DRI Comes to DirectFB

Pivot writes "To further heat up the discussion about the future of the graphical desktop on open source OSes: Now the DirectFB project works with DRI!. Screenshots are available. I guess what is lacking now is only XAA driver support, or native drivers for your favourite graphic card." We've mentioned DirectFB before.

Comments

Re:This will kill X in the long term.

[DrXym]

Some people need X11 and some don't. If local desktop performance and modern windowing behaviour can be achieved by completely bypassing XFree86 and its associated window manager and other processes then it should be done. After all, GTK & QT are abstractions over X11, so most apps really shouldn't care whether they're running on X11 anyway - they just link to the widget lib and let it decide how to do things. Now not every app is clean this way but a good many must be. As the app starts it would straightforward enough to dynamically link to the appropriate version of QT / GTK.

If the net result of a native fb GTK lib is that someone can run all their apps locally with better performance and less screwing around in different places configuring mice, resolution etc., and better support for their hardware and better support for games and multimedia, it means Linux is better suited for the desktop. It doesn't preclude using X11, or even running X11 in rootless mode (as it does on OS X) if people want to but it sounds like a great project to support.

And in some ways it helps Xfree86 since a single direct DRI driver can support a whole range of display hardware without XFree86 having to maintain them themselves.

Re:This will kill X in the long term.

[Christianfreak]

Face it: we don't need X any longer.

Then why is it that Microsoft keeps trying to copy it (failing miserable) ala Remote Desktop etc.? I for one would love a handheld device that gave me complete control over my home machine from anywhere it the world. You can't do that without a network GUI.

X is bloated and you compare it to "High Performance" Win XP? From what I have seen XP is useless on machines less than Athlon or PIII, and even then it starts slowing down if you have more than a few apps open, while my wife can run Mandrake 9 with full blown KDE, Mozilla and Open Office (even at the same time) on a K6-2 450 with only 192 megs of RAM. Its not the snappest machine in the world but its useable enough that I don't get annoyed at it. Its even faster when I run Blackbox.

KDE works automatically. And this would weed out Gnome this obsolete, second desktop system which just draws resources from the KDE pool and thus slows down advancement of open source systems.

If you want your apps and look and feel dictated to you then go back to Windows because that's what its for. No choice, you can feel good that everybody just uses what is handed to them. Linux is about choice. While I agree that Gnome and KDE could work better together (and should strive for that goal) I would be extremely upset if the people that work on Blackbox, or GAIM or Mozilla decided they were going to work on KDE apps instead. I like the GNOME apps I use, I like Mozilla and no one has the right to dictate those choices to me.

Open Source development isn't about what everyone wants, its about what the developer wants and she/he's nice enough to give that to other people in case its useful to them and they are free to do with it what they want.

Finally are you a KDE developer? because if not then you certainly don't have any right to complain about other people not working on the project you want them to work on.

Naive Question

[Godai]

I've noticed that a lot of the discussion on DirectFB is like all other X 'replacements' -- half the people talk about how great it will be because it will jettison the useless bloat in what they call outdated technology, while the other half rail about the loss of the network-transparency that they can't live without.

Well, this may seem naive, but maybe both sides are right? I mean, sure, network-transparency is wonderful but how many people are really using it? 1 in 20? Maybe? At the same time though, that one person is probably using it for somthing uber-useful, like eliminating 200 desktops in lieu of dummy terminals :)

So here's the stupid question: why didn't (or hasn't) someone build a graphical syb-system that's modular? Why can't you have a well-written, clean API (I've heard horror stories from people who've had to write code directly to X) that lets you plugin in modules like 'network-transparency' or 'anti-alisased fonts', or even everyone's favourite 'alpha-blended windows'?

I'm not saying this would be trivial, but surely it'd be worth the time and effort so that the 95% of users who don't want it can simply turn off network-transparency, and the 5% who do can plug it in without a lot of hassle.

As I said, surely this is naive. So flame away.