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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."
I don't really like this... X is mature and popular, replacing it will take a *lot* of time, and most people will not switch unless the major distributions do.
And anyway, alpha blending and an official toolkit? No. The unofficial X toolkits work well enough, and alpha blending is not very hard to hack in - it's also quite useless for anything other than eyecandy.
I doubt this project will get much highlight after this initial slashdotting.
I agree to some extent.
However, the state of toolkits under X is now quite a mess. How many of them are there again? 15? 20? All with their own look and feel, and all with their own pain in the ass dependencies. It's not enough that GTK and QT is somewhat of a standard. That's still one toolkit too many.
Ideally, there should be one standard toolkit api that is easily extensible by developers (ie a very flexible widget system), easily reconfigurable by the users (one standard look and feel, that "power users" can change).
How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life
Everybody says X sucks, that it's bloated, that it's slow, ... and everybody wants to replace it. The best effort I've seen so far it Qt (especially Qtopia for palm devices).
I think X is like Unix : it was inadequate and bloated but computers have caught up with their demands, in terms of power and disk capacity.
Computers get more and more powerful, networks are faster and faster, and X is more and more lightweight comparatively. Combine that with decades of testing and millions of developers who have experience with it, and I can guarantee X is there to stay and evolve.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
There is no way to get consistency in a window system. People will port their favorite window managers and toolkits to whatever window system you create. MS Windows runs many of the same toolkits that X11 does. Apple is even worse, officially supporting OS 9, Carbon, Swing, and Cocoa-based applications on the same desktop, and now also X11; and in addition to all that, toolkits like Gtk+, FLTK, Swing are also being ported to native Quartz backends.
If you want consistency on your desktop, just choose to use a consistent set of applications. Most non-computer experts can't even tell the difference between an MFC, Gnome, KDE, and wxWindows application: they all look equally flaky and confusing to them. And most people incorrectly think that something is an OS X native application if it has shiny gumdrop buttons. In short, most people neither know nor care.
Read the paper. It is of shockingly good quality, both in the writing and the completeness of ideas. The writer is a college senior!
This is the strength of the Open Source model. The source is out there for everyone to see; think you can do it better? Step up to the plate and take a swing!
This guy seems to know what he's talking about and as far as I can tell he's got a proof of concept to show allready. Along with solid research and design.
I wouldn't be to fast at hand with bashing this guy - he lists all the other XFree replacements and for some like Berlin/Fresco he can clearly state why they failed and what you have to aviod to not fail the same way. And he also acknowleges XFrees benefits and sees no point in overthrowing them.
Keep an eye on this project, this could be something really interessting.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Come now. Windows has shipped with a standard widget toolkit since its very first version, yet it has definately evolved since then.
Don't assume that had X got a built in toolkit, it would never have evolved. Given the extensibility of X it probably would have evolved nicely, in fact.
However, likewise you shouldn't assume that if X had a built in toolkit everything would use it. Of course, this would not be the case. Mozilla would still use XUL. OpenOffice would still use the VCL. Wine would still use its clone of win32 widgets. Some apps would still reinvent widgets for whatever reason (just as they do on Windows and MacOS X).
Toolkit compatability is best dealt with by standards, IMHO, rather than just moving them around....
You are making a common mistake. Just because someone is not skilled in the areas that you are, doesn't mean that they aren't skilled in other areas. Just because they have a hard time learning what you find easy doesn't mean that that don't easily learn many things that you find difficult to impossible.
E.g.: My wife has, after years of sporadic effort, finally learned that files are not stored inside of the programs that create them. I think. But she can pick up a new musical instrument and with a couple of hours practice play reasonably advance music on it. Not just scales, and not just strings. She specializes in ethno-musicology. Some things she handles well in an hour would take me years to do as well.
But with a bit of guidance she is able to handle ordinary WordProcessing, Graphics, and Music Composition programs. (The only problem is that she tends to save files in random places, and not understand why. Or where. I'm still working on trying to get her to understand disk folders.)
People have radically different skills. Learn to enjoy this. Or at least accept it without shouting. Its the people with different skill sets that have the most to offer each other.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I see some flaws in the document posted.
I love research, and more than anything I love the people involved in doing research: those who create, explore and can give us future direction. But I also believe that the research must be truthful if we want to build on it.
The Y presentation paper is interesting on the ideas it introduced (we could argue whether they are new or not, since NeWS did did before, in fact, with a more extensible system) but it fails on presenting X correctly.
The document goes on to show that the X-based approach has lead to major GUI fragmentation, and how the MacOS and Windows do not have this problem.
On the screenshots where X looks bad, the author shows some old graphics program running together:, xpdf and two modern apps: mozilla/xul and gnome calculator. All of those programs have Gtk-based or Qt-based equivalents that would have made the whole experience consistent.
The screenshot should instead be presented as a proof that X can still run applications that were developed 12 years ago.
Then he shows the Mac and Windows. Again, not really honest screenshots, because even Apple is shipping two different GUI views: the brushed metal theme and the aqua theme (this combination kills me) and Microsoft is not exactly known for keeping their GUI look consistent across their product line: Office, MSN and the rest of the desktop use different styles and widgets.
So summing it up: the screenshots are presented to prove a point which happens to not be there.
Now, to make things even more interesting, here is a little bit that the author of Y might not be aware of: widget rendering on MacOS X happens on the client side, and the operation that the server supports is basically "uptade-rectangle-with-this-RGB-buffer", there is no magic of server-side widget rendering on MacOS X.
Also, doing an X protocol translator is not an easy job, but I wish them good luck pursuing this new adventure, it defintely sounds interesting.
Miguel.