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freedesktop.org xlibs 1.0 Released

Posted by timothy on from the how-long-until-etc dept.

Daniel Stone writes "A short time ago, freedesktop.org xlibs 1.0 was released. Simply put, this is the collection of libX11, libXext, and other little-used libraries that kind of power your whole desktop. The xlibs team at fd.o are now maintaining all these libraries, and more, and we're going to be making releases as part of the fd.o platform, which is far more wide-ranging, but it still forms an important part of the platform. Share and enjoy!"

2 of 243 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Who uses Xlib by CoolVibe · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Raw Xlib? Almost nobody. And yes, GTK and QT on X11 do depend on it. The fd.o stuff looks really promising, since the stuff from X.org is starting to show it's age.

    And X is NOT slow. For what it does, it does it quite efficiently, and it even has network transparancy thrown in for "free", because of the way it works. Just because the code base of XFree86 is a bit aged and has accumulated a lot of cruft over the years, doesn't mean the initial design is flawed. It was ahead of it's time, and it's still relevant.

    Oh, and X works pretty good for me. Haven't seen a crash because of X in years. Maybe it's something else (buggy driver? broken hardware?) that's plagueing you. It's not X, in any case.

  2. Re:Who uses Xlib by BrookHarty · · Score: 5, Insightful

    And X is NOT slow.

    He is right about X not being slow. The problem is the perception thats X is slow. X is what is visual to the user, users either blame KDE/Gnome or X.

    Take a pre-emptive low latency linux kernel and run X on it, its like night and day, its smooth, fast, which proves its not X but the kernel.

    Windows cheats and loads the gui extremely fast, but if you watch your hardrive light, and tool tray, you will noticed things are still being loaded in the background. The system is busy for a few more seconds. You can load an application, and it waits till after the services start.

    So, X seems slow compared to other OS's.
    1. Long delays to get into KDE/Gnome, and actually use the system.
    2. Slow response on user input.
    3. Multitasking, switching apps pause the system.
    4. Loading directories in ICON/Image view takes longer than windows.
    5. Lindows has everything running as Root for a speed boost.

    I predict we will see pre-emptive, low lantency kernels as standard on Mandrake and Suse. Preemptive kernels are now standard on 2.6.x (well, if you check the box). And even more pre-linking to help boot time.

    BSD has the same issues. Apple's X server does seem faster than both Linux & BSD. I'm only running window maker on it, so its not an exact match, but task switching and running gimp does seem more reponsive.

    Could the answer be the mach kernel osx uses? Maybe we need a new suite of benchmarks for user interaction. (os+X+wm/etc).
    -
    I code in my SecondLife