Frontiers: A New Xlib Compatible Window System

alucard writes "The JourneyOS people have published this overview of their upcoming window system. It looks like it is OpenGL based and uses XML as the communications protocol. The biggest news is that it is supposed to have Xlib compatibility, but uses HyperQueues instead of Unix domain sockets. Could this get rid of the speed problems of XFree86 while still retaining Xlib compatibility? I think this is something everyone wants, but projects to create alternative GUIs such as Fresco and PicoGUI have given up any hope of compatibility with X11 or Xlib. Can we expect another alternative out there soon?"

Comments

could it be...

[SuperBanana]

Could this get rid of the speed problems of XFree86 while still retaining Xlib compatibility?

Could it be that the poster hasn't read more than 1 page into the comments on the last dozen times this X-is-slow BS has come up? I thought we all agreed on this one, but apparently not.

This is very frustrating to see, because this makes for system #3, and things were already bad enough with 5 billion different window managers. Choice is great and all, but there's a reason some things are standardized, and "xlib compatibility" is not the same as "X"; I guarantee this new system will break all sorts of things in new and exciting ways.

Perfect example of how open-source has failed us; EVERYBODY's gotta invent their own wheel instead of helping to make the existing wheel(s) better.

Didn't Apple teach us anything?

[daBass]

"This allows for one of the goals of JourneyOS, which is eventual Win32 compatibility"
Oh no. Not just X, but also Win32 compatible.

I doubt we'll ever see this project finish. When is anybody going to just start from scratch, like Apple did with OS X? Build it and they will come.

Re:That depends...

[Anonymous Coward]

Regardless of what computer you run it on, you had better count on the flying pigs being there before a window system based on OpenGL and XML beats X11. After all, despite all the slagging it gets on slashdot, X11 does have a reasonably sane binary wire protocol and XFree86 does utilize most of the 2D capabilities of your video card.

Of course XFree86 depends on the card manufacturers giving them documentation for the hardware, but if the manufacturer doesn't see any advantage in helping Linux use their cards to their fullest, don't expect for a minute that they would help some unknown group like JourneyOS.

Re:Hrmm

[digitalunity]

The idea here isn't to create an X alternative, but an X replacement. Something modern, fast, light. I know everyone is going to chime in with 'XFree86 is good enough. And it isn't bloated or slow'. It is an excellent piece of software, but it isn't as fast as it could be. There are commercial X11 servers for Linux that really are as fast as advertised, I've seen it in person. Another of the 'problems' with XFree86, and even commercial X11 servers is that they don't take advantage of modern GPU's. Granted, OpenGL isn't an ideal method of rendering *everything*, but for some things, it would offload much of the graphics subsystem from the CPU. There are cases where OpenGL would be much slower, but with a little smart programming, this can be avoided. OpenGL also has the added benefit of adding some eye-candy features like transparency without taxing the CPU. Anti-aliased vector fonts are easy with OpenGL.

The only problem I see here, besides the usage of XML(it's flexible and easy to program, but too large as a metadata medium), is that many have tried this before and failed. Only time will tell.

I'll give it a week before declaring it 'YetAnotherDOA sourceforge project'.

ARGGH! X isn't where the slowdown is!

[MarcQuadra]

Alright, people need to listen closely. XFree86 is NOT SLOW, the toolkits you lay on top of it are what bogs it down.

I get full-window dragging and resizing in WindowMaker on my old 366MHz laptop, and it has an ATI Mach64 video chipset. Windows crawls when I do similar operations on the same hardware.

I seriously suggest that if you think X is slow you check out a more lightweight window manager and apps. GNOME and KDE have a LOT of overhead because they run on top of an extra layer of abstraction (GTK+ and QT, respectively). WindowMaker is written in C to interface with X more directly and it shows.

You can still use your GNOME/KDE apps under WindowMaker, I'm using konqueror as my file manager right now. Try it.

As for this project, it sounds cool to me. I think X is plenty fast as it is, but that doesn't mean I think someone should take what we've learned over the last decade and apply it to a more modern 'ground-up' solution. It would be nice if there was an X replacement that had QT and/or GTK+ tied in more closely, or if we had a quartz-extreme-like OpenGL windowing system and font renderer with postscript-esque qualities (i.e. run my desktop at high resolution, but zoom everything appropriately for 'real-world' DPI).