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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 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 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
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.