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."

Comments

Built in toolkit

[Michael Hunt]

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?

Re:Built in toolkit

[Spoing]

Come now. Windows has shipped with a standard widget toolkit since its very first version, yet it has definately evolved since then.

Yes, though enhancements show up much more slowly in Windows. Except for the icon and interface whitewash with XP, it's not much different from what was shipping with Windows 3x.

To drive this point home: I've been showing off Linux at work using Knoppix and a USB pen and have had people astounded...to the point I'm starting to temper thier expectations. Simple things like tabs, and complex things such as ioslaves (with a real world example) leave them saying Microsoft doesn't stand a chance against Linux. Well, that's too much enthusiasm but I hope this gets the point across;

Windows itself has improved the base widget set, though most Windows apps still look like they were designed for Windows 95 and very few of these new widgets are used there.

Depends.

[termos]

According to the webpage:
Y depends on:

* libSDL 1.2 (available at www.libsdl.org)

Now, doesn't libSDL again depend on X? ;-)

Re:A pointless endeavour...

[gsdali]

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.

Re:more info please

[larry bagina]

Apache was originally developed at NCSA in Illinois - ie college students, gov't funding.

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.

Re:Rebuttal

[David McBride]

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