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."

Comments

So...

[Anonymous Coward]

The next X.org release is X, free, 6.8?

Progress

[Zorilla]

Looks like the original XFree86 project was going nowhere fast. The distros making the first move to X.org want to make some progress to making Linux (and other Unix-types) ready for the desktop. Hopefully, X.org is the first sign of progress to a backend which will eventually be able to do things a modern desktop will need to do.

Re:Progress

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Progress

[Zorilla]

But my question is... how many more forks will we have?

Think of it this way, Linux is like a fancy dinner, just remember that this fork is for the sala- NO, NOT THAT ONE!

Re:Progress

[jusdisgi]

I disagree. 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. More often it's from either a "why is X such a bitch to configure" or "gee those XFree guys are a bunch of assholes." In the distro community I have not seen real dissatisfaction with the technical side of XFree86 in the last few years.

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.

Re:Progress

[Anonymous Coward]

I have not seen real dissatisfaction with the technical side of XFree86 in the last few years.

Have you been listening?

(A) 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..."

(B) There's been an emormous amount of criticism of X protocol design, going back 20 years. But with the rise of OSS frameworks, this reached a breaking point. The X response has been that the Toolkits serve the Windowing System and "Well, X11 is X11..."; rather than the more sensible attitude that the Windowing System should serve the Toolkits (and user programs). This is probably the biggest philosophical difference giving rise to the XFree fork.

The licence change was portrayed as a legal issue, but it was really just the final case of the "XFree Guys are Assholes". If the project wasn't already forking, there would have been no legal shit stirred up.

Re:Progress

[Performer Guy]

If you're talking about the DRI then I have to comment that direct rendering is nothing like DirectX 3. The DRI is an underlying mechanism to get 3D drivers to interface with hardware efficiently and in a modular way, it doesn't affect the higher level ABI in any way what soever. Something like the DRI is essential for efficient hardware acceleration on modern hardware with complexities like high speed DMA from the card. It is completely invisible to applications that don't care. It is not a hack and it's nothing like the crimes Microsoft committed with D3D.

Re:Progress

[jusdisgi]

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.....

Re:Progress

[Midnight Thunder]

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.

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 /.ers actually give a donation to projects that they use a lot, but don't contribute to? Maybe a poll is in need?

Re:Progress

[jsebrech]

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.

Re:Progress

[be-fan]

A) If people say X is slow, and it turns out not to be XFree86's fault, then the people are wrong. They can say that OpenOffice is slow (it is) or Mozilla is slow (it is) or GTK+ is slow (it is), but saying X is slow is wrong (it's not, as proven by apps that *do* run fast on X).
B) Only OS X remembers the contents of windows. Most other OSs do not. So it's not a problem limited to X, and in general it's not a problem that would be a big deal if dumb applications didn't handle EXPOSE events so badly.
C) The buffer copy would only make things twice as slow if the *only* thing the server needed to do with each command buffer is copy it to the graphics card. Of course, the actual processing is much more complex than that. In practice, unless you're doing something stupid like drawing single pixels at a time, the overhead imposed by the X protocol is dwarfed by the actual cost of drawing.

Re:Progress

[be-fan]

If you actually benchmark the damn thing, you'd see that it is pretty damn efficient. 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). My own benchmarks show that with reasonably-sized primitives, you can drive the graphics card at about half it's memory bandwidth, which is very efficient for a general-purpose 2D protocol.
Also, you're obviously not a programmer if you think people use single pixels to draw movies or text. Movies use the XVideo extension or OpenGL, which stream pixel data in batches to the graphics card. Text drawing uses server-side pixmaps of each glyph, and the normal case involves simply sending some commands to string together the glyphs that are already in video memory.

Re:Progress

[imroy]

My understanding (I've never actually looked too hard at this) was that with videos/movies, you use the 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. You certainly do not send every pixel over the X socket. Otherwise my 1600x1200 display would grind to a halt when playing a movie fullscreen. In reality the player only uses a few percent of my AthlonXP/2400 to decode a DVD or XViD video.

Re:Progress

[RAMMS EIN]

``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.

Re:Progress

[FooBarWidget]

Sigh, there we go again...
First, get this: when you see a problem, there can be a whole bunch of causes. The only way to fix a problem is to correctly identify the cause.

