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."

Comments

Linux without X11...

[Red Warrior]

Looks a lot like DOS.

Re:Linux without X11...

[Phattypants]

Alas I can't get to the link so I don't know how much it looks like DOS, but it does look a lot like the DOS inherent when a link is first posted on Slashdot. :)

Not only can, it does. (obligatory)

[oblom]

The system can run completely off the CD, without needing to be installed on the harddrive."

At least that's what the server seems to be running from.

Woooooooooo!

[B3ryllium]

I wish them luck. I want to have a choice, instead of being forced to use X11 for GUI on *nix :)

Re:Woooooooooo!

[realdpk]

Sure, choice is good, but why not make it easy on yourself and choose "vi" - the only correct choice.

Re:Woooooooooo!

[jdray]

Hmm.

Avoiding my initial reaction of revulsion at putting Explorer on Linux, it sounds at least intriguing.

How does it handle the file system? Does it try to figure out how to turn / into c:\ ? /home into My Documents? Or do you open a window to the file system and see things as you might in Konqueror?

You should put together a document on how you achieved your feat and post it here.

Re:Woooooooooo!

[ColaMan]

Good too see! Pass your info onto the wine dev team, they've being trying to get explorer running well in wine for about 3 years now.

Of course, you could be just talking shit.
(Looking forward to your patches though ;-)

When is X12 coming out?

[Anonymous Coward]

X11 really is ancient.

Re:When is X12 coming out?

[Soko]

X12? Geez, I need to pay attention. I was waiting for XIII to be released...

Soko

Re:When is X12 coming out?

[naelurec]

And then Microsoft will release X11#

Re:When is X12 coming out?

[neurostar]

Geeks around the world are still expecting XXX :)

nope, they aren't.

Re:When is X12 coming out?

[__past__]

What, not X100?

Re:When is X12 coming out?

[Captain Large Face]

Duh! Everyone knows X11 should be followed by X001. :P

Themes schemes

[vasqzr]

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.

Re:Themes schemes

[NanoGator]

"Right. Because themes are the most important thing, ever. This isn't an media player, it's a GUI."

Themes are the UI. When you customize your theme to put buttons where you need them, then you're making your UI more useful to you. I thought customization was a big whoop-dee-doo feature of Linux. Now it's being poo-poo'd?

Re:Themes schemes

[NanoGator]

"If I could re-theme my hardcoded windows GUI, themes would be the most important thing, ever. "

You can re-theme it. Check out this thread here.

Here's what my desktop looks like. It's customized with my own (in progress) artwork on it. And yes, those are buttons and multiple desktops there. Some of the stuff there is default, and some of it I added on my own.

So yes, you can modify your 'hard-coded' theme. Somebody's already gone through all the work to do it.

Re:Themes schemes

[slamb]

> > "If I could re-theme my hardcoded windows GUI, themes would be the most important thing, ever. "

> You can re-theme it.

I disagree. Your screenshot shows that you can change the bitmaps. And that you can replace the shell. But that's not what I consider true theming.

First of all, theming should at least be able to change the size of widgets. In Windows, that's impossible. All the software is designed with absolute positioning of widgets, so changing the sizes of widgets would make the entire scheme fall apart. Java supports this - it has good layout managers, and they are commonly used. You can resize controls without making everything look horrible. There are other advantages to layout managers, also - fonts can change size (accessibility!) with less impact, there's better window resize behavior, etc. (Incidentally, I was really disappointed to see that OS X uses absolute positioning extensively. It has a really good UI, but there are low points.)

Second, themes should be able to change the look and the feel. You've changed the look. The feel of programs is the same. I really like to see a one-to-one correspondence to looks and feels. Ideally, all of the software on my computer would have the same, customizable, look and feel. But failing that, I hate it when things look different but behave the same, or look the same but behave differently.

I particularly hate the "native" themes that Mozilla, Java, gtk/Win32, etc. have. I see the mostly-native look and expect native behavior, but there are subtle differences that bother me all the time. Things like wheel button behavior not matching up.

I also dislike single application that goes against the grain with UI conventions. I let a few get away with it - cross-platform applications, mostly, especially ones with a relatively-common framework such as Java's Swing), but Winamp in particular bothers me. It looks horrible, its scrollbars are broken, etc. If they had just used the native widgets, they would have expended much less effort for a better result.

something i always wondered about

[b17bmbr]

why is linux so beholden to X? yeah, i love it's network transparent features ( i use in my class every day), but, look at what apple did with essentially a kernel and subsystem. they could port aqua to linux, since it already compiled under gcc anyways. that might be a huge commercial ticket for linux. certainly there is nothing that says you can't run a proprietary windowing system on top of the kernel, is there? app compatibility would be a huge issue, but like apple's X11, it could run rootless, and almost be unnoticable (except for the widgets).

Re:something i always wondered about

[tuffy]

why is linux so beholden to X?

Because when Linux was written in the early 90s, most Unix systems were using X11 for a GUI and that's where most of the open sourced apps were. Inventing a whole new graphic system would've been a huge waste of effort. Arguably, it still is. But for embedded systems, an alternative isn't a bad idea.

Re:something i always wondered about

[m0rph3us0]

Do you realize that most of X being "slow" is really XFree86 being slow.
In fact some X servers for Linux are FASTER than Windows.

Check out the benchmarks

Re:something i always wondered about

[tuffy]

Even Xfree86 isn't all that slow - so long as it's got decent drivers to work with. But people tend to load lots of Gnome/KDE stuff to get their machines to look/act more like Windows, then complain that their machines run at Windows-like speeds. But X11 is easy to blame because few understand what it is or what it does; kindof like a "not invented here" syndrome for the open source world.

Re:something i always wondered about

[tuffy]

Excuse me...but I run both Win98SE and Redhat 8 with Gnome, and I can truly say that Windows is the faster of the 2.

