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XFree86 Core Team Disbands
mumumu was among the many to write with this news: "XFree86's release engineer David Dawes has announced that "a majority of the XFree86 core team has voted in favour of my proposal to disband the core team". XFree86's News Headline has a short message about it. Why, all of a sudden?
What is the successor of the XFree86? Xouvert? freedesktop.org?"
"core team was no longer
representative of the active, experienced and skilled XFree86 developers"
That leads me to suspect it isn't XFree86 that is dying, just the current core team is giving up their posts- and probably to be reorganized with new members from among the referred to "active, experienced... developers"
I wouldn't panic yet.
then perhaps it's a good thing as there has clearly been a fair amount of rankling lately.
If you ask me, xfree86 doesn't need much "inovation". It works great the way it is! Of course, that shouldn't stop other people from taking the xfree code and do radically new stuff with it. If someone manages to come up with something that is significantly better than xfree I'll be more than happy to switch.
(NOT framebuffer because fb doesn't work well with some hardware)
Purely out of interest, what kind of hardware does the framebuffer not work well on?
Jesus Fucking Christ. How many times are people going to trot this shit out?
/flame on
/flame off
You haven't been using Linux or X very long, have you? Or if you have, how have you failed to notice how many times someone says "X is slow/boated/sux for 3d/etc"? If you did, did you ever follow the discussion after that point, or did you just say, "Yep, I agree with them, I can stop reading now"?
Because if you had, how did you miss the amazingly lucid explanations as to just why X does not suck; just how incredibly extensible it is; or how it does not suck at 3d, but that the real problem lies in the card manufacturers who won't release the necessary specs to allow open driver development? No, really. The fundamental problem with 3D driver development is that the card manufacturers have a limited pool of developers who can only acquire so much knowledge/expertise, and can only spend so much time developing drivers for each platform. How much better would things be if they would allow more experienced X devs to look at their code and suggest or write some improvements? We know the answer to this question; if you don't, what are you doing using Free Software?
X works. X works well. X, properly equipped with the right drivers, even does 3d well. If you can't configure it yourself (no shame there; I was scared as hell the first time *I* did it), there's all these nice distros from RedHat (oops, Fedora), SuSE, Mandrake, even Debian that have tools to do it for you.
Allright, I'm done. Back to browsing at +3...
The fdo.o X server is most likely going to be the successor to XFree86, even if development of XF86 continues. They fd.o X server project is led by Keith Packard, who did a lot of the work on Render and Xft, basically bringing XFree86 into the 20th century. He is also getting help from people who really know what they are doing, like Jim Gettys. They are working on the following features:
- A core X server based on the lightweight kdrive codebase (formerly TinyX).
- Back-buffering of all windows, like OS X. This will enable OS X-style fancy window effects like shadows and whatnot.
- OpenGL accelerated 2D rendering. This is a big step up from Apple's system, because it will accelerate actual drawing via OpenGL, not just window compositing. As a result of this, there is a lot of talk about seperating OpenGL from the X server, and allowing the X server to be just another OpenGL app running on top of a low-level OpenGL acceleration layer.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...