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X Power Tools
stoolpigeon writes "The X Window System has been around for over twenty years and is the display system for an incredibly wide range of operating systems. With the number of Linux users growing, there are more people working with X than ever before. Most modern desktop environments provide user friendly interfaces that make modifying X rather simple. There is not a need to dig into config files and settings as in the past. For those environments without such tools or for the user who loves to dig deep into their environment, this book can be a simple way to understand how X works and how to tweak it in any number of ways. If you want things that 'just work' and have no interest in digging around below the surface this book is not for you. On the other hand, if you think the best thing to do with a shiny new tool is to take it apart, well "X Power Tools" by Chris Tyler may be just for you." Read on for the rest of JR's thoughts on this book.
X Power Tools
author
Chris Tyler
pages
254
publisher
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
rating
9/10
reviewer
JR Peck
ISBN
0-596-10195-3
summary
The author, Chris Tyler, is a professor at Seneca College in Toronto as well as a programmer and Linux user. His first book published by O'Reilly was "Fedora Linux: A Complete Guide to Red Hat's Community Distribution", published in 2006. He cites the growth in X users, combined with active development and the lack of existing books that address X as the motivation for writing "X Power Tools."
X is the windowing system on a wide range of Unix and Unix like systems. Chris is obviously most familiar with Linux and so the material is heavily Linux oriented. This is most apparent when the book deals with Session Managers, Desktop Environments and Window Managers. The material focuses on Gnome, KDE and Xfce and their associated components in regards to X. For the Linux user this could be a valuable resource.
When I've had issues in working with X locally and over the network, I've found that while what I need is available on the web, getting just what I need can be very labor intensive at times. Usually just what I want is spread across tutorials, on-line man pages and forum posts. Sorting out what applies to my situation can be especially difficult when I'm not even sure just how things work for my setup. Chris makes this kind of guessing unnecessary and provides the locations and function of key files. He also spells out how the most important files and tools can be best used.
For the sysadmin on another platform, these Linux specific sections are not going to be much help. Most of the book though, deals with X itself. I've already loaned my copy to one of our AIX admins more than once and I think he plans on picking up a copy of his own.
When Gnome and KDE provide an interface for modifying or customizing X functionality, the book gives at least the name of the program and sometimes screen shots and explanations of how the tool works. This is always after an illustration of how to get the job done with the tools that are a part of X itself. From fonts to keyboard layouts, multi-display to kiosks, everything required is laid out in straight forward terms.
For me, as a Fedora user, this means that having read this book I approach my work environment with a new level of confidence. Behaviors that used to puzzle me, now make complete sense. Quirks that bothered me, no longer need to be tolerated as I know have the tools to get things working just the way I want, rather than using defaults.
The book has just come out, so it was being written before the release of KDE 4. I've looked through the documentation and I don't think any of the changes to programs like KDM or KWin make the information in the book out of date. In fact, according to the KWin release notes, when discussing KWins new compositing support, "...manual configuration of X may be required for proper results..." So if you are a KDE user that likes to live on the edge, this book may come in handy.
O'Reilly says that their "Power Tool" books are comprised of a series of stand-alone articles that are cross-referenced to one another. To be honest, it didn't feel much different from reading any other tech book. Topics flowed naturally and the articles are analogous to sections that divide up chapters in other books. One nice navigation feature is that page numbers are on the bottom of the pages while chapter and article numbers are at the top corner in a decimal notations. For example at the top of page 58 there is a grey square containing the number 3.13 which means that it is the 13th article in chapter 3.
The book has a thorough index. It also comes with 45 days free access to an electronic version through O'Reilly Safari.
For me the only real weakness of the book is that I would like to have seen more information on working with X on Unix. When reference is made to specific implementation of X it is almost always in regards to Linux. I wouldn't want to lose that, but I think a mixed environment of Unix, Linux and Windows is more the rule than the exception today. It would be more work to include other operating systems, but it would have also made the book much more valuable.
