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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 leads to toolkit darwinism, which has left us with essentially GTK and QT as the two dominant toolkits. Imagine if X had been shipped with Motif as its native toolkit? Who the hell would use that in 2003?
You're doing it wrong.
According to the webpage:
;-)
Y depends on:
* libSDL 1.2 (available at www.libsdl.org)
Now, doesn't libSDL again depend on X?
Note to self: get smarter troll to guard door.
What's the license?
For great justice.
The paper is written around one idea, simplifying the internal structure of X. However, it is against the simplicity of X by claiming xlib's level of abstraction too low. One should start from the requirements, like the internal simplicity, and modern features. One should also specify the scope of the windowing system; mobile systems need other type of solutions from zillion-pixel worksations. Y lacks the obvious new features needed, such as subpixel cursor positioning, anti-aliasing, and 3d. IMHO, the paper is written by a confused state of mind - there is nothing shockingly good in it.
-- Imperial units must die --
Well yes, but it allows people to transfer system relatively painlessly, should Y become accepted. Apple have been masters at this in the commercial sphere, having moved their user base first onto RISC and then from a proprietary OS to a less proprietary *nix based system every time providing a way to keep old ways of doing things unbroken. The Free Software community could learn a thing or to. An admirable effort, X Windows for all its merits and for all the work that has gone into it is still a bit of a pig although i see the human interface issues as more pressing than the architectural ones. I wish the Y guy all the best of luck with his project and ask him not to forget about putting good human interface at the core of his thinking.
This is not particularly important since Y is a work in progress, but you can see use of a GCC C extension in Y's button.c:
.c = &buttonClass, .reconfigure = buttonReconfigure, .paint = buttonPaint, .pointerButton = buttonPointerButton, .pointerMotion = buttonPointerMotion, .pointerEnter = buttonPointerEnter, .pointerLeave = buttonPointerLeave
static struct WidgetTable buttonTable =
{
c: &buttonClass,
reconfigure: buttonReconfigure,
paint: buttonPaint,
pointerButton: buttonPointerButton,
pointerMotion: buttonPointerMotion,
pointerEnter: buttonPointerEnter,
pointerLeave: buttonPointerLeave
};
That's not necessarily a bad thing - I think GCC is one of the best compilers around. The only issue here is that that particular named struct member syntax construct has been deprecated since GCC 2.5 and may be dropped in the future. If I understand the GCC docs correctly I think the alternate C99 syntax would be:
static struct WidgetTable buttonTable =
{
};
But I could be mistaken.
Yes, but aren't Xouvert and DirectFB others starts ?
I'm lost in those things...
Will we have a replacement for X ? Will we have the choice when installing Linux (like KDE or Gnome) ?
Will we have a simple and light software for home users and a big, with network support, for the IT ?
I'm not sure to really understand what this news means.
Ploum.net.
That's true, as far as it goes, but is pretty much unnecessary.
The "norms" as you call them can click through a RedHat or Mandrake install if they want, and if they accept the defaults will end up with a desktop that is not so far removed in usability from a Windows interface that they will be incapacitated. At least, unless they are such complete morons that they shouldn't be allowed within spitting distance of a computer...
This notion that everybody should throw out all desktop environments except one and unify is all very well until you try to decide which should go or stay.
The whole point is to enable freedom of choice, not to turn Linux desktops into Microsoft-style dictatorships.
BSD was originally developed at Berkeley - ie college students, gov't funding.
XWindows was originally developed at MIT - ie college students, gov't funding
GNU was originally developd at MIT - ie tenured college professors stealing BSD code and relicensing it.
Linux was originally developed by a college student in Finland.
See a pattern yet?
Perl is actually an exception in that it was originally developed to scan HTTP logs to see who was downloading porn at the NSA, and Larry Wall is now employed by O'Reilly which is the number 1 publisher of perl books, does a lot of perl training, etc. so there is a business model behind it.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
GNU was not developed at MIT. Stallman resigned from the AI lab before doing anything on the gnu project. Oh and the BSD code stealing line is bullshit too. There's no BSD code in the GNU system, and I'm not sure why anyone would relicense BSD code under the GPL.
