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New X Roadmap from Jim Gettys

Posted by michael on from the best-laid-plans dept.

A reader points to a roadmap on freedesktop.org that provides a good summary of what is out there for *nix desktops, with emphasis on X but also covering some other areas.

7 of 278 comments (clear)

  1. Re:X Can Be Sold... by alset_tech · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The difference (and this is not a slam towards X - I love it) is that learning a video game is a recreational process. Learning X in a business setting is a productivity issue. In many cases this isn't a big deal, but in some situations this can be a serious consideration. When you have to take time for employee training the benefits of an X system may have some competition for budget. Dan

    --
    Standing on the shoulders of giants.
  2. There is no specific roadmap by sisukapalli1 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Except a long list of associated technologies. For a non X-pert, the article is just a summary of what is there out there. I was expecting some sort of "this is what the future plans are."

    Roadmap is a little bit misleading term.

    S

  3. Bring it on by Space+cowboy · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Any X "roadmap" is going to have the hungry trolls out in force, mindlessly flailing around with "arguments" that X is badly designed and should be junked at the first opportunity.

    My take is this. You can do what you like to the underlying graphics subsystem. I neither know nor care what the protocol-on-the-wire says. However, you can take the network transparency from my cold and bloody fingers once I've shuffled off this mortal coil, and even then you'll have a fight on your hands. This single attribute is the reason I use it, and why it's possible to remotely administer far far more unix machines than windows ones. VNC is cool, but X is built-in. I love it.

    Simon.

    --
    Physicists get Hadrons!
    1. Re:Bring it on by Space+cowboy · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Yes sir, yes madam, we have our first customer, roll up, roll up, see the troll feverishly attack the non-existent target.

      As has been said many many times before, the network transparency does not affect the local transport. The X team amongst others have done tests (you know, where you measure things), and the implementation (using unix sockets, which are massively efficient data-transports, and shared-memory (no transport at all)) is as fast as you can get. It's within the theoretical margin of error of the peak performance of the system. Nothing goes faster.

      I can't say this any simpler. X is massively efficient on the local channel. Direct-X on the PC is a different name for the same thing - an API into the low-level drivers.

      You might argue that the low-level drivers are in need of optimisation, and I might agree in some cases, but that would still be the case for any new system. X itself is pretty bloody good at getting the maximum performance out of any hardware you throw at it - try running the 2-D blit in X11perf, then multiply the area * bitdepth * fps, divide by your AGP bandwidth and read the number you get .... You'll be surprised if you're running nvidia or ATI cards. Even venerable matrox cards push the bandwidth limit ...

      Simon.

      --
      Physicists get Hadrons!
  4. how about basic copy & paste? by McKie · · Score: 4, Insightful

    All that stuff is great, but the clipboard situation still stinks. It's one of the main stumbling blocks whenever I try to get someone interested in using Linux.

    Even if you truly believe in selection/middle-mouse, you have to admit that it should at least be *possible* to configure X to use a universal Alt-C/Alt-P.

  5. VNC vs. X by penguin7of9 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Note that network transparency is really mostly about conventions and standards for applications running on different hosts.

    VNC doesn't try to address that issue at all. And, in fact, GDI+ and Quartz can be trivially used as remote display engines, but neither their toolkits nor their applications have any clue how to behave properly.

    Unfortunately, Gnome and KDE are eroding network transparency in X11. For example, they use some of their own preferences files, accessed via the file system, which means that preferences come from the remote machine, not the desktop. I think Gnome is trying to address this, I'm not sure about KDE.

  6. Re:Stallman hates X-Windows by penguin7of9 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Robert Stallman recently published a treatise entitled "The X Window's Trap" on his GNU.org personal homepage.

    Stallman (that's Richard Stallman) in that article makes a point about the X Consortium's licensing policies. The X Consortium, in fact, took a position similar to Microsoft: "open source is good only if we can take the source and make it proprietary whenever we like". That's what Stallman disagrees with.

    We can't say "Fuck Bill Gates" in one breath and then "I love X" in the other and remain morally sound and forthwith.

    You are right if by "X", you mean "the X Consortium". But the X Consortium has been pretty widely disliked in the open source community for a long time for just that reason.

    X11 itself, however, is an open network protocol. Stallman doesn't have any objections to open network protocols.