All tech books face the danger of becoming quickly useless as progress marches forward. X is actively being developed, but at the same time, looking back on its history I think this book will be useful for sysadmin and user for some time to come.
You can purchase X Power Tools from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
X is the windowing system on a wide range of Unix and Unix like systems. Chris is obviously most familiar with Linux and so the material is heavily Linux oriented. This is most apparent when the book deals with Session Managers, Desktop Environments and Window Managers. The material focuses on Gnome, KDE and Xfce and their associated components in regards to X. For the Linux user this could be a valuable resource.
When I've had issues in working with X locally and over the network, I've found that while what I need is available on the web, getting just what I need can be very labor intensive at times. Usually just what I want is spread across tutorials, on-line man pages and forum posts. Sorting out what applies to my situation can be especially difficult when I'm not even sure just how things work for my setup. Chris makes this kind of guessing unnecessary and provides the locations and function of key files. He also spells out how the most important files and tools can be best used.
For the sysadmin on another platform, these Linux specific sections are not going to be much help. Most of the book though, deals with X itself. I've already loaned my copy to one of our AIX admins more than once and I think he plans on picking up a copy of his own.
When Gnome and KDE provide an interface for modifying or customizing X functionality, the book gives at least the name of the program and sometimes screen shots and explanations of how the tool works. This is always after an illustration of how to get the job done with the tools that are a part of X itself. From fonts to keyboard layouts, multi-display to kiosks, everything required is laid out in straight forward terms.
For me, as a Fedora user, this means that having read this book I approach my work environment with a new level of confidence. Behaviors that used to puzzle me, now make complete sense. Quirks that bothered me, no longer need to be tolerated as I know have the tools to get things working just the way I want, rather than using defaults.
The book has just come out, so it was being written before the release of KDE 4. I've looked through the documentation and I don't think any of the changes to programs like KDM or KWin make the information in the book out of date. In fact, according to the KWin release notes, when discussing KWins new compositing support, "...manual configuration of X may be required for proper results..." So if you are a KDE user that likes to live on the edge, this book may come in handy.
O'Reilly says that their "Power Tool" books are comprised of a series of stand-alone articles that are cross-referenced to one another. To be honest, it didn't feel much different from reading any other tech book. Topics flowed naturally and the articles are analogous to sections that divide up chapters in other books. One nice navigation feature is that page numbers are on the bottom of the pages while chapter and article numbers are at the top corner in a decimal notations. For example at the top of page 58 there is a grey square containing the number 3.13 which means that it is the 13th article in chapter 3.
The book has a thorough index. It also comes with 45 days free access to an electronic version through O'Reilly Safari.
For me the only real weakness of the book is that I would like to have seen more information on working with X on Unix. When reference is made to specific implementation of X it is almost always in regards to Linux. I wouldn't want to lose that, but I think a mixed environment of Unix, Linux and Windows is more the rule than the exception today. It would be more work to include other operating systems, but it would have also made the book much more valuable.
All tech books face the danger of becoming quickly useless as progress marches forward. X is actively being developed, but at the same time, looking back on its history I think this book will be useful for sysadmin and user for some time to come.
You can purchase X Power Tools from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
As long as the program lives on (even as abandonware), so does the technology and the potential for manuals and other HOWTO material. People still buy QBasic By Example (and blogs still rave about it) even though it was unbundled from Windows in Vista (maybe even XP, I'm not sure) and most people (myself included) haven't written a proper program in it for coming up on a decade.
Those using pirated Tinysoft signatures(TM) are a real threat to society and should all be thrown in jail.
Can you provide some code? You are free to make a new graphics interface. X has been around for a long time and it will stay for a long time yet. It has proven itself despite of its shortcomings. I don't think that a complete replacement is a good idea. The best thing for X that yet has to happen is it running as an unpriveledged user, but that is hard with the hardware so close to the software.
