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Y: A Successor to the X Window System
impto writes "Whenever someone brings up the topic of replacing X, everyone always says that's nice, but where's the code? Well, Mark Thomas put his money where his mouth is and produced a replacement that maintains network transparency while adding many of the features that people desire from X such as alpha blending and a built-in toolkit. It still needs a bit of work to be as featureful as X but it's a fresh start that takes advantage of current technology and ideas. Read the paper here in PDF (1.7MB) or PS or grab the source and start hacking."
That's all well and good, but one of the reasons that X is so successful is that you can use whatever toolkit you want, and all X really is is a network-aware framebuffer.
This is EXACTLY what has kept the supposedly "clunky and outdated" X system so popular.
Yes, linux users are screaming that there is ALOT of overhead in X that is not needed... and for a single user home machine, something that linux AND X is not designed for, they are absolutely right.
but, the power that we enjoy COMES from this. the Windows GUI system is a very limited toy compared to X because it was designed for single computer use... to not be used by 5 people or more at once.
Me? X is the absolute best thing out there for what I do. I have a single high power (ok super low power to you gamers, it's only a dual P-III with 2 gig of ram and a raid 5 scsi160 drivesystem... gawd how do I live with it's slowness...) machine in the basement and a NCD terminal in every room elsewhere in the house. if Iget up in the middle of the night wanting a slashdot fix, there it is in my room on less than $30.00 worth of hardware + the monitor but I have every bit of processing power that is sitting in the basement.
Businesses Love being able to do this... one really high end server could serve 30 desktop workstations and make it so 1 admin can instantly upgrade all 30 of those desktops instantly... (too bad NCD terminals are as expensive as a desktop PC when bought new, but that is another issue)
I love X, I do things with X that are 100% impossible with windows (and I regulary piss off the windows admins here by showing them weekly what windows can't do.)
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
That may be.
It still sucks though.
...the modern, easy-to-use APIs of GTK and Qt blow away the horrific Macintosh Toolbox API (note: I am not a Cocoa developer, so things may have improved)...
Qt is a beautifully designed API, but GTK+ is anything but. It is an inconsistent and hassle-filled shoehorning of OO concepts into a non-OO language. And I'll agree with you that the original Mac Toolbox kinda sucked (and by extension, Carbon, which is just an extension of the original toolbox for ease of porting).
But Cocoa? Cocoa is the most glorious, beautiful, perfectly-designed and implemented API ever conceived (being based on NeXT, which has the same attributes). Cocoa is what Qt is trying to be (see moc - they're trying, with some success, to give C++ the power of Objective-C).
But GTK+? No, thank you. Never using that horrendous API ever again (and I've written pure assembly Win32 programs, so I can take pain!)