Which you are not doing here. "X apps seem to be slower so X must be slow" may make sense from a non-technical user point of view, but that doesn't mean it's correct. In fact, it isn't.
If you benchmark things and stuff, you'll see that the problem is not in X itself: it's in the toolkits. So if people listened to you and ditched X, we'd still have the same problems because the toolkits are still slow.
Try using something like WindowMaker and some non-GTK non-QT apps. You'll find that they usually respond significantly faster (not on my machine though; Athlon 1.4 Ghz here, I don't find X apps slow).
And try playing 3D games. Look at the high framerate (assuming you're using a good card and driver, like NVidia + vendor drivers). How's that possible for a windowing system that's slow?
I've written several testing apps, for Windows and X. On both platforms, I get the same frame rate.

Expose events: Windows does pretty much the same thing. If I wrote an app that only responds to the paint event once, and I move a window above it, you'll see that the window won't be redrawn. Windows in fact uses the very same expose mechanism.
X *does* in fact have a feature which allows you to save the content of the window. It's saved Backing Store and Save Under (I think). QT and GTK don't use it except when popping up a menu. Ask the toolkit authors why they don't, because I don't know.

Data copying: data is *not* copied when transferring pixmaps, which is about 90-95% of the traffic. On localhost, XFree86/XOrg uses shared memory for that.
On localhost, normal X messages are transferred via unix domain sockets (not TCP sockets), which are almost as fast as shared memory (at least on Linux). Remember, this is small amount of data.
No modern windowing system allows the app to touch the hardware directly. Not Windows, not MacOS X, not BeOS. In fact, Windows internally uses the same message-based communication system as X. Windows apps don't draw directly to the hardware.

Re:Progress

[k98sven]

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.

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 /.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.

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.

Re:Progress

[glitchvern]

You can force it to use backing store by starting the X server with the +bs -wm options. According to Alan Cox this is better and feels snappier on most setups but will kill a tiny machine.

who forked from who..

[martin]

I thought Xfree86 was a fork of the original X11 development camp and that X.org is a refounding of the original X11 camp after lots of splits, esp with alot of Xfree86 dev guys getting annoyed and going 'back to their roots' as it where..

Could be wrong (and frequently am)..

Re:who forked from who..

[AKAImBatman]

As I understand it, you're right on the first part. XFree86 did fork X.org's work. The part that you're wrong on is that X.org didn't use XFree86's code. XFree86 was a fork specifically designed for the x86 platform. X.org didn't have that, and thus had to patch their codebase from XFree86's codebase.

Clear as mud?

Let's Talk About X Baby

[grunt107]

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).

X in Windows?

[random_culchie]

What I'd really like to see is some support for X type connections in the next version of windows. I don't mean basing all of windows on X11 but perhaps allow remote windows sessions that are native. Not based on screen redraws like VNC.

Re:X in Windows?

[ch3]

Like X.org in Cygwin?
If you use the latest release of cygwin, it comes with an X.org server that has a rootless WM (like the one in Apple Xfree server). With it, you can run X11 applications next to your Win32 windows as if they were native (same for remote windows).
I use it all the time for remote admin and this is great.

Re:X in Windows?

[drinkypoo]

Slightly more information: Install cygwin, I usually install the default install, minus emacs, plus the whole X11 directory (then turning off some emacs stuff in there), and explicitly turning on a few things if they aren't already like ssh, ncftp, and whatever else. That part is up to you.

Once it's installed, I make a shortcut for the X server that runs "C:\cygwin\usr\X11R6\bin\run.exe XWin -multiwindow -clipboard -unixkill -nowinkill" and bingo, I have X. There's also another flag you'll need if you want your X desktop to span multiple monitors, but I only have one hooked up right now so it's a non-issue.

You can also turn off -multiwindow and run -rootless (I think) and then use a window mangler to manage your assorted X clients. If for some reason you want X clients and Windows apps to look even less alike, this is how you accomplish that.

Re:X in Windows?