I wasn't aware a lot of programs interfaced directly with X. I'm sure there are some that for whatever reason feel like they must interact with X directly, but wouldn't say, X2 or X+ or whatever with GTK/QT4 be sufficient to run -almost everything-?
is that it know the hardware it's running on better. You shouldn't need a file to say what resolution your monitor can do for instance; it should just know and keep track of preferences of what resolution you'd prefer maybe.
This isn't a troll; monitors and graphics cards have been able for donkeys years to tell the OS what resolutions and refresh-rates they are capable of for years now and X hasn't caught on.
And that's pretty much my only complaint.
throw new NoSignatureException();
What are you smoking?
You don't install ANY OS on hardware without considering driver support.
MacOS is no different. Various forms of Windows are no different.
Linux and X are not alone in this.
That said, I've never gotten all the whining. I've put no more
effort into buying machines and vidcards that I would have done
to avoid a lemon under Windows. Yet I've managed to avoid problems.
Slackware 96 was not pretty but it wasn't painful in this regard at all.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
#DeleteChrome
What did I leave out that you would like to know? I'm always looking to do a better job and would appreciate any help in that regard.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
From man xorg.conf, verbatim:
...
VIDEOADAPTOR SECTION
Nobody wants to say how this works. Maybe nobody knows
On the more serious note, Xorg might have some misfeatures and shortcomings - that don't really justify everyone whining there, but, well, it's kind of typical - but the sheer fact that something designed over 20 years ago to operate with hardware and software long forgotten still does its job well and manages to keep up with other windowing systems even when it comes to bells and whistles (Composite, etc.), while being ABI (ABI, mind you, not API) compatible with software that actually is 20 years old, means something. That's one solid piece of engineering, the kind one doesn't see often.
This is Slashdot. Common sense is futile. You will be modded down.
> Look, I know this is the standard FOSS fanboy answer to any criticisms about anything and everything,
> but it's gotten tiresome - it doesn't actually address the criticism at all.
Actually it is more response than the original poster deserved. Go reread it, he complaimed that it is old. No specific complaint, no suggested solution.
And you fail to understand the FOSS idea. The line between users and developers doesn't exist. If you don't like it you are free to fix it. Iven if you aren't a uber coder who can write GL drivers in their sleep you can at least learn enough to make good guggestions, bug reports or hell, contribute some better documentation. If you can't code or at least understand the system enough to make constructive criticisms and suggestions for improvements then you really should just shut up and accept what you get because talking from ignorance just reduces the signal to noise and makes it harder for those who do have a clue to get on with improving the stuff you use.
10 to one both you and the original poster don't even realize GNOME and KDE aren't even part of X. That sort of ignorance is what makes every thread about X devolve into silly rants about GUI usability and brings out the Mac fanbois. X itself is just fine now and with some of the current improvements working their way towards mainstream it will only get better.
Democrat delenda est
That's an invalid argument. I may know enough to say my car isn't working (e.g., it won't start), but I certainly don't know enough to fix it.
You're pretty new to this, eh?
It's not so obvious anymore on todays multicore, multi-GHz numbercrunchers with gigs of RAM, but X11 is a lot of things, but _not_ speedy. They didn't even try to make it speedy - the network transparency layer (among other things) creates so much overhead it was a pain to use X11 until relatively recently.
When XP was first released its windowing system actually felt more responsive than X11 did on the hardware from that time.
Truth arises more readily from error than from confusion. -Francis Bacon
From Alan Coopersmith of Sun Microsystems:
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Why don't you double how much you're paying for the X Window System ($0) and see if anybody is interested in writing a replacement for that kind of money?
If you didn't pay for it and you don't like it you have two options:
1) Write something better. Surely you can because you know what you don't like about the old one, right?
2) Shut the fuck up, grow a set, and realize that the open source community is not your personal bitch.
You are exactly the reason why I gave up writing open source software. You had criticisms about my software, software that I designed and wrote for what I needed it for. I told you that I wasn't going to change it and you went on a total tirade about how I was supposed to fix this for you and how this software was yours. Bullshit. If you don't like it, fix it. If you can't fix it, there are programmers that specialize in open source software that would be more than happy to make a little scratch on the side to code something up for you. If you're too cheap to do that, then SHUT THE FUCK UP.