That shouldn't be too surprising, since Win98 is 3-4 years older than Red Hat 8. Gnome (and KDE) has added *a lot* of stuff since then that'll make your system crawl. But to get an idea of how fast X11 itself is, try making a dummy account with a .xsession (or .xinitrc on occasion) file containing the lines:
#!/bin/sh

twm &
xterm

Make the .xsession file executable and then login to the dummy account. (The account will log-out when you exit the xterm) I think you'll find the speed faster than Win98, and I hope it'll demonstrate exactly where Linux's desktop slowness comes from.

Re:something i always wondered about

[maynard]

I'm sure they could take advantage of the RENDER extension, but I don't really see the advantage of a whole Postscript interpreter under there.

One of the big advantages to DPS and DPDF is the device independence in rendering text and other objects. That is, it's truly WYSIWYG - what's rendered on the screen is exactly what will be rendered to print (or any other device). For DPS you also have the option of writing applet procedures which run on the display server, similar to the old Sun NEWS system. So, for example, one could write a terminal emulator in postscript and have it run in the display server, thus reducing network load by cutting out most of the transmission of event processing between client and server during a remote display session. This solves the biggest complaint about network transparent X sessions, that being it's a network hog and has terrible latency.

X is fine for what it does - especially given the price - but it saddens me to no end to see the DGS render extension die because no one seems to care, while at the same time everyone bitches about slow old X. GnuStep with Display Ghostscript would certainly have been a better solution than completely rewriting a new display server and the rewriting the windowing environment all over yet again.

So now someone is selling cool new desktop that will never cross the threshold of users necessary to replace X, while others keep dumping more intellectual energy in bogus free X desktops that 'kindof' work. How many times have we done this? How many widget toolkits does X really need? Athena, Motif, TK, QT, GTK... on and on and on. None of them work well together, everyone needs applications that cross toolkit boundaries, and users are left completely in the dark on how to do the simplest thing like cut and paste non-text between applications. Wasn't Simpson Garfinkle bitching about just this in the UNIX Haters Handbook ten years ago?!?!? And everyone laughed because it was true while nothing changed. Feh.

We're long past the point where the history of X, and ridiculous backward compatibility, is impeding growth toward something new and better. Gnome and/or KDE ain't the solution. Nor is GnuStep rendering through xlib. Feh, what a mess.

JMO,
--Maynard

Re:something i always wondered about

[maynard]

I think you underestimate the render extensions. Why generate Postscript, which is interpreted and in turn writes to a canvas, when you can write to the canvas directly?

Because writing directly to the canvas implies you're writing to the local framebuffer, which tosses the whole point behind network transparency. Device independent rendering and display side server applets are the two things that DPS does really well. Of course, that doesn't mean that a toolkit will necessarily use those features, but it's a cool thing to have available. X is FUBAR'd at the protocol level because of how it handles event processing (just one of many reasons), so no matter what one does above at the toolkit level it will always be a network hog. There were more elegant solutions before Project Athena released X fifteen years back. Adding a new toolkit layer simply won't resolve this fundamental brokenness - even if it has access to all the cool framebuffer features through RENDER. Though I agree that DPS is a somewhat overly complex protocol, it can do stuff simply and elegantly that X can't even come close to doing even after jumping through multiple layers of rendering and toolkit libs hoops. JMO.

Cheers,
--Maynard

Re:something i always wondered about

[SewersOfRivendell]

You're comparing apples to oranges. "twm &; xterm" nets you an ugly xterm window. Welcome to 1983. What the hell use is that? Compare with Win98's myraid of applications, all of which run at relatively blinding speeds and in full graphical splendour...

Seriously, I'm not trolling here. What you seem to be saying is that X is inherently slow because it scales poorly. Or are you blaming GNOME and KDE for the slowness?

I think they really need to get on with it and fork, already.

Re:something i always wondered about

[arkane1234]

twm is just the window manager, so that's the point that was being made. As another person pointed out, you can use fluxbox or blackbox, also. I personally use Window Maker, because it offers ease of use, it's functional, pretty where it counts, and leaves me deskspace :) It's also very low on the memory usage. (about 3 megs)
Don't take the full memory usage of X into account, because it uses AGP memory also in that listing.
Here's mine:
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ Command
7585 root 9 0 273m 17m 4328 R 0.0 3.4 0:07.66 X

You'll notice the resident size is 17 meg, and the shared memory size is 4 megs (approximately).

17 megs for X, 3 megs for Window Maker... that's 20 megs for everything X related. Of course the XTerms take up like 3.3 megs a peice on my system, but then you have ATerm which on my system takes up 1.5 meg a terminal session.

Phoenix is what I use for a web browser, which takes up 30 megs. (6 sessions, 24 megs each, 23 megs of that shared between sessions, which means the first is 24 megs and the others are 1 meg)

Other apps take their respective memory usages, but that's the breakdown. It's not X that takes alot of memory, it's the toolkits used over top of it.

One comment:

[Anonymous Coward]

It's ok to emulate something else if your familiar or comfortable with it, but I'd like to see an OS released that allows you to create your UI just how you want it, and not just pretty borders, colors, etc. Stuff like how it handles file structures graphically, selection of tiled, paned, or stretched work panels. Total control over ALL aspects of a GUI!

Re:One comment:

[mrroach]

It's called gcc. The config files are a little tricky though. Have fun!

-Mark

Old sztuff repackaged

[Lumpy]

Hmm, I've been using an embedded linux with a NON X gui for at least 2 years now....

it's called picogui

Plus you dont have to buy it, and it's much smaller.

Re:Old sztuff repackaged

[Anonymous Coward]

You can find out of date picogui stuff at sourceforge, but why does picogui.org only come up with advertising for the webhost? Has picogui not been paying their bills, or is the site down right now?

Competition...

[zzxc]

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.

On alternate graphics layers.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:On alternate graphics layers.

[Fnord]

The one other issue I've heard of is that since acceleration is implemented in userspace, the server can't block on a hardware interupt and so ends up doing a bit more busy waiting than it should. Though this is only an issue on a machine with a pegged cpu.

