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The Power of X
An anonymous reader writes "The license changes in the last version of Xfree86 have caused many distributions to reject the project in favor of the forked X.Org X server. As X.Org prepares to release the second version of the X.Org "monolithic" X Server (dubbed version 6.8), Ars Technica investigates the future of the X platform, as cooperation between X.Org and projects like GNOME and KDE begin to take take hold at freedesktop.org. Already host to an impressive array of projects, it appears that freedesktop.org will become the hub in which other Free Desktop projects can collaborate. Daniel Stone, release manager for freedesktop.org, gets into the details on how it's all going to work, in conjunction with freedesktop.org's upcoming platform release."
The supposed 'modularization' that is to take place in future 'X' releases sounds promising - release enough to work (or 'major' fixes) and then extremely long development cycles can be diminished.
The one caveat is to not micro-modularize; do not release things for install/upgrade that cannot stand on their own (i.e. - limited functionality vs. not executable).
I would like to see 'X' go on a diet, though (if possible).
From the interview:-
For the less code-inclined, there's always lots of documentation to be written! Manpages need to be written, documentation needs to be released Xorg 6.7. converted from random archaic formats to DocBook, et al. This is one area that really badly needs some love from those with the requisite skills.
I realy wish that this was a higher priority among developers, as it would greatly help both new users, and future developers.
Don't bother with the next cool widget until the docs are up and understandable.
It could happen. With each new version of Windows, we see it start to behave more like Unix, to exclude its naughty behaviors like running as admin at all times, but that can only be attributed to old, bad development on the behalf of the third party. At this point, we have permissions at the file system level, home directories (with many preferences stored within them), and the command prompt, which serves a purpose as an administration tool for scripting and such, rather than its previous use, which was to maintain DOS compatibility.
There are other examples, I'm sure. Post them if you got 'em.
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
wrong again, I think most would say there is a major trend in IT right now to move the applications back to the back room. Noticed all the web based applications lately. I would call that a thin client app. Lets face it a web browser makes a terrible thin client, but its the quickest way to convert all those idle computers on peoples desks back into terminals. I think the future is think but not fat client architecture. It will all for end user systems to have much longer life spans and make handhelds ever more practicle.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
That said, it has long been true and well-supportable that those XFree86 guys have definitely been a bunch of assholes for a long time. They maintained a really closed community which gave the appearance of complete disdain for what anyone else wanted out of X. Whether their actual behavior was in that mode is arguable (recall the massive enhancements of XFree 4), but they certainly didn't like to "play ball" with the rest of the community.
Then of course this license thing was the last straw, and that's what forced the distros' hands...they couldn't build their systems at all anymore when core components were GPL'd and either linked to XFree stuff or used its code.
In other words, I'm not sure how much this will impact the technical progress of X...but it's certainly good to get a broader base of people working on it, and a more open development in general.
Given a choice between free speech and free beer, most people will take the beer.
If they could be fixed, giving a more clean-looking GUI, linux would make much more headway into the desktop market.
Mod this as you will. I can smell the flames already.
**I was thinking of English. Most computer literate users speak it well enough, and if not by all means pick up the internationalization pack**
but that is not what internationalisation is all about, I for example use my computers in english, yet I write and read Finnish on them every day.
äöäöäöäöäöäöäöääöäÅÅÅÅÅÅÅÅ 7;
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
I'm currently using a beta release of the new Xorg and whoa is it nice. Finally true transparency, nice real dropshadows, etc. are possible.
;-D
There are probably more exiting features than the inclusion of Composite in the next releas (XDamage seems to be a great step forward for X over the network for example and XCB looks interesting too, RTFI) but hey, I'm just a sucker for eyecandy.
All in all I do get the impression that we all should thank Mr. Dawes for behaving in a way that lead to a fork of XFree. Xorg and freedesktop.org put the development of X back on track and it is only just beginning.
Finally, thanks to all the folks at freedesktop.org for doing such a great job and putting the fun back in my computer.
I don't think the web is a terrible thin client - it's incredibly cross-platform (heck, even my phone has an HTML browser on it), has a wide variety of input methods and control, and can support client-side processing of small-ish chunks of data. I use it for web-based apps all the time, and I've not found something it can't do yet :)
But without internationalisation, software developed in, say, French, would present a French user interface to you!
i18n means that gettext, or whatever, simply pulls out the en_US strings and the user is none the wiser.
Yeah, people realized that they liked all of their old applications and the project never really took off.
I read the internet for the articles.