Bad analogy. What the original poster said would be more like "I know the internal combustion engine is entrenched and all, aren't we fed up with this dinosaur? ..."
Really? I don't recall having much problem with XDMCP. Granted, I never had to do it large scale, but it was more or less just a matter of having one machine run XDM/GDM and then on "client" machines start X with an option that points it to the IP of the XDMCP "server." IIRC, there is even an XDMCP browser. The only thing is that some distributions (maybe most these days?) don't enable listening for TCP connections by default for security reasons. So you have to know where to enable that.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
Then hire (and more importantly pay) a mechanic to fix it. A mechanic doesn't do what he does out of the goodness of his heart and because he likes other people. He wouldn't be able to pay his bills if he did that. You are not entitled to free car service just because you are you, just like you are not entitled to free and open source software changes on your whim.
If you know him personally or if it's a side project or it interests him enough, he may do it for free. That's his choice as to how to spend his time. However, the vast majority of programmers in the open source community think that X works. They aren't interested in pursuing an alternative, at least not for free. I'll bet if you offer to pay their salary, their interest would be piqued. I'll bet if you had the skills to write one on your own, you could do it and attract some mindshare. Now, and this is key, sitting around on Slashdot and bitching about it won't solve the problem.
Do it yourself because you are interested, hire someone else to do it, or accept that the vast majority of open source development is done because it's in the best interests of the person working on a particular project, and right now, the consensus amongst open source developers is that the X Window System works.
* What does it cover?
* What are the chapters?
* What detail does it go into?
* Who is it aimed at?
* Would a newbie find it useful or bewildering?
* How expensive is it?
* Is it easy to use as a reference or do you read it cover to cover?
* What didn't you like about it?
* Was there any bad information in there?
* When you say it's more linux aimed, to what degree?
Those are just some of the questions I can come up with from the top of my head...
I know X is entrenched and all, but really, aren't we all fed up with this dinosaur? A new window system might be a good thing for Linux as a whole.
Why does every new kid on the block insist you have to replace it to be any good without knowing how much effort it takes to get a GUI working right?
X-Windows is also 1984 from MIT as Wiki on X-Windows, which makes it almost 24 years old. And components of it likely existed before it's 1984 debut. It has had a lot of years to become polished. For without it Linux would likely still have some proprietary GUI that can't be used with other hosts. That is, I enjoy login into Linux, login to a different vendor of Linux or perhaps a BSD, AIX or Solaris....and it works!
I will admit, having used and programmed X-Windows from almost year one, it was initially heavy, had alignment bugs and was no where near like today's X. It was in fact ahead of it's time but now that the graphics hardware has enough juice it is in it's prime. A portable inter-operable network/GUI.
And just so you don't think this fossil is stodgy, GTK is a fantastic Motif replacement. You should try it, real nice.
Don't try to make Linux look like Vista, Vista will not last. And X-Windows will outlast Bill Gates himself. Bills empire still can't do portable Windows without outside help. Perhaps spend your time with that new X-Windows desktop for Linux, the one with the cube.
This is what you get when most of your windowing system is run in the kernel: the low-level drawing and management routines are just a syscall away. Plus I believe the Windows window system is multithreaded (or, at least, much of the stuff runs in the applications' threads when they make windowing calls). X.org, on the other hand, is single-threaded and runs as a user-space process, so there's also context switching overhead. [All that "Ha-ha, NT runs its video drivers in the kernel" stuff is misleading; the criticism wasn't that the hardware support was in the kernel, which is where it should be, it was that a load of management stuff was there too.]
Personally I'd like to see a lot change in the structure of X11. I'm not fond of the way the 2D stuff appears to work by acquiring privileged maps to areas of physical memory, effectively subverting the kernel. I'd much rather it were all built using DRI. In-kernel modules would be responsible for mediating access to hardware registers. The heavy lifting and config part of the drivers should be done in user-space (much like MesaGL) with a minimal multi-threaded graphics server. X11 would be run as an application on top of this to provide network/legacy support, etc. But then again I'm not an X.org developer and they probably know better.