Re:On alternate graphics layers.

[Cyno]

What is slow about X?

It plays my OpenGL games just fine. Plays my movies and TV shows just fine. Flips between virtual desks faster than I can blink. What's this slowness everyone keeps talking about?

Maybe everyone buys the same video cards or something, I don't know. I don't have any complaints.

X10 is critical technology!

[Thud457]

I used to just hate when blonde hotties broke into my house and start taking their clothes off!

Thanks to the miracle of X10 security technology, I no longer have to worry about that. THANKS X10!

Re:X10 is critical technology!

[Goonie]

And does it make a sound when a tree falls on her?

Really?

[truthsearch]

With Windows, every version retains legacy compatability for almost all applications written for a previous version.

When Rob Short, the vice-president of Windows Core Technology, was asked, "How many applications will transfer over from [Windows] NT4 or 2000 [to Windows Server 2003]?" he answered: "I'm not sure what the exact number is for taking an NT4 application and running it -- it's in the high 60 percent. It's not 90... Most of the time, if the application is following the [security] rules then it will run. But I must admit the rules haven't been well publicised."

Full Windows backward compatibility is a myth.

A major step forward

[stratjakt]

X11 is an albatross most of the time. Very few make use of it, it's bloat to everyone else. It's showing its age.

I've long believed it needs to be removed from the nuts-n-bolts for something smaller and faster. Let X11 support be a strap-on application for those who need it, like it is for OSX.

Linux users like strap ons almost as much as Apple fanatics.

Re:A major step forward

[tuffy]

I've long believed it needs to be removed from the nuts-n-bolts for something smaller and faster. Let X11 support be a strap-on application for those who need it, like it is for OSX.

Please make up your minds, people. X11 was certainly fast enough on this speedy beast, and hasn't inherently gotten slower since. If you want something *smaller* than X11 to drive graphics, you'd better be prepared to write lots of code to handle niggling details like window displaying - in the graphics libraries. Ick. Projects like Berlin try to add *more* features to the windowing system that X11 doesn't have, which isn't necessarily bad. But it's not going to be *less* bloated than X11 is now.

But "old" and "bloated" is going to be a contradiction when one considers the advances in hardware over the 10+ years I've been using X11.

Milestone

[bigjocker]

I'm pretty sure that this will set a milestone in the Linux development history.

We have multiple distributions (SUSE, RH, MDK), multiple WM (Gnome, KDE, E), multiple Office Suites (KOffice, OpenOffice, AbiWord), imaging software, network tools ... even multiple kernels where to choose from, but we are stuck with only one graphical environment.

I know there has been a lot of advancemente in the FB handling, but officially, if you want to have some windows you need X.

Personally, I love X, but I for one can see (and have seen a lot of) people complaining about X; and from efforts like this one only good things can happen.

Re:Milestone

[Alomex]

Personally, I love X,

Otherwise known as the Stockholm syndrome.

Virus Proof?

[Rick.C]

OK, the pool starts... now!

How long before someone writes a successful virus for the runs-from-CD implementation?

Never say "never"

Yes, they are important.

[ethnocidal]

You seem to connect themes with simple bitmap changes, and the like. I agree that simply offering this functionality is less than important.

However, with 'true' theming, the internal function of the GUI (and OS) is loosely tied with the graphical layout and function of the GUI. What does this means? It means that a single system, properly configured, can handle many different interface styles. You could simultaneously offer transition interfaces to users from different GUI camps - Windows, MacOS, NeXT, etc.

This is an immensely important feature for this reason. While many see theming as eyecandy, properly implemented it can serve a very useful purpose; fit the GUI to the user, not the user to the GUI. It should also allow new interface styles to be prototyped - what better way to develop usability than to look at what people with the skillset to change the interface think works best?

Archive of Screenshots

[jacobb]

AmigaOS , WinTel, and More Screenshots, all thanks to The Internet Archive

Re:And the .iso mirrors are ?

[jdray]

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.

Re:And the .iso mirrors are ?

[the_consumer]

from the site:

# Free for Non-Commercial (Home) Use.
# Source Code is Publicly Available.

And I have never paid for sex in my life. You must be one ugly bastard.

KDE for framebuffer

[Anonymous Coward]

Would it not be possible to port KDE to QT/Embedded so that you could run KDE in the framebuffer without X11 at all? There would be a lot of work to do, but the toolkit which KDE is based on already works in the framebuffer.

XFree86 good, not bad

[0x0d0a]

Most people that dislike X don't understand it.

My favorite complaint is that it's bloated or eats too much memory. It's bogus -- X uses relatively little memory itself, but pixmaps are stored in X instead of in apps. So Linux GUI apps tend to use less memory than they would with a Windows-like environment, but X's memory usage go up.

I actually sat down and modified some code to query X how much memory is being used by each program in pixmap memory. This is memory that would have to be used under Windows. Little things -- gkrellm, a simple dock program that I have running, caches about 2.7MB of pixmaps in X all by itself. This doesn't show up as gkrellm memory usage in top, but it *is* being consumed by gkrellm.

X11 allows network transparency, 3d support, hardware scaling of video, support for more font formats than Windows does, zooming in and out. When combined with a window manager, the X11 architecture is incredibly powerful and flexible.

I wish people would stop complaining about and learn to use X's features.

Re:XFree86 good, not bad

[aussersterne]

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.

Re:XFree86 good, not bad

[mTor]

> Most people that dislike X don't understand it.

I think I do and I still don't like it.

> My favorite complaint is that it's bloated
> or eats too much memory. It's bogus -- X uses
> relatively little memory itself, but pixmaps are
> stored in X instead of in apps. So Linux GUI apps
> tend to use less memory than they would with a
> Windows-like environment, but X's memory usage go up.

Heh, that might be true when you're using a simple windowing toolkit such as Xlib but what happens when you start using GTK or KDE? Things get a LOT more complicated.