A library of clip art is not harmful as long as it is in a separate file that you don't need. As it stands X.org is still using the packaging model of XFree, it's in several archives and you don't need them all to build X from what I can tell (although gentoo does it for me so I'm not too worried about it.)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
As someone who often puts together presentations, marketing slides, flyers for printing, etc., this is my single greatest annoyance about Linux at the desktop (and we're using Linux on all our desktops; heck, we're even a SUSE technology partner). Copying text between my Java IDE and OpenOffice gives me only about half a page of text - the rest is simply lost. How on earth can I simply copy from GIMP into an OpenOffice presentation like I can copy/paste from PaintShop pro to PowerPoint? The last time I tried, I couldn't even copy/paste consistently between various KDE apps.
As much as I hate to say it (and I really hate to say it), this is *the* one thing that Windows does right. More or less seamless application integration which works the way I need it to work.
Dan.
my biggest complaint is the configuration of X. xf86config should just be plain outlawed. I am an experienced unix admin and love linux but the only real complaint I have with is the configuration of X. I can get it working with no problem with xf86config or x86setup - but I really like what fedora has done - it is a non issue and you don't even have to mess with it at install time - this is the way it should be. I have installed fedora on at least 20 to 30 computers and they all went without a hitch and I didn't have to have the monitor sync rates. thanks fedora and keep up the good work!!
Terrible for some things. Not terrible for others. Look at all the websites that are applications. Eg travel sites. Select your city, date make a query.
Hmmmm, IF you are talking about freedesktop.org, that it is NOT Xorg. Freedesktop.org is collabration place for various projects to interact and make integration easer. I DON'T think anyone will mess with X protocol, so your worries are little bit over the top, IMHO.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
Then in ten years time, you will end up with exactly the same situation we are in today; obsolete crap in the base protocol, all effective new development in extensions. Except that you will have utterly broken backwards compatibility in the process. :)
:)
Time and time again, X11 has showed us that it is better to provide mechanism, not dictate policy--even unto the protocol itself.
The Extensions mechanism provides the X11 protocol with extrodinary forwards compatibility.
You can take a modern X11 Window Server from 2004, connect to it a crufty old X client from some godawful old piece of embedded hardware from twenty years ago, and have it work perfectly. At the same time, your modern server can perform nifty tasks that the protocol's designers never dreamed would be necessary, such as, well, everything Keith Packard and co are doing today.
In a well designed windowing system (such as Display Postscript, Quartz and even GDI although it falls down in a number of other areas), the drawing commands sent to the windowing system are exactly the same as the ones sent to the printer. This makes it very easy to create true WYSIWYG applications (you don't need to write an X11 rendering path and a PostScript rendering path for the same data, and hope you've done it correctly). The Xprint extension provides this functionality to X11.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
reminds me of the dilbert cartoon where PHBs recommend doing everything they are currently not.
"it should be monolithic, not modularized"
then you would complain:
"i dont use any of that stuff, make it modularized, what moron said it should be monolithic"
You're kidding Right?
Filesystem permissions on NTFS are a joke. In theory, they'd be great, but In reality, XP opens up everything wide for you upon install. They could take the OS X approach and prompt you for a password upon installing things and have a more secure desktop with no user inconvenience, but as it stands, Spyware X can be installed by a user and affect other users because generally, a user has way too much write permission the way MS has set up XP.
Home directories are worthless unless they A. work right and B. Come with well-implemented and executed file permissions. Again, this is an area in which XP is capable, but the issue of most users in an XP system having far too much power weakens it.
The Dos/Windows command prompt was, is, and always will be a joke. It feels like it was written by someone who never had to be productive at a command prompt. It hasn't had command completion until recently, it doesn't have 10% of the utilities (packaged with windows) that one needs to be productive, and it doesn't have enough device/file mappings to be able to truly take advantage of it. Just cause you can do ls doesn't mean you can do du -md 1 | sort -n or dd if=cf_img of=/dev/sdb bs=2k. As an additional kludge, the cmd.exe window is awful for running an editor in and doesn't resize well.
Just because Microsoft provides some of these features doesn't mean it does it well. Truthfully, I think they should give up on the command prompt. they'll never get it right, and remote administration can be done in a web browser anyhow (webmin, anyone?) It's not like they're going to build software remotely as source code is not a popular distrubution method on windows.
Basically, saying that Windows has a command prompt is like saying that linux has direct rendering support. They're both true, but in such useless ways.
Brian
"The Extensions mechanism provides the X11 protocol with extrodinary forwards compatibility"
Yes it does , but at some point its time to say that "this functionality would be better served being a core part of the system". Eg transparency.
