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The Power of X

Posted by michael on from the name-that-you-want-to-touch,-but-you-musn't-touch! dept.

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."

4 of 410 comments (clear)

  1. What about Y? by Outsider_99 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    With all this talk of X, ive remembered Y-Windows http://www.y-windows.org/ Does anybody know whats happened to Y? According to the road map, version 0.3 should have beed out 4 months ago.

  2. Re:Progress by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    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?

    James Carr

  3. Time for X11R7 or even X12 by Viol8 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Its time a load of heads sat down and decided on the features that are required in the next MAJOR release of the X windows system/protocol. None of this piecemeal "we'll add it in as an extension" rubbish thats been happening for the last 10 years as this is becoming unmanageable; "My server has the dbe extension but not open-gl, your server has shapes but not etc etc etc." Just put ALL modern graphics requirements in the base protocol and write new extensions for Xlib and work from there.

    1. Re:Time for X11R7 or even X12 by groomed · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Time and time again, X11 has showed us that it is better to provide mechanism, not dictate policy--even unto the protocol itself.

      Um, X is a textbook example of that philosophy gone horribly wrong.

      To its credit, the X consortium tried to rectify their mistake thru the ICCC, but again they fell into the trap of creating something with so much misguided "flexibility" that it's almost impossible to find any apps which actually implement the ICCC in full, let alone cooperate in any meaningful way.

      The ICCC has been such a joke, that ten years on something as elementary as copy-paste is still a hit-and-miss affair. And what about projects like the CDE, or Enlightenment? Everybody's who been serious about using X to craft a desktop has felt the need to introduce policy above and beyond what X has to offer. That's not a sign of X's flexibility or time-tested design: it's a sign that X sucks.

      Let's hope freedesktop.org manages to beat some shape into the mess that is X, but they'll only succeed if they're willing to provide policy rather than mechanism. Bad policy that's followed by many is much more useful than good policy that's followed by few, or no policy at all.