If you really want to understand why some of us dislike X11, take a look here: X-Windows Disaster.

Also, one of the people who has been vocal in X11 criticism is no one else than David Wexelblat.

Re:XFree86 good, not bad

[B3ryllium]

Yes, it can be implemented well.

In all the implementations I've used, however, it's been a poor hodgepodge of unstable apps, laggy display rendering (on a Voodoo Banshee, which has dandy 2D capability), and butt-ugly interfaces. I never got a chance to try 3D.

Now, I haven't used XFree extensively in RH9, I hear it's quite nice in fact - the last time I used it was on Debian Woody (XFree86 4.2, i think). As always, I couldn't stand the Gnome and KDE interfaces - they always irritate me.

XFree86 running Fluxbox wasn't so bad, but ... every single application has a different "look". Different buttons, different menus, different widgets. It annoys the hell out of me.

When I'm using a GUI, I demand consistency - if not in layout, then at least in appearance. Mozilla is the lone exception (I can understand why they deviated and created their own layout library).

That's why I use command-line unix (FreeBSD), and some Windows variant as a desktop GUI (on a different machine, of course).

Eventually I might give RH9 and KDE3 a try, but not right now. :)

Re:XFree86 good, not bad

[0x0d0a]

from what I can tell all it does is serve fonts and networktransparancy.

X is responsible for actually rasterizing and displaying every pixel that you see on the screen. It renders fonts, yes, and very nice antialiased ones. It handles network code, yes. It (well, it and Mesa) do 3d hardware rendering -- in Windows user terms, all of the video card drivers in Windows combined with DirectX. It does hardware scaling -- if you play a movie, Xv is used to display the thing. It handles combining multiple monitors via Xinerama. It acts as the intermediary in copying and pasting data between apps. X deals with tablets, joysticks, mice, keyboards and handing off data from them to apps. X provides framebuffer access to memory. Unlike Windows, X lets you fine-tune precisely what timings are used on your monitor, if you want to squeeze the last little bit of performance possible out of your monitor.

if you want to do anything usefull you have to add a window manager

Sure. X could have included a window manager, but the folks that write it realize that different folks prefer different types of window managers. Some prefer really simple WMs like twm, metacity, or kwm. Others prefer glitz and don't care about plenty of overhead, and use enlightenment. Others like poking at and customizing their window manager, recoding bits of it while it's running (a la emacs), and use sawfish. The list goes on and on. Most *ix folks tend to feel a bit irritated when being forced to use the Windows environment -- there's no possibility of choice, and relatively little of customization.

a cut & paste manager

Well, you *can* use a multi-clipboard program, (of which there are a collection to choose from) but Windows doesn't provide this functionality natively either. Just as with window managers, this modularity is done deliberately. Distributions can prepackage a multi-clipboard program if they like -- so the end user experience can be "there's one, it's preinstalled, and I don't have to worry about it" -- but you aren't *forced* to use any single one.

a toolkit of somesort (gtk for example)

Again, Windows happens to force people to use a single widget set. I'm not a tremendous fan of chunks of the Windows set (anyone that's done gtk programming and Win32 programming knows that layout in gtk is *much* better than the forced pixel-level layout used in Win32 and the Macintosh Toolbox), but it can't really be changed for backwards compatibility reasons.

X is modular. If a widget set falls behind the times, a new one can be produced. I'm not sure if you've ever seen Athena, but it was one of the earlier widget sets available for X. I suspect that most desktop users would not like the way it operates. With Windows, you'd be stuck lugging around Athena forever. With X, you can simply move to something newer, like gtk.

hell even windows 3.1 does far more then X and can be cut down under a meg and still be 100% usefull, not to mention that adds a multitasking ( a bad one but still) to the OS (dos)

Win 3.1 and X are completely different beasts. They don't do even remotely the same task.

Win 3.1 is marketed differently. X *has* a partial equivalent in Windows, but you cannot obtain it separately from the rest of Windows. However, it's really irrelevant. You'd never use X without a kernel, so the fact that Windows 3.1 does scheduling isn't really useful.

(i.e. drag and drop doesnt work 80% of the time unless all you use is kde apps)

Drag and drop cooperation between gnome and kde is relatively new. Yes, it was added recently, and it takes a while to get in. I used Mac OS in the 7.x days, when drag and drop support was added...and the same thing happened -- actually, it was even worse, if anything.

I'm not saying that X is unilaterally more featureful than Mac OS or Windows. Drag and Drop is a particular weak point that's being added to a lot of apps right now. Overal

Re:XFree86 good, not bad

[10Ghz]

X is good. XFree could be alot better though.

Myabe X11 just needs another revision

[headbulb]

X11 isn't as Bad as everything thinks.
The way I see X being slow is that widgets need to be on server-side instead of client-side. Right now the client Draws everything useing X primitives, sending the raw data (pixmaps, whatnot) to the server over the network. Now if the server had the widgets on its side the client would just have to tell the server the type, size, position of the widget, Instead of sending a pixmap.

This would help things such as less bandwidth, less cpu overhead for eash client.

Maybe this could even be implimented in a X-
extentsion

Maybe I am just showing my ignorance here, But an idea is an idea.

Re:Myabe X11 just needs another revision

[serbanp]

Sorry but X doesn't work that way. Most of the X packets are related to vector and GC operations. E.g.

XDrawRectangle(mainDisplay, win, drawGC, ltx, lty, width, height);

I believe that most widgets are made from simple geometric figures and not only from plain pixmaps.

Serban

Re:Myabe X11 just needs another revision

[poot_rootbeer]

The way I see X being slow is that widgets need to be on server-side instead of client-side.

Don't forget that because of an idiosyncrasy in the way X client/server communications are conceptualized, the X SERVER is the thing with a display and input devices, and the CLIENTS are the machines running applications (which may or may not be remote to the X console) that request I/O services from the server.