"Does that count as a major redesign?"
No. I'm not interested Yet Another Open Source Groups pet project , I want ALL parties who use and/or develop X to sit down and agree on a COMMON standard that comes shipped AS THE DEFAULT on all unix systems, not an optional alternative you download of some website no one has heard of.
I have not seen real dissatisfaction with the technical side of XFree86 in the last few years.
I wish you wouldn't remove the In the distro community from my quote like that...it's pretty integral to my meaning.
There's apparently a ton of longstanding problems with the XFree codebase that are only now being addressed, both in fixing the current codebase and in a longer-term massive redesign/rewrite. The response for years has been "Well, it works..."
And this is pretty much precisely what I meant when I said, You hear a lot of bullshit from a lot of people bitching about all the things "wrong with X", but rarely from a well-founded technical basis. If you are out there someplace thinking about how your argument was from a well-founded technical basis...I hate to be the one to tell you, but.....
Given a choice between free speech and free beer, most people will take the beer.
development seems to move at a snail's pace, and let's be frank, it's almost the same as it was back in the good ol' unix days.
/.ers actually give a donation to projects that they use a lot, but don't contribute to? Maybe a poll is in need?
While I love open source, sometimes the fact that it is done for nothing is one of the things that ensures it is developed slowly. Unless you are a full time student, most people are working a day job to put food on the table. Without the cash motivation it is not always easy to spend the time and effort necessary to make a great project. I am not saying the money is what is important to them, though being comfortable, being able to buy a workstation and not living on the street is.
I don't know how many
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
One of the things that has always bothered me about XFree86 in the past 6 years I have used linux is XFree86's kind of lag in new releases... development seems to move at a snail's pace, and let's be frank, it's almost the same as it was back in the good ol' unix days.
Which, together with the license change, is the reason people have given up on xfree86. X.org 6.8 will include all the flashy cool new stuff people have been talking about for years, like translucent goodness a la mac os x.
I for one enjoy X.org and a windowing system that can hopefully be kept up to date and have more active development.
But my question is... how many more forks will we have?
Given that X.org is the original X foundation that has been maintaining the X11 codebase XFree86 split off of, and all the non-xfree86 X projects are now basically working under the X.org umbrella, I wouldn't say that we're seeing all that many forks.
But it wouldn't. Plenty of hardware can't do transparancy, and is used on systems that aren't powerful enough to do the job in software. Besides, it would break the protocol.
People said that fonts would be better served by making font rendering a core part of the system. What do we have today to show for it? A crufty, obsolete, nonextensible set of functions for drawing glyphs on the server side, that no new development uses because Xft/pango/fontconfig work together to do a much better job on the client side.
No one foresaw anti-aliased text, Unicode, truetype fonts, glyphs drawn with an alpha channel, etc. Fortunatly the mechanism that X provides allows a client to use these features without requiring every X server it comes into contact with to be upgraded to X12 or whatever.
I don't think [the command line has] gone through many changes at all.
Well, no, not yet; it's still cmd.exe, which only had minor enhancements to command. But the parent was talking about where Windows is headed, which makes the command line a particularly fitting example, because long-in-the-tooth will have MSH, which is vastly different and actually much more of a "real" shell.
Given a choice between free speech and free beer, most people will take the beer.
If Windows has such a "tight" and "well-designed" GUI, then please, tell me:
1) Why does Luna look like a pre-schooler threw up after eating several crayons?
2) Why do MS Office, MS Visio, and MS Visual Studio all look different (hint: they use different toolkits!)
3) Why does every other Windows apps (Winamp, Windows Media Player, Ephpod, etc, etc) use their own weird-looking skin?
4) Why do the buttons on every single installer (Wise, InstallShield, MSI) all look different?
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Answer these two questions, if you will:
* What do you suggest we should be using on the printer? * Why does it have to be different from what we use for the screen?
For the record, I'm a software developer myself, and I'm extremely happy that I do not need to write and debug my code twice.
All four of those companies are members of X.org.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
And how many modern X servers don't support modern popular extensions? Let's face it: XFree86 and X.org are the most popular X servers. Their codebases are compatible so the NVidia driver works on X.org too. Both of them support modern extensions like Xrender. Commercial X servers that don't support modern extensions will lose customers.
In order words: the free market will force other (commercial) X server vendors to support new, popular extensions.
Of course, you could tell that this was a case of ignorant ranting when the original poster referred to X.org, which is helmed by Keith Packard, as a pet project.