[zorander]

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

Nice Screeny's

[daxomatic]

Yummie soon available near you http://freedesktop.org/XOrg/X11R68ScreenShots

Compositing

[maharg]

I know I'm going to get flamed by all the 80x24 textmoders out there, but compositing is cool

Re:Compositing

[GoRK]

Compositing is not all about transparency you know. Being able to do things like offload drawing onto the powerful graphics cpu's present in most new computers these days is the most obvious beneft. There is also a nice benefit to the multi-desktop pagers and desktop preview widgets out there, since it's a lot less work to capture and resize image windows. For users without a lot of screen real-estate, switching techniques such as Apple's Expose can in many cases give a user a real benefit. Most of these things would be slow or impossible to do without good compositing. Every time I drag my kterm across a thunderbird window, I feel the pain of X (Nvidia's drivers do not help much either)

Re:Compositing

[plimsoll]

I run 40x25, you insensi-
tive clod!

Re:Compositing

[BenjyD]

Things like translucent error dialogs (see Jef Raskin's book), Expose, any oddly shaped app that you want to see the background through the gaps in (like the Dock).

It isn't just the ability to draw translucent windows. By rendering to an offscreen buffer and then compositing on the screen, you can do all sorts of transformations and effects that make the desktop easier to use. Apple's Expose effect is probably the best example.

What about Y?

[Outsider_99]

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.

Re:What about Y?

[jandrese]

Yeah, people realized that they liked all of their old applications and the project never really took off.

NVidia driver issue?

[Lispy]

He avoids answering the question about XFree86 Driver compatibility, especially with regard to NVidias binary drivers. This is a big issue for a lot of users and I hope that NVidias cards will be capable of using the new extensions.

As far as the article goes all I can read is that they work with both major graphiccards vendors but only ATI delivered so far. Or did I miss something?

Re:NVidia driver issue?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know if you missed something in the interview but the nvida drivers definitely work with the new xorg and the extension. (I'm using them right now).

Also if you take a look at the xorg mailinglist you'll find that the guys at nvidia are working happily with the xorg devs.

As per usual

[frankthechicken]

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.

x.org rules!

[DMJC-L]

the new xserver kicks ass.. I've got it running on my desktop, compositing is a great effect, and with proper integtration with programs, promises to change the way i use my pc for the better... btw windows don't stutter when I move them! drop shadows are sexy too.. hopefully we'll get PLG features in a compositor in the next few months.

Re:Unfortunate...

[Anonytroll]

Most people don't need internationalization

I beg to differ. There's a world outside of where you live. In that world, internationalization is an issue. Or would you like to work with a system that displays everything in (for random example) French, because internationalization was "not an issue" for the developers?

Re:Does it run linux?

[DarkOx]

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.

Re:Unfortunate...

[gl4ss]

**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&#19 7;

Prepare to be blown away

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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. ;-D

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.

Re:Prepare to be blown away

[Queuetue]

Where do you actually see the new eyecandy? Dropshadows, transparency, etc ... Don't new window managers and applications have to be built to take advantage of them? (I've only read part of the article, so sorry if I missed this answer there.)

Time for X11R7 or even X12

[Viol8]

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.

Re:Time for X11R7 or even X12

[Anonymous Coward]

Please try to at least get a little bit of information before starting a rant.

The folks at freedesktop.org are in the middle of a whole redesign of X. For example, this is probably going to be the last monolithic release of X, they are working on a replacement for xlib (xcb), there is a lot of discussion about putting certain function that are now provided by X into the kernel (RTFI for more information).

Does that count as a major redesign?

Re:Time for X11R7 or even X12

[cortana]

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. :)

Re:Time for X11R7 or even X12

[cortana]

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.

Re:Time for X11R7 or even X12

[groomed]

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.

Compositing is just the tip of the iceberg.

[Anonymous Coward]

And pretty slow it seems.

Right now I am running fedora core 2 and am using the latest release from X.org's CVS.

It seems stable and all that, but it's slow.

GLXGears I am scoring 285 fps with xcompmgr off
and 60-70 with it on. (that turns on the composite features).

Although it does have my dri drivers turned off in both cases (using intel i830-type video driver). I am recompiling as I type right now to enable the new i915 driver for it to see if that makes a difference.

But other people have reported it to be slow. Probably would be nice on my other computer using the Nvidia FX 5900 XT, but I don't want to mess up my desktop with a CVS-based X server.

All in all it's pretty stable and shows the progress that XFree86 was holding back on, unfortunately. Yea for X.org

Oh and also for that guy that says he was nervious about X.org and Freedesktop.org and KDE/Gnome "working to close together". He is a idiot. This isnt' X Windows, this is just the X SERVER. It's one part.