So you've got it backwards, unless you think X has it backwards, in which case you've got it forwards.

Re:And the .iso mirrors are ?

[Pharmboy]

God, why is it the majority of Linux users are whining thieving babies who want everything for free? Wake up to the real world, where nothing is free. Not sex, not food, not clothing, and most certainly not operating systems.

If you lower your standards enough, everything is free. Sex? Find someone ugly enough. Food? Go dumpster diving. Clothing? Bin diving at the Salvation Army. OS? Fortunately, Linux doesn't require settling for less, and much less offensive than the gap-toothed gal with a peg leg you picked up for free sex.

Imagine that

[niom]

In fact some X servers for Linux are FASTER than Windows.

Wow man. FASTER than Windows. That's the stuff dreams are made of.

I'm happy with XFree

[pivo]

Yeah, this was sort of a revalation to me recently. I just got a new machine at work. Of course it came with Windows (XP Pro) installed on it so I played with it for a few days before blowing it away and putting RedHat 9 on it. I was sort of hesitant to do so because windows in XP seemed to pop up fast and the whole system seemed very responsive (not that I was doing anything heavy duty.) Another plus is that font rendering is actually better than Windows, and about equal with Macs. That's really nice.

Anyway, now that I've got RH installed (w/XFree 4.3.x) I am very happy to say that X seems just as responsive as Windows, even when I am doing something heavy duty, and I'm using KDE as well. This was the first time in about five years I've used any kind of Windows, it was a nice validation of X as far as I am concerned.

XFree, at least without propriatary drivers, might not be great for games, but it makes my development life a lot more joyful than other non-networked windowing environments would, and that includes the kludgy windows terminal services crapola.

Re:I'm happy with XFree

[bigmase521]

I have been running Mandrake 9.1 with XFree 4.3.x and I have to say that the speed concerns in X isn't as bad anymore. On an Athlon XP 1700+ and 512mb ram, Mandrake on X, KDE 3.1, and the newest Nvidia drivers, is just as fast, and in the majority of cases (mozilla loading time excluded) is faster than Windows. KDE is a mem hog, and I wish they would optimize it a bit better, however I have no complaints as to the overall slowness of X. Especially in games, OpenGl on X playing UT2003 is just as fast as windows in most cases. If a new X server re-written from scratch with newer optimizations came out, this problem that many do have would disappear, and the speed of X would be a moot point.

what's the value proposition

[wfmcwalter]

IMNAMD (I am not a marketing dweeb) but I have to ask - what's their (Rocklyte's) value proposition?

There are several free, reasonably mature windowing environments available for linux already, many featuring hardware acceleration. Several are suitable for embedded use. Why do I want to spend $40 for this? (I'm not being rhetorical - the site isn't accessable). There are innumerable linux distributions, several of which boot straight from CD without install.

Frankly, the speed differentials Scitech quotes (over Xfree) aren't really all that impressive for most graphics adaptors. Sure, there's a big difference between unaccelerated (e.g. vesa) access and accelerated, but a 20% differential between the 2D performance of one accelerated solution and another just isn't that compelling. Now many applications are _that_ dependant on 2D performance? If I'm that 2D bound I can spend that $40 and get vastly better graphics performance by buying a better card.

The "foo is old fashioned", "foo is too complicated", "foo is SO last century" claims that some make (I dunno if these guys do, as their site is still down) aren't value propositions. Is something significantly faster? Significantly smaller? Significantly more useful features? Significantly cheaper? Those are.

Parenthetically, note that I don't apply this standard to free projects. Someone can go code a new OS just for their own pleasure, and doesn't have to pass a customer-value-proposition test. Why? Cos they don't have customers, and so they're not obligated to provide value to anyone.

NOT FREE

[baudtender]

They want $99NZ (approx $42US) for each machine
running Athene in a commercial environment.

Baudtender

why use this over X?

[MikeFM]

I've used X for many years and it still works well for me. IMO it is far better than Windows and is better than MacOS. What benefit does this new gui (or any of the others) have over using X? Themes are no big deal. If one feels like it they can theme just about anything in X. X boots from cd too. The page seems to be /.'d so I can't dig to deep.

For any opposing GUI to make ground I'd say it'll need all the features of X and a compatibility layer to let X apps run on them. At the minimum they'd need to make something like a wxWindows port for their gui.

Replacing X is worse than pointless

[njdj]

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.

Re:Replacing X is worse than pointless

[krumms]

What exactly is your point?

X running on RedHat 8.1 with my Athlon XP 1800+ is slow when compared to the WinXP UI. And I don't play games on Linux - that's what Windows is for - I code.

Admittedly, some features a novel - such as the whole UI-over-TCP thing. Great. It would be nice in some situations, I'm sure. But I'm not going to 'look beyond what's good enough for the PC in my bedroom right now'. Why the hell should I? After all, I'm using my computer now and I want it to work to the best of its ability.

Now, I've had my little rant, don't take it to heart - my point is, make a point. What do you feel is so great about X that we should simply forego the PCs in our bedrooms because of some greater, only-known-by-you good?

The Internet is old. Is that a reason to ditch the internet? - I hear stirrings of people looking into it. SMTP is old too, everyone uses it whether they like it or not, and look how fucked up it is.

Re:Replacing X is worse than pointless

[Theodore Logan]

> They complain about its "bloat", because they see it taking 10MB of their 256-MB machine's precious RAM, most of which is idle.

This is certainly not a worst case scenario, and you know it. That you adress the problem in this way furthermore attests that you don't know how X works. The answer isn't "blah! You don't need that RAM anyway" but "it doesn't use more RAM!" The reason it appears as if that's the case is that much of the memory it consumes is actually used by applications running on it, since X stores their pixmaps. Taken together X doesn't use more memory than other systems.

> They complain about it being "slow", which tells me that they have nothing better to do than play video games.