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience
``With a good set of drivers (NVIDIA), 3D is as fast as on Windows, and 2D is within 10% (go to www.rocklyte.com and look at their benchmarks comparing Athene, X, and Windows).''
Ok. That benchmark even seems to use unaccelerated video, so I was all wrong. Sorry to have spread FUD.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
``Xv extension. That allows the app to decode into a shared memory segment (like the old Xshm extension), and leave the graphics card to do the scaling and YUV=>RGB colour space conversion.''
Completely right. I was talking about unaccelerated video in my original post. However, be-fan proved me wrong on that as well. I stand corrected.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
While I love open source, sometimes the fact that it is done for nothing is one of the things that ensures it is developed slowly.
/.ers do anything at all. Personally, I contribute code. If I come across a bug in a program I use, or a feature I want. I often fix it. Then I submit a patch for it.
Yes. Sometimes, but not in the caes of Xfree86. There, it appears the main reason was a rediculous level of conservatism from the project leaders, including some of which who no longer even were active developers.
There are plenty of stories out there of presumptive Xfree86 developers who turned their backs on the project after being treated with what they felt was an unfair and arrogant attitude. Many of these are now active in Xfree86.
The problem that it's 'done for nothing', (not true, there are paid developers not living on contributions out there) is actually pretty small, if you're working on a project with a sufficently large interest. For instance, the reason why Linux took off and the GNU Hurd didn't can almost be attributed entirely to leadership differences.
Here the money bit comes in again. When people aren't getting paid, the barrier to exit is lower. You have to be respectful and kind and open and listen. It costs nothing to praise loudly but critizise softly. And be very wary of license changes.
I don't think most
Future contributions are usually determined by the reaction I get. Sometimes, you don't even get one. Some projects don't seem to want bugfixes or more developers. And these are the ones which are prone to forking.
The Inconstancy of the Windows Desktop
One of the more insistant and vocal themes heard in the desktop debate is that that Unix desktop needs to be like Windows. It is said that multiple widget toolkits, inconsistant dialogs, and other evidences of a decentralized development model must be removed before the masses will accept a Unix destkop. This cry for uniformity can be especially shrill, almost as if the very survival of a certain free operating system depended upon it. But is the underlying premise true? Is Windows really a consistant and uniform desktop?
The answer is resoundingly negative.
While conducting a quick survey of configuration dialogs under Windows, in an attempt to understand what a newbie user of my software would be familiar with, I discovered that there was no standard procedure for these dialogs. Even configuration dialogs from the same manufacturer varied wildly. By all Slashdot accounts, Windows users must certainly be mentally damaged from their constant exposure to such inconsistant interfaces.
Where is the configuration dialog located for a Windows application? Using the Windows system I use every day at work, I discovered that even this simple item was highly variable. Microsoft Word had two configuration dialogs, "Tools->Customize" and "Tools->Options", while Microsoft Outlook added an additional "Tools->Services". Microsoft WordPad had only one under a completely different menu "View->Options". Moving on to non-Microsoft products, I see that Adobe Reader and Quicktime Player have "Edit->Preferences". But lest you think those are consistant, Adobe Reader has a single dialog, while Quicktime Player has a submenu of three dialogs. Firefox and Roxio Creator Classic follow the WordPad model of placement.
What about the dialog contents themselves? Microsoft Word has modal tabbed dialogs, while Microsoft Outlook has a modeless tabbed dialog without a help button. Adobe Reader and Firefox have modal dialogs using a listbox instead of tabs to separate the pages. Quicktime Player is similar, but uses a combobox instead of a listbox. Some of these dialogs had help buttons while the rest lacked them.
Okay, what about the look and feel? Certainly the Windows platform has a consistant widget set? Sadly, no. Adobe Reader has an almost-but-not-quite Win2K look, that matches neither the Windows Classic nor Luna themes that comes with Windows XP. Roxio Creator Classic has a "brushed plastic" look with odd splitter controls. Quicktime player has, of course, a look and feel straight out of another operating system! Comparing native Microsoft applications only improves matters slightly. Microsoft Word has a completely different toolbar style than Microsoft WordPad! I could continue on to some truly egregious examples of inconsistancy, but I'll leave that as an exercise to the reader.
I think by now that I have thoroughly debunked the notion that the Windows desktop is uniform and consistant. The question remains though, is the Unix desktop better? The answer is similarly, "no". But since Windows isn't consistant, the urgency of the question is clearly lessoned. Newbies aren't going to be rendered insane by seeing Evolution running alongside Konqueror. They aren't going to go running back to Windows when their distro forgot to include Plastik icons with Mozilla.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!