What I'd worry about more is X.org and Linux getting to cozy and unintentially making it more difficult to run on other Unix-like OSes.

X.org has a open invitation for all Unix developers and it would be great if they would get more of their input. (Especially the BSD's)

The future looks good. X.org would like to strip away the dual nature of X's drivers (Mesa/Dri OpenGL drivers + XFree86-type 2D drivers) and get the X server running on pure OpenGL!

That means instead of having to write 2 versions of drivers for video cards, now they only have to worry about the OpenGL version. This means it's easier to get good drivers for Linux and other Unix-like OSes that use X.org servers, and quicker too.

Also the Cairo project is going to be integrated bringing in Vector-based Windows and graphics libraries into X windows and allowing them to also be OpenGL accelerated.

The MS Longhorn waiters, eat your heart out. This is going to be some cool stuff we will have in the next couple years.

Of course OS X is openGL, too, but the cool thing about X windows is the flexibility. All these changes will keep complete backwards compatability with older programs (X clients actually in X terminology), while removing bloat for features that nobody uses/completely obsolete and streamlining developement thru modularlization and extensions.

Stuff like Damage is reducing the X networking load considurably too, making wide spread use of X terminals in businesses and schools more and more fesable.

And all sorts of other improvements are coming.

Changing over to X.org seems to have been a fortuninate move.

Re:KDE and Knome infect X ?

[mark_lybarger]

x talks to your video hardware, hopefully through kernel drivers.

kde and knome are layers on top of x. i'm sure you realize that.

x tells the video card to draw stuff on the screen.

kde and knome tell x what that stuff should look like. kde and knome wrap windows with decorations. (title bars, etc).

if a user wants to be able to resize their desktop on the fly (go from 1024x768 to 800x600 resolution perhaps), the functionality has to be available in X, then also able to be controled by the window manager.

likewise, if you want window drop shadows, X has to be able to support that and you can just enable it in your window manager of choice.

this is not at all about slicing an elephant up to stuff into an automobile (where did that come from?) it's about providing kool features that everyone can enjoy and not have to duplicate all over the place. it's about letting the xerver talk to the harware capabilities that are in most semi-modern hardware these days.

finally, stop fearing the advancements of the X server. they're long over due and there's a lot of folks out here that welcome the advancements with open arms!

Whose task is copy&paste

[dtietze]

This triggers something that's been bugging me for ages. Whose responsibility is a decent cross-application copy&paste framework, which works as one would expect?
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.

Re:Whose task is copy&paste

[FooBarWidget]

Ehm... clipboardhandling already is part of X. It's called the "selection mechanism".

In fact, there is a standard. People used to misunderstand it but now it's documented clearly. http://www.freedesktop.org/Standards/clipboards-sp ec

The X selection mechanism supports contents negotiation, which means that you can copy rich text and images from Mozilla and paste it in OpenOffice with the same markup. In fact, it already can. I tried it - it works. Even images are preserved. Try copying some tables in Gnumeric and paste them in Mozilla Composer. It works - the tables are preserved!
The X selection mechanism is actually technically almost the same as MS Windows's.
Unfortunately not all apps use content negotiation, I don't know why. Gimp is the worst example - it doesn't use the X selection mechanism *at all*, not even on Windows! It uses it's own internal clipboard. So you can copy & paste inside Gimp but not between multiple Gimp processes.

Geez why do I have to post this this over and over? Isn't it about time everybody on Slashdot knows about this?

Re:Unfortunate...

[kahei]

Most people don't need internationalization

I despair. I do not pass GO, I do not collect $200, I just despair.

suggestion

[suezz]

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!!

Re:KDE and Knome infect X ?

[Pecisk]

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.

Re:Wtf has the printer got to do with X?

[TheRaven64]

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.

Re:PRECISELY MOD UP+

[lokedhs]

"Internationalisation" is spelled exactly like so... In all english-speaking countries except the US.

Re:Wtf has the printer got to do with X?

[grrussel]

Printing to the screen versus printing to paper?

Why distinguish? An application should be able to use the same commands to draw on screen as to a printer, which is just a different display device.