So, your counter argument here is that if people think X doesn't suit their needs, they have the wrong needs? I.e. there's nothing wrong with X, only with the people who use it. This is, as I'm sure you understand without me having to point it out to you, an inappropriate way of looking at things. By definition, X is bad if it doesn't suit the needs of its users. If the users want to play games, and X can't handle that, X needs to be rewritten or avoided rather than users must be trained to stop enjoying games.

Besides, many other apps have the same problems with X as games have. Still, the proper way to address this question is to say "X isn't really that slow. XFree86, on the other hand, is, and even that is getting better by every release." Again, you have no idea what you're talking about.

> X is many times better than anything else in the marketplace

Better at what? You don't say. Yet you have just, yourself, provided a lot of reasons for the contrary position.

> X is many years ahead of anything that Microsoft offers

You wouldn't know.

> it may be old, but so what? The Internet is old. Is that a reason to ditch the internet?

Ridiculous comparision. The Internet is not a piece of software. Besides, nobody wants to ditch X merely because it's old - they want to ditch it because they think it sucks. The talk about it being old is merely an excuse for it's suckiness.

> look beyond what 's good enough for the PC in your bedroom right now.

Why should I do that? That's precisely what I, and everybody else for that matter, care about.

> Find out what X is really about.

What is it about, why don't you tell me? According to you, it's not about suiting it's users' needs, and it's not about being good for their computers. Curiously, however, this is what people refer to when they say "X is bad." What you're saying is only that "yes, it's bad in the way everybody thinks it is, but that's not the way that matters. It's good in a lot of other ways, that people don't care about. And this is a very good reason for keeping it even for the people and purposes it doesn't fit." I understand that I'm repeating myself here, but all your "arguments" seem to be answerable in the same way. It's also amusing that, all your ranting notwithstanding, you haven't provided a single example of something X does good, but a lot of examples of things it does poorly.

> It's still leading-edge and is one of the advantages Linux has over its competitors.

Everyone tech-savvy person I know who still use Windows do it because they need it to play games, something not easily done with X even for the few games that exist and are optimized for it. How exactly is this an advantage for Linux 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.

You're missing the entire point. The arguments for ditching X is that its architecture simply isn't a very good one for the purposes it's now being used for. If anything at all is wrong with X, it is precisely it's base.

Still, I don't think we should ditch it. Yet, knowing nothing about it and just reading your post I would arrive at the opposite conclusion. You're just a zealot, obviously embracing Linux and X more to fit in with the Slashdot crowd than because you understand their real advantages. It's embarrassing and you are doing the community a disservice.

Actually...

[Jussi K. Kojootti]

Your claim about source code availability is only 70% true.
From the faq:

We do not distrubute all of the source code, but the components which we deem to be helpful to third-party developers and which do not risk the dilution of our intellectual property are available to you at no charge. Approximately 70% of the source code is currently available to the public.

-jussi

Re:Actually...

[hitmark]

hmm, and the last 30% is iether internaly made software that theycant make up theyre mind about or connected to that graphics system they use to replace X11...

Re:famous AmigaOS GUI?

[KingDaveRa]

Yeah, I think considering what was available at the time it came out, it did an awful lot. It was doing overlapping windows, and all sorts of other stuff we'd now consider very basic and trivial, but then was a feat of coding to do.
Don't forget it could do all this off one disk too. No hard disk install required for a complete 32-bit (ok, bits of it 24) multi-tasking operating system with a pretty good, and very usable GUI.
Workbench is a damn good example of usability in GUIs.

I've been waiting for this day...

[neo]

I'm so happy to hear someone finally ditched the X windows. Now maybe we can get some decent applications without needing to code the whole UI experience every time.

This may be the one.

CD based

[Anonymous Coward]

Can anybody strip down Knoppix http://www.knoppix.de/ or Topolpgilinux http://topologi-linux.sourceforge.net/ or this new distribution to get a tiny core set of applications which would be a good end user CD-bootable Linux desktop?

Our IT people would love to have a graphical rudimentary cd bootable stripped down linux package to which a few open source applicatios could be easily added.

This is the other way round instead of Knoppix adding in as much as possible.

Re:CD based

[Joe Tie.]

Never tried doing so myself, but Morphix is supposed to be pretty easy to add new programs to. They also have a few different main builds, one of which is called lightGUI, and comes in at less than 200MB.

The Flying Circus That Is X

[DeadVulcan]

The UNIX-HATERS Handbook has a chapter called The X-Windows Disaster. Near the end, there is a hilarious bit about colours. The durned lameness filter prevents me from posting it.

Search for the word "circus" in that chapter, and you'll find it.

Non-X GUIs: What's Really Needed

[istartedi]

What's really needed in a non-X GUI (in fact, all GUIs) is support for higher level APIs so we don't have to care about the underlying GUI. That begs the question, what do developers use most often?

I'd be willing to wager that there is a large percentage of Windows software that uses the GUI's APIs directly--Win32 or one of the popular wrappers like MFC or OWL. On *NIX, GTK is probably the most popular.

There are high-level wrappers that will allow you to target Win32 and *NIX with just a recompile. wxWindows leaps to mind. However, I wager that the percentage of people using them is small, although the following is growing (doesn't AbiWord use wxWindows?).

Given that, I'd probably want to see GTK and wxWindows apps running on top of a non-X GUI before I'd use it. A Win32 subset would be sweet. No, not Wine. I don't want to swallow an elephant just to get a peanut. Full Windows emulation is overkill. I would just like to have Win32 API functions so I could recompile apps that use the APIs directly. I (and thousands of others) have written our own Win32 wrappers. For alternatives to succeed, they need to be able to pull in as much software as possible.

Oh crap... I can't even check the website to see what higher level APIs it supports. D#$% /.

Re:famous AmigaOS GUI?

[nexusone]

That is only your opinion, I found the Amiga's GUI easy to use.
Program did not crash all the time vs my windows machine.
The Amiga had some of the coolist and very creative programs years ahead of windows.

