Next Generation X11

Rene Rebe writes "The German News site Golem is running a report (babelfish translation) about the next generation X11 projects, like the OpenGL X-Server Xgl, Luminocity as well as Enlightenment 17. The report is including many screenshots and five videos."

Comments

Re:Why isn't this already out?

[vadim_t]

Plugged in how?

This is something I spent a *long* time explaining to some people on a forum about a related subject. Network transparency doesn't involve significant overhead, dammit!

There has to be some way for an application to talk to X. So, you remove the network protocol, how do you want to talk it to X then, magic? In order for two different programs to talk to each other there has to be some kind of protocol, no way around it.

Now, networking indeed can slow things down a little due to things like latency. But that's effectively inexistent if you're talking on the local host. And X already has shared memory communication as well. On Linux there are also the so called Unix Sockets, which is pretty much like TCP/IP, only with even less overhead since it's done locally, so it can be implemented in a simpler way.

However, as far as an application is concerned, an Unix socket and a TCP/IP one are exactly the same thing, so it makes no sense to get rid of network transparency - you wouldn't win anything with that anyway.

Re:Y Windows

[WillerZ]

Don't go there expecting anything you'll be able to use in the near future. I fully expect HURD 1.0 to be released before we're done.

Please don't join the mailing list and ask "is anyone still working on this?" or "when will feature x be included?", because I'm tired of telling people to fuck off. We're working on it, we'll work on the features _we_ want in the order we feel like doing them. If you want something done you can do it yourself or pay someone else to do it for you.

Apologies for the rant: the usual followup to that link being posted on /. is a stream of fools bitching at Mark/Andrew/me for not working hard enough on Y. I work on it in _my_ time, and people telling me what I ought to be doing usually causes me to go do something else entirely.

Phil

( phil -at- y -hyphen- windows -dot- org )