I'm up to your challenge

[hummassa]

Please name an application in which compositing gives a better user interface ...

I worked in a GIS (geoprocessing) application to an electrical company. In the user's screen, a map showed up with all polls and wires that are in a location. If you clicked on a poll with, e.g., a transformer, a translucent (big) tooltip came up with all of the transformers specs, where the electricity was coming from, where it was going to, etc (like 20 lines of text). Without dismissing such tooltip, the user is capable of clicking in another poll in the map, and only the contents of the tooltip changed, (maybe it's position if it were possible to move "away" from the current part of the map. The user could even click thru the tooltip, in a poll that was showing below it! (there was a menu item/toolbar speed-button and a hot-key to close the tooltip, obviously)

This kind of interface is *very* practical and would be impossible without translucency. I implemented it in a no-nonsense 15 minutes under BorlandC++/w2k.

I'm using the new X.org

[thejuggler]

I just installed Slackware 10.0 and it came with the X.org system. I didn't even know about the change. I happily went into the config file and configed my video card, monitors, screen and all just like I used to with XFree86. After saving I started X like normal and all ran just fine.

I wasn't until I was reading later on that I realized there was a different X on my machine. Even then I was getting confused because much of Slackwares online docs have not been updated to refect this change.

I like X. X is good. Some X'es are better!

Re:I'm using the new X.org

[Eunuchswear]

I wasn't until I was reading later on that I realized there was a different X on my machine.

The reason you didn't notice a difference is that there isn't one.

The X.Org monolithic X is just the XFree86 one from a microsecond before the license change.

More or less nothing has changed in XFree86 since the license change.

Re:unified desktop

[Technonotice_Dom]

Here's my take on it:

I use Linux on my systems (with Gnome as a DE) and I know what you mean some times. Part of the problem is that people write programs for different purposes - e.g. some people will write a program using Qt and the KDE libraries causing the programs to look one way, while somebody else will use Gtk or another toolkit.

It obviously isn't just down to the toolkit, but also depending on who the application is targetted at, most developers (generalising I know) don't have the time (or don't want to, or don't have lots of experience) to make their application pixel perfect.

Gnome has some usability guidelines and I think anybody would testify to the fact that Gnome itself and applications based around the HIGs have a very consistent feel. Likewise KDE has some HIGs (currently redrafting I think) but it doesn't have anywhere near the emphasis on the programs in the KDE collection IMO.

As well as defining the HIGs, part of the problem is to educate interface programmers and try to ask them to follow the guidelines - and more importantly, for people who have experience in usability (and that includes all users) to comment, suggest changes etc.

An interesting example was on the KDE Usability mailing list the other day - Celeste Paul posted a usability report on KHangman. The coder behind it appeared shortly after and immediately began following the conclusions of the report. I'm sure almost every programmer will be happy to accept constructive criticism for their work.

If you think a menu item or something isn't right, file a bug report against it - and try to include a suggestion (even if it isn't a complete solution) for how it could be improved. It only takes a few minutes. </rant>

Re:unified desktop

[be-fan]

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?

Hope that compatability is retained

[Baki]

It would be very sad if changes in the X protocol or Xlib would make "new" clients unavailable on other X-window platforms and/or would no longer be network transparent.

In this cases it would no longer be possible to remotely work on a UNIX/linux server with windows X-emulators (such as exceed), nor would the typical linux open source app be able to run on other UNIX variants. Which would be very bad for UNIX as a whole and thus also for Linux which is a part of that world.

Re:Hope that compatability is retained

[Trelane]

This isn't a problem. All new functionality is done by extension to the old X11. I actually keep arguing that we should standardize an X12 which removes things not used much anymore and which includes (sans extensions) the functionality which is wanted, and provide and X11 interface for compatibility (if you have to make an extension extension because there are so many extensions, you need to move to the next version!). However, they don't want that; they want compatibility (which I don't hold to be orthogonal if things are done right, but I'm not (yet) and X hacker, merely an armchair X pundit. ;)

Anyhow, rest assured that compatibility is top priority with these changes. You just won't be able to see the shinies. :)

Re:I would love to see CCM for X

[chtephan]

That's not an X issue.

I think Owen Taylor is planning to implement this in Pango. It's all but trivial.

Re:unified desktop

[Brandybuck]

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.