The Amiga died because everyone had IBM clones in schools and work, thus this is what people got for their homes.

Also the US Management at the time did not premote the computer system well.

There is the funny story about how Bill Gates was showing off his 95 multimedia computer, with the computer graphics for it being generated by an Amiga computer hid under a desk.

$40 for this?

[dh003i]

Ok, so they've got this microgui environment. It's not significantly faster than X (20%, according to *them*). It can't run nearly as many apps as X. Oh yea, it offers *nothing* that isn't already offered by a solution that is free as in beer and free as in freedom (PicoGUI). So, why exactly should I waste $40 on this piece of shit, when it isn't that much faster than X, can't run many programs, probably isn't going to be the future of the FOSS community, and offers nothing that isn't offered by Pico's FOSS solution?

There is no reason.

As for performance, the $40 you spend on this crap could be spent getting a better graphics card. I believe you can get a GeForce 2's now for $30-$50. That's what I use on my current Gentoo GNU/Linux system (with WindowMaker). Guess what, no performance problems -- at all [qualifications: 1GHz CPU, 256MB SDRAM, 7200rpm ATA-100 HD].

People are really stupid when it comes to buying the latest greatest whatever. Here are the specs on my current PC:

1.1GHz AMD T-Bird CPU
256MB SDRAM
60GB 7200rpm ATA-100 hard drive
64MB GeForce2 GTS
19" Monitor

Guess what? It was fast when I bought it (a year ago). And guess what? It's still fast. It has not magically been transformed into a lumbering beast. For the home user, there is really no reason at all to buy anything other than that which sits at the best performance/price ratio. You can get an excellent system today for under $1000 that will be able to do anything you want as far as productivity goes, and will play most all games just fine.

My general plan -- and I think it's a good one -- is to upgrade once something 10 times better than what I have is available at an optimal price/performance ratio. And that's only if I have some need.

It's amazing to me how many home users are tricked into believing that a 2GHz CPU is somehow going to make their internet browsing experience any better, or make programs load faster and make Word work better. For almost all typical uses of a computer, you will *never* need to ugrade. You will only need to upgrade if you want to keep up to date with the latest games or if you want to do computationally intense computational work. Even then, you can still do so at the best price to performance ratio.

just got back....

[zogger]

... just got back an hour or so ago from my weekly supplies run to town. One of our stops is the church thrift store, girlfriend and I enjoy that random "deal" shopping. I always head to the electronic junk and hardware, she splits to what I call the "imelda marcos" area. Anyway, myself and another customer are staring at this old xt bundle, commenting on what we are running now. The dude actually starting complaining about xp, said NO WAY would he pay that to upgrade, but he was really bogued out about what he was running, which is ME. SO, here's my chance, I ask "Hey, ever try that "linux" stuff?".

yada yada, he sounds enthused already,he's heard of it, I'm the first person he's ever met weho's used it,he asks how much it is. I sez, "well, 30-40 clams from the vendors with manuals and stuff low end, or you can.." I only got that far he goes FOURTY DOLLARS FOR AN OPERATING SYSTEM?? WHERE CAN I GET IT????

No lie. Then I drop the next one, "well, you can download and burn it for free,too, or clone companies will sell it to you for like 5-10 bux whatever, oh ya, comes with one zillion programs, too"

He's floored, gonna try it.

One person at a time

(hey spider tools, you might have an incoming)

Download it here ---->

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the freely available version of Athene and DML. The Pandora Engine is also included in this archive.

http://www.simtel.net/pub/dl/60070.shtml

http://216.239.53.104/search?q=cache:http://www.ro cklyte.com/downloads.html

Re:And the .iso mirrors are ?

[great_flaming_foo]

Add up all the money you've spent on dates, gifts, etc. for her and divide it by the number of times you've had sex with her to get an idea of how much sex is costing you

did anyone else get this error:

Runtime error (func=(main), adr=7): Divide by zero

Re:Who would *want* Aqua on Linux?

[Master Bait]

Aqua is the most dog-slow, RAM-hungry POS in existence. I've always considered it the biggest *problem* with using OS X, since you can't use OS X without having to have this huge beast bogging down your machine.

I was a NeXTStep user in the early 90s and loved it. Fast forward to 2003. I recently got fully OSX'ed and think this new NeXTStep is a severly dumbed down and spray-painted and obfuscated Frankenstein.

I suppose Carbon was needed because none of the corporate commercial software houses would port anything to Cocoa, but the result is shameful.

TROLL! Mommy, mommy!!!! Master Bait said something bad about OSX!!!

Source tarball here, download ASAP

[0x0d0a]

Feel free to grab it here.

There's also a perl script in there (which I didn't write, just found somewhere else) which does more nice analysis of X memory usage.

Grab it ASAP, as the server is going down permanently within a couple of days. Matter of fact, if you want to make it available yourself for anyone interested, I'd appreciate it.

I use the XRes extension, which is relatively new...you can't be using an ancient copy of XFree86.

"aging X11" ???

[nurb432]

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.

Re:famous AmigaOS GUI?

[schon]

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.

Re:And the .iso mirrors are ?

[fyonn]

Your analogy is inherently flawed

I think his analogy is more inherently flawed due to the fact that if you buy a mushroom from a shop and it turns out to be poisonous, you can sue them, and they can't turn around and say "well, you shoulda read the fineprint that came with the mushroom. it states that the mushrooms are not sold with any expectation of being eaten and if the purchasers chooses to consue the mushroom then he must take responsibility thereof. indeed the mushroom is in no way certified to even be a mushroom, it may very well be a diving mask. no recourse is available against the mushroom vendor or mushroom supplier. this mushroom is not to be used in mission critical or life affecting situations. you are not allowed to make any duplicate of this mushroom, this includes taking a photo of it or even drawing it with a crayon. the physical characteristics of this mushroom are trademarked, copyrighted and patented. if you are unhappy with the conditions attached to this mushroom then you may return it to the vender who supplied it to you (with the purchase of a shopping trolley) and ask for a refund on your mushroom. he will likely inform you that he is unable to do this but you can certainly ask.

etc, ad nauseam

dave

Funny thing about that is...

