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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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Ah, there's probably a joke in there somewhere about crossroads and hidden treasure, but I can't find it...
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
I though he was working on all the termcap stuff...
Low level xlib (ie, generic level) support for X session movement from machine to machine.
This sounds a bit like screen implimented for X - you can take apps to work and back again without shutting them down, and keep apps running whilst restarting an X server. (With a bit of luck it will support echoing one app to mutliple windows as well.) It also allows for graceful app shutdown when an X server dies.
Up until now I have been using VNC to do this, but adding it directly into xlib should make it a good deal less clunky. Way to go guys.
Beep beep.
Sigh. And what issues are these? Have you talked to any of the X11 gurus lately, such as Keith Packard. I assure you they very much do "get it" and are doing wonderful things to make an already amazing framework even better. X11 is an amazing piece of work, one that is still working well today, almost 16 years after it was introduced. With the new extensions being worked on to allow compositing and true alpha channel blending, and because of the brilliant way in which is being done, the capacities of X11 can rival or even surpass Apple's Quartz system. No more nasty hacks are needed to simulate transparency. Everything from true live matrix transforms (imagine live windows morphing in real-time, something that even OS X fakes) to 3-d capabilities (the composite manager can map the live windows onto surfaces of polygons and use opengl to render them) without fundementally breaking the X11 protocol. In other words, remote log into an old SGI box and your apps will still run and have these effects.
Dispite all the work that's being done to make X11 better, it's number one killer feature has always been network transparency. Fortunately many of the security concerns of this are being addressed; X11 will probably soon no longer default to tcp/ip connections, but rather use unix-style sockets only and have ssh connect them. (Very few people have a real good reason to not tunnel X11 through ssh anyway).
So things are looking really good for the Linux desktop and X11. I'm excited for the next year and hope to be able to contribute in some small way. We have 2 years to really develop some great features before longhorn comes out. Hopefully with things like the composite extension, we can have more capabilities sooner.
For anyone that doesn't know:
The Xouvert Project
has been set up to help develop experimental extensions to X in an open way, using Free Software.
(It's not a competing X implementation, it is assistance).
(Jim didn't mention this in his paper)
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
Reading this document has given me a new respect for the X developers.
You can use a modern X server to talk to an X client on a 1990s vintage machine with no problems at all, yet X is pretty fast on modern machines, has pretty good 3D support and is being updated to add more and more eye candy all the time - without breaking backwards compatibility.
Their aims may not be the same as the ones you think they should have for your own use, but when compared against their aims they are doing very well indeed, and should be recognised for that.
Beep beep.
Back when I first got a PC capable of running X (1993?), I remember having to use Metro-X instead of XFree86. At the time I was blown away by Metro-X since: (a) it actually worked and was easy to configure -- no tweaking resource files all day, and (b) it seemed to cost money, which baffled me since I never figured anyone would pay for Linux software.
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.
This is a very interesting article. The thing that I found most interesting is that it demonstrates that the open source community is now in the driver's seat with respect to X development. That's a real change from the old days when the X consortium wouldn't give the XFree86 group the time of day.
I know alot of people are down on the XFree86 group these days, but it looks like they single handedly destroyed the old X consortium.
If my memory serves me correctly, this was several years ago already.
And what basically happened, is the XFree86 guys did a big "fuck you very much, we'll stick with X11R6.3".
The X Consortium, realizing they were no longer in the driver's seat, had to change their licensing so that XFree86 would go along, and it would appear like the Consortium still had authority.
If anyone else recalls the actual events better, please pipe up. But the take away message is that for all intents and purposes, XFree86 is X.
And Stallman is so rabid about his ideology that he often hurts his own cause.
1) (partially linux specific) A way of getting DGA (or DGA2) to work for a non-root program. No sudo-stuff, no suid root, just a way for a completely ordinary user to use DGA without being able to crash the machine.
2) A standard way of getting an equivalent to the MSWindows Alt-tab and alt-enter for programs that run in fullscreen mode.
For example, an extension that the window manager can hook into, that allows fullscreen applications to run in an own workspace, and a xserver enforced keycombination that can bring back the window manager workspaces if the full screen application crashes.
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.
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.