originally developed Jim Gettys et al considered putting _all_ graphics rendering in an extension (leaving just the core windowing w/o rendering in the core). They fully expected the original rendering model to be replaced fairly soon, but that's taken a long time. XRender hopes to do that and probably will largely supplant the old rendering primitives for new apps in a few years. Maybe sooner for gtk/Qt/other whizzbang bleeding-edge stuff.

We toyed with leaving graphics entirely to an extension, but the argument that a window system without any graphics would be useless won out pretty fast :-).

We never thought the existing rendering would last as long as it did: we expected significant extensions would have occurred long since.

--Jim Gettys, 2001

We can't get rid of the core X11 primitives because they are a part of the X11 specification and all apps use it and it isn't going to go away any time soon. Once render is complete and stabilized we can just encourge people to not use the core primitives. Eventually we can care less about making them fast and concentrate on making them unobtrusive.

--Keith Packard, 2001

From the thread
Proposal for server-side Anti-Aliased fonts

Sumner

Are you kidding me?

[NitsujTPU]

1) Irix is not a microsoft product. Score 1 for SGI.
2) The truely high-end stuff tends to be done on unix type workstations. Perhaps this graphics card garbage is true in the home market, but not on the professional one.
3) If you're willing to pay for X (you're willing to pay for windows aren't you?) You can always buy implementations that support the latest hardware.
4) There are X-Servers/Clients with extremely advanced graphics features. Again, you generally have to fork up some cash, but you're willing to pay for windows, aren't you?

Re:MS Windows vs. X, same hardware

[Fnkmaster]

Very interesting post - I agree that Gtk and Qt are probably culprits for not properly playing nice with X Windows and its rules. I think part of the problem is the fact that there never seems to have been any coherent work done on this. The windowing system oriented people who work on X say "the toolkit authors fault". The toolkit authors would say "it's your drivers or the limitations of X Windows".

While I do appreciate the flexibility of X Windows, I honestly DON'T think the windowing system and toolkits should be these totally orthogonal projects, and the toolkits just "draw as they see fit" on a canvas that they expect the windowing system to render dumbly. This is the X model, inherited from the dumb terminal days. I have had this argument out several other times here on /., I am not a newbie or a moron, and I AM a professional software executive with over 8 years of programming experience (though admittedly not writing windowing systems or toolkits).

I certainly believe firmly in the benefits of choice and competition, and agree with most /.ers on that. I just don't think that the toolkit is the right place for it. Linux is competition for Windows. Berlin (could be) competition for X (someday). But Gnome/Gtk and KDE/Qt as competing toolkits, desktop environments, etc. that are totally decoupled from the Windowing system? It should honestly be enough to have competing apps built on the same toolkit. A somewhat similar aesthetic for the desktop.

I appreciate what X Windows does for us, I just don't think it's the right solution for a desktop operating environment. Because of all the X apps out there, I think anything that comes out needs X compatibility as a backwards compatible route, but I don't feel that we should look to X Windows for the future. Just my opinion.

Re:MS Windows vs. X, same hardware

[pthisis]

I think part of the problem is the fact that there never seems to have been any coherent work done on this. The windowing system oriented people who work on X say "the toolkit authors fault". The toolkit authors would say "it's your drivers or the limitations of X Windows"

Nope, read the thread I quoted and you'll see that gtk developer Owen Taylor agrees and that gtk 2.0 includes some of the optimization mentioned. The toolkit and X11 authors do work together on these things, and the toolkit authors have had a huge amount of input into the design of the XRender extension and the DRI infrastructure.

While I do appreciate the flexibility of X Windows, I honestly DON'T think the windowing system and toolkits should be these totally orthogonal projects, and the toolkits just "draw as they see fit" on a canvas that they expect the windowing system to render dumbly. This is the X model, inherited from the dumb terminal days.

Actually that's not the X model (BTW, X wouldn't run on a dumb terminal--even vi wouldn't run on a true dumb terminal (ie glass tty)). The X model is to provide high-level graphics primitives to the application, which then submits them to the server which can turn them into whichever low-level calls are most efficient on the hardware in question. Not only that, but the library used to submit those request can (and does) batch them together so that the application writer can have a simpler model and still get efficient code--for instance, multiple XDrawLine calls are batched by XLib into a single XDrawLines call that's sent on to the server, saving on round-trips and in some cases saving on bus traffic to the video card by eliminating redundant traffic. Or servicing those high-level requests in whatever manner is most efficient for the hardware in use.

Highly efficient graphics can be done this way. Witness SGI, who were for years the undisputed leaders in the graphics field. They used X11.

But think of X as being more of a device-driver with a unified API, the GUI is to be built on top of that. It's a highly reasonable and well considered model that is ideal for building the high-performance GUIS of the future on. Far better than e.g. a framebuffer, which is already obsolete (doesn't handle many 2D features like overlays & alpha blending, doesn't do 3D acceleration, doesn't allow for hardware security a la SGI, doesn't handle hardware video decoding, etc) and is low-level enough that you can't have the driver do intelligent optimizations without rewriting the apps. And designed with the foresight to be extremely flexible.

Sumner