>Problem: X11 is inefficient.
>
>Answer: No, it isn't. X11 is pretty damned
>efficient. Today's pixmap-laden interfaces can
>run much more slowly over a network than the
>original interfaces, whicch were mostly big,
>flat-color rectangles, but the same is true of
>VNC and similar.
Do you mean that X is efficient for flat-color rectangles but inefficient for pixmap-laden interfaces?
If so, the definition of efficiency needs to be updated. Today, efficiency means efficiency dealing with pixmap-laden interfaces. Anything is efficient for flat-color rectangles.
This efficiency is not comparative. "VNC and other interfaces are inefficient too" is not a good excuse for X to be inefficient as well.
>Problem: X's multiple-widget set system is a bad
>idea.
>
>Answer: No, it isn't. [snip]
>But, you say, this ignores the fact that Windows
>and Mac OS have advanced through the years! Nope.
>First, Windows widget sets *have* broken user
>level compatibility on a regular basis. Menus in
>Office XP now work a lot differently than menus
>in 1987 did.
How is it different than GTK 1 and GTK 2? QT 1 and QT 2 and QT 3? As far as I know, most, if not all, applications have to be rewritten, so X widget sets *also have* broken user level compatibility on a regular basis.
Once an application have chosen a widget set, it is doomed in the sense that it has to be revised when the widget set does - it is unrelated to how many widget sets a system can support.
So, in this sense, the single widget set settings on Macs and Windows is NOT a disadvantage at all when compared with X.
>Second, some widget sets are
>hamstrung by initial design flaws. The classic
>MacOS widget set does not include a slider
>widget, for example. As a result, years of
>application developers misued the scrollbar
>widget, made up their own widget (which led to
>even worse user interface problems), or just
>went without. The ability of X11 to evolve has
>let things like KDE's tearable panes come to the
>fore. Also, when it comes to APIs...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) or
>the almost-as-grotty Win32
As QT and GTK and other X widgets can evolve, Macs and Windows widgets can evolve just as well.
So the "ability to evolve" is not unique to X11. This argument of how X11 is "superior" is just plain nonsense.
>Problem: X11 is hard to use.
>
>Answer: No, it really isn't. Occasionally, piss-
>poor setup on the part of distro makers has made
>things more of a pain than it should be. If a
>user isn't interested in remote windowing, he
>shouldn't have to worry about xauth or xhost.
>This is largely a problem of the past.
Show me a good way of pasting one selection over another selection under X without retyping.
Like I said in prior similar topics, for intranets, businesses really want an HTTP-friendly GUI to avoid firewall hassles. Candidates include XWT, and SCGUI (my pet). I suppose XUL could also be included. HTML forms + JS + DOM is really a pain for GUI emulation.
Table-ized A.I.
The plan is to continue development. Up to this point, due to the nature of an individual project, development had to be done solo -- although we had various discussions regarding the design of the system.
Hopefully, when Mark gets back from holiday and gets settled at his new job, we'll be able to get going again.
Cheers,
David
Well I didn't read the whole paper, but the first 5 minutes made me go.... you know this guy actually knows something, the next 5 minutes made me go, you know this guy actually knows a hell of a lot, and the next 5 minutes after that, I was convinved that it's not a bad system to replace X Window, with.
If people actually got behind this, poked around, wrote drivers so everything didn't have to go through SDL and the other things that it needs it could really work, admitidly it'd be a bit of a shift and many things done today would have to be built as modules to the windowing system, thinking particularly things like Evas *druel*, themes and so forth.
Bigest turn-on: You could connect to a machine, run a program and no matter what it was it'd look right on your machine, somone else running the same program on the same machine would have it look right on their desktop as well.
Bigest turn-off: The number of legacy X11 appications which would totally ignore the good features of the windowing system and fact it'd probably take 10 years to get to the stage where nvidia and ati would write accelerated drivers for it.
Now of course I am a beast of my enviorment, so I'll just mourn that I saw no mention of RISC OS and say jolly well done, I don't think my masters project will be anything close to this impressive.