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New X Roadmap from Jim Gettys
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.
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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.
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
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!
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.
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.