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Interview With Cosmoe's Bill Hayden
Eugenia writes: "Over a month ago it was reported that a developer had forked the Athe(na) operating system and ported its GUI on top of Linux, without the use of XFree86. This combined OS, called Cosmoe, would support Linux, AtheOS, BeOS and even Macintosh's Carbon APIs (without the use of GNUStep - his port of Carbon is wrapped around the Be API). OSNews today features an interview with the architect of the combined OS, Bill Hayden, where a lot of things are explained about his plans for Cosmoe."
Duh! I made a mistake when I submitted the story. GNUSTEP wraps around the Cocoa API, not the Carbon one. Sorry for the confusion.
:P
I was deep into porting a game to MacOSX at the time of the submission and everything was like a big knot in my head...
When AtheOS was "outed," it was really far along. Especially when you consider it was all written by one person.
... what? Run BeOS apps on Linux? Run AtheOS apps on Linux? Run BeOS apps on AtheOS? Run MacOS X apps on Linux?
Similarly, OpenBeOS was impressive because it garnered a big crowd working on it rather quickly, and working code soon followed, to the chagrin of many. (There's already much work done on the kernel, via NewOS, BFS, the network stack, the GUI implementation, various preference and utility apps, and much more.)
AtheOS was a new OS built for fun (seemingly) by a guy that was impressed (but maybe not directly influenced) by BeOS. More power to him.
OpenBeOS is being built by fans of BeOS who want to see an open source version that can live on in binary compatability (for the first releases), and eventually progress beyond what Be, Inc. did (RIP).
Where does Cosmoes fit in to things? This guy forked AtheOS against the original author's wishes (welcome to the world of Open Source, Kurt), in order to
Honestly I'm trying to figure out what the goals are; I don't mean to be negative. If the guy is just doing this like Kurt, to have fun, then great... Otherwise, why promote this thing so much when virtually nothing is done? He admits the most of the hard stuff is waiting to be done. Instead of doing an interview, announcing the code fork, etc, why not start coding and announce it when you've got something to show for it?
"And like that
As many of the responses to your post illustrate, folks just don't get the idea that XFree86 is a highly modular system. They don't get the idea that the fastest path to a high-quality GUI desktop for their favorite OS is to start with the existing XFree86 server, extend it as necessary, and layer atop it with a decent client side. Yes, Xlib's time has come and gone, and Xt has always been pretty hopeless. So use something like XCB as a base, and design the GUI API of your dreams atop it.
Also note that many of the XFree86 features you mention are either brand-new or not-quite-there-yet. For example, decent font support has only been solid for about a year now, and is still evolving a bit. Server-side affine transformations have been specified but not yet implemented. The spec for proper anti-aliasing of polygons was just finalized last week: it was implemented this week. (That's how fast XFree86 is moving these days with Keith Packard working on it full time. Keith has repeatedly demonstrated that it's pretty easy to add the "missing" functionality you want as an X extension.) As folks get used to the Render and FontConfig APIs, I expect to see correspondingly less interest in building window systems from scratch.
IMHO, the "visceral dislike" comes from several factors, including outdated ideas about what X is and how well it works (the performance claims I see around here sometimes crack me up), insufficient appreciation of the difficulty of what X does, and NIH syndrome.
The good news is that all the carping isn't slowing down the clueful folks any. KDE 3 is nice enough that for the first time since the mid-80s I'm not running twm as my window manager any more. I expect things to only get better from here.