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Linux Desktop Without X11
A writes "Rocklyte systems have announced the first version of their Athene Operating System. It is a desktop and embedded operating system built on the Linux kernel, but without the "aging X11". Instead, it uses the SciTech SNAP graphics system with which it is possible to completely re-theme the desktop to look like the famous AmigaOS GUI or another famous UI. For backwards compatibility, an X11 server is also available in the system. The system can run completely off the CD, without needing to be installed on the harddrive."
Instead, it uses the SciTech SNAP graphics system with which it is possible to completely re-theme the desktop to look like the famous AmigaOS GUI or another famous UI.
Right. Because themes are the most important thing, ever. This isn't an media player, it's a GUI.
Competition in open source projects is mostly a good thing. This new GUI may make X11 developers improve to keep up. However, different projects like this also create lack of standards. This may require people to use two GUIs, with different applications running on each one. With Windows, every version retains legacy compatability for almost all applications written for a previous version. However, this becoming popular would make it required to run two GUIs to run all Linux applications. Rather than expecting developers to conform X11 emulation should be implemented.
Alternate graphics layers have been around for a long time. Some of them have significant advantages over X11.
So far the only one which has really gained prominence is the frame buffer device that most modern Linux distributions use when booting. There is even a port of QT to that, and it is sometimes used as the only graphics device in embedded platforms. It has the great advantage of being really lightweight, but it is probably even slower and much less featureful than X11.
Another one is the Y server, which was used in some PDA's until public outcry over lack of source compatibility forced the manufacturer to put in X11 instead (remember that, Slashdot?). Before that there was also svgalib. I don't think anyone cried over that going away.
The issue is support--there are tons of toolkits and applications available for X11, and the networking features are neat and useful once in a while (very often for some people, including myself). Others start with a base of pretty much nothing. That means that it is really hard for them to gain acceptance, even if they are superior from viewpoints such as being smaller, faster, and easier to program.
I personally think that we are going to be stuck with all the cruft and slowness of X11 for a very long time.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
Was anyone whining? Maybe my filter (1+) is set too high, but I didn't hear any whining. In a commonly-open source community, freely downloadable ISOs are, well, common. A fair mistake, I'd say.
Having said that, I agree that the base expectation of things being free is somewhat overused. And, if it's a good implementation (I can't tell a thing, 'cause the site's slashdotted), I wouldn't mind paying $40 for it.
The Spoon
Updated 6/28/2011
People bad-mouth X because their PC happens not to use its power. They complain about its "bloat", because they see it taking 10MB of their 256-MB machine's precious RAM, most of which is idle. They complain about it being "slow", which tells me that they have nothing better to do than play video games.
X is many times better than anything else in the marketplace; X is many years ahead of anything that Microsoft offers; it may be old, but so what? The Internet is old. Is that a reason to ditch the internet?
There is value in having alternatives. For mobile phones, the power of X is not needed and something lighter might be appropriate. But to all those who persist in bad-mouthing X, I say: look beyond what 's good enough for the PC in your bedroom right now. Find out what X is really about. It's still leading-edge and is one of the advantages Linux has over its competitors. Does it need improvement? Of course, like pretty much everything that's used. But it's the best base we've got for building on. Discarding it and going back to a Microsoft-like GUI would be a giant leap backwards.
Complaints about the slowness of X in Linux are also bogus and are down almost entirely to drivers. Many drivers that have been written by the OSS community tend to have been written essentially by reverse engineering the hardware, without manufacturer support. As a result, they often suck.
Drivers which have been provided by the actual manufacturers of the graphics hardware (as is the case in the Windows world) fare much better.
A perfect example is NVidia hardware, because both free and manufacturer provided solutions exist. The nv driver included with XFree86 is fairly slow in 2d and provides no 3d support. On the other hand, if you download NVidia's Linux drivers for XFree86, you get mind-numbing 2D acceleration and blazing fast 3D acceleration at the same speeds as the Windows drivers, with full OpenGL support.
Unfortunately, because the NVidia drivers aren't OSS, most distributions don't install them. Users install Linux, get sub-par graphics performance, and decide that "1) Linux graphics are slow, 2) X provides Linux graphics, 3) ergo, X is slow" and never even realize that they could increase the throughput of their graphics subsystem manyfold simply by downloading a better driver.
It's really an issue all across the Linux world -- poor driver support because of uncooperative manufacturers... it's just than in X, a poor hack of a driver is much more obvious because the user interacts with it directly.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Bah, X is an established standard that works well.
So few people truely understand what makes X tick is why so many people bash it..
X is wonderful, its the crap that runs on top X that tends to suck and give X a bad name.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The AmigaOS GUI sucked ass and prevented people from buying a technically cool machine.
No, it really didn't.
The AmigaOS GUI was one of the most fluid, easy to understand GUI's I've ever used - it encouraged multitasking, instead of (seemingly) being designed to prevent it (quick - load two Mac/Windows/X word processors, make them full-screen, send one to the back and try to continue using it. Trivial on the Amiga.)
It's one of the things I miss most about it.
- X is not slow
- Some X video drivers are slow.
- The slowdown caused by Network transparency is negligible.
- KDE and GNOME are piggishly slow. I use both because I'm willing to sacrifice speed for functionality.
Facts about X usability:- Configuration is difficult, even for experienced users.
- Cut-and-paste style should be configurable.
What X needs:- A way to send less data over the wire for toolkits such as QT / GTK+.
- Easier configuration and setup.
- Pluggable cut-and-paste architecture that can be more easily used by the other toolkits.
- Better video drivers*.
* I know