[Paradox]

Having used both NeXT and OSX machines recently, I think this "dumbed down" statement is funny considering how much more feature-rich OSX is compared to NeXT.

I guess it's true you just can't please some people.

Isn't linux monolithic?

[moosesocks]

Isn't it about time that the windowing system was directly implemented into the kernel?

It certainly could be done without breaking compatibility with current console applications. After all, linux IS a monolithic kernel. I'd go as far as reccomending that some sort of graphical interface be intergrated into the POSIX standard. Limiting unix to a 640x480 console is ridiculous. Apple's been doing this since 1984 - long before X11 was drafted or Linux was created.

X has so much potential to be great, but after 11 years, it has failed to show it. To me, that is a flawed system.

Re:Isn't linux monolithic?

[JoeBuck]

Certainly the lowest level of the X server, namely the framebuffer, can be put into the kernel, and a number of X implementations have done just that.

Full Mirror w/Picts (Archive.org)

[ProtoStar]

Athene
MS Pict
Omega Pict

Remember NeWS Window System?

[billstewart]

NeWS was Sun's Network Extensible Windowing System, written in large part by James Gosling, who later went on to write Java. It was a Postscript-based windows system, so what you saw was really what you got when you printed things, and characters could be any size you wanted, and you could download programs to the display server so that work could happen at whichever end of the wire made the most sense, and mouse tracking worked really well because it ran on the server instead of the client. That's not a big issue if you're running clients and servers both on your desktop, but it matters a lot more when you're operating remotely across a slow network. Of course, being Postscript meant that debugging was a Black Art, and security was a serious risk, and the things could explode into a mess of pretty colors if you weren't careful, but it was still really really cool. And it could be stripped down to run on a Sun3, and was ported to the Mac, back when Macs had real 680x0s in them. It was happier on machines that had at least 8MB of RAM on them, but you could get away with a bit less.

NeXT also did some Display Postscript things that weren't as cool as NeWS, but still were good display environments.

fvwm2

[KPU]

Looks like someone wants to use fvwm and the variety of themes with different looks and actions. Only window manager I've seen that can do windows, mac os (who would want that? *duck*) and CDE.

shhh....

[caino59]

don't tell the RIAA! ;oP

Great, another step toward

[PotatoHead]

the less useful machine. I thought Bill was the leader in this area. Must we emulate everything?

The X window system is what makes a Linux machine multi-user. It also makes it useful as a multi-user machine at the same time.

The core of UNIX power comes from the multi-user philosophy. X was crafted with the same goals in mind. That is why they both have been around for such a long time.

Both of these things come at a small price; namely, a requirement for some basic literacy with regard to the system and how it works.

YOU CANNOT HAVE THE POWER WITHOUT PAYING THAT PRICE.

I did not spend the last 7 years learning these things only to have my environment dumbed down for the sake of those not willing to step up and actually learn something about the machines they say they need.

All of those folks wanting a frame-buffer only system really don't want multi-user systems --or at least don't want useful ones. Or, more likely, just flat don't know better.

As for those folks asking for X emulation, I ask this?

If the X window emulation does what X is supposed to wouldn't you have what you have with X right now plus added overhead? Why not consider using a toolkit to make the X development easier while not ruining the multi-user nature of Linux?

Win32 machines are multi-tasking machines. Sure, you can run processes as more than one user, even run applications on your machine as more than one user, but in the end, you still have only one desktop.

Many of the problems come from that one desktop and its close intergration with the rest of the OS. This is the same shit that Microsoft and Apple to a degree have been pushing all along. We don't need this.

For those that think we do, read again. WE DON'T.

Common arguments:

- The network display capability makes X slow.

Bullshit. The fastest graphics systems around have always used X. Want to see a sweet X server that does the network display thing nicely. Get any SGI IRIX machine and examine the X environment. 3D capable display, both in a window and full screen, on screen video in real time with sizeable windows, network applications, speed. All have been present for longer than the more capable win32 environments have existed. Local display requests do not go through the entire network stack. This combined with the excellence of UNIX and Linux network stacks make this a moot point anyway.

X is hard to configure.

Each year this is much less so. Soon it will also be a non issue. We have gone from hand tweaking our display to spin the CD and choose the type of display. Give it a bit more time and you will soon get all the little features you think you need as well. All without any sacrifice of the multi-user values that make Linux and X what they are; namely, better than everyone else.

Nobody needs all that extra capability.

Well, that is because most of them do not know what they are missing. We need to keep the power in the box by default; otherwise, we will end up running the same way others on more limited systems do now. Is that worth it?

X is old.

Well so is UNIX. Does that make it bad? No, if it were, it would be dead long before now.

This is long enough. If you actually want to see more take a look at my journal, there is plenty more in there for the reading.

To sum this up:

If you really don't understand what X and UNIX is about, just spare yourself and get a nice wintel PC and get it over with. Maybe split the middle and get an Apple. (I *like* Apple BTW, that's not the whole point here...)

If you want to actually take some control over your computing environment and have the ability to exercise choices, step up and shut up and start using X.

It will be worth your time in the end.

Re:Themes schemes-"G" Rated.

[SoupIsGoodFood_42]

That has to be the most funniest anology I have ever seen. Are you seriously trying to compare Quake to windowed GUIs? Put down the crack pipe buddy.

Problems with X

[binaryfeed]

Okay. I've read so many damn threads on this topic that I decided it's time I post my own opinion. Facts about X speed:

• 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 ... we're out of luck here without help from the video card manufacturers.

that's progress for you

[g4dget]

So, instead of an aging client/server, network-transparent window system, you can now be transported all the way back to 1960's technology: direct frame buffer access. If that isn't progress, I don't know what is.