Have you measured the cost of network transparency, and would you be willing to debate Jim Gettys and Keith Packard about that being one of the bottlenecks? (This is one of the persistent myths of X11.)
how to invest, a novice's guide
It's good to look at why one wants to replace something, and not replace it if it's not broken.
But really, X *is* a dinosaur. The drawing operations it has to support were neat when we had 1-bit displays, but aren't that useful (or accelerated) on modern hardware. Its imaging model is completely different from modern printers and page definition languages. Antialiasing and transparency (at the window level) is obviously an afterthought, and resolution-independence was an early goal that nobody really got working. Font support is only so-so. Color calibration is basically nonexistant. It has a bunch of individual features which run great, but not with each other, like OpenGL and video and Xinerama. Compositing support is still kind of flakey. Network support can be useful but X11 screwed up the design. The Unix Haters' Handbook has a whole chapter of other issues.
And sure, we could (and probably will, eventually) fix each of these things. But X11 seems to never drop its old baggage, even when nobody's using it. So when somebody wants to fix fonts or colors, they'll do that by adding new extensions (which have to be installed in the server, yay), and now we'll have N+1 ways to do these things, and still most people won't use the good new way. Anybody who's done software testing can tell you about the reliability of N orthogonal features; it's no wonder compositing + video + OpenGL + Xinerama doesn't work.
There's something to be said for wiping the slate clean and saying "OK, it's 2008 and we now know how to do compositing and acceleration and video and fonts and colors, so we're going to throw out all the dead ends we've created in the past 25 years, and start fresh". (You can even run X11 inside whatever graphics system we create, like X11.app on the Mac.)
Writing a network protocol for a graphics system isn't fundamentally that hard to do. There's no black magic here. Linux users claim to know better than anybody the problems with a monoculture. And yet, X11 is so monstrous that there's really only room for one implementation; there simply aren't enough graphics geeks who are willing to put up with the pain of maintenance to support several. So when Xorg forked, it was a Really Big Deal. It shouldn't be! Note that the programs that open-source does best are those that we have a million of (like text editors, or chat clients, or MP3 players), and those that we always complain about are the big monsters that nobody is crazy enough to write a new implementation of (X11, OOo, Moz). I do not believe this is a coincidence.
I would really like to have a graphics system that is simple enough that I (with only a 4-year degree in computer science) can understand, and which we're using because it's the best design we can come up with, not because it's the only free windowing system we could find in 1984.
Actually, here in slashdot what we get is lots of people, much as yourself, mentioning flaws. But very few people have any real idea of what they are talking and about one third (being generous!) of the posters are probably among those that think that KDE is a window manager, that QT and GTK are part of X, and that have some very mystical and completely misguided understanding of how the SELECTION protocol works.
There are flaws. This is obvious from reading the mailing lists of the X developers. But your blowing hot air about `flaws' in no way is comparable to any positive action with regards to their solution---let alone their identification.
But for desktop users we have a monolithic window system that breaks, all the damn time, and has fallen so far behind the competition that it's only recently become usable and with an enormous investment of effort into hacking 3d rendering into it.When does it break, exactly, and all that frequently, for desktop users? In what way does its being monolithic affect anyone apart from its own developers? Are you really not aware of the reasons why accelerated 3d rendering goes at somewhat glacial speed?
I shouldn't need to say those things though, as I said, this is Slashdot. People here know what the problems with X are, dammit, I'm announcing my dissatisfaction. People reply with "You don't like it, code your own," ok. Let's start. Let's make a development program for a replacement for X that will correctly process the hooks for a few popular toolkits (QT,GTK+) and work from there.Ah. I see. You are going to be in charge of the management of such a project... And I imagine you'll want to participate in the critique part, too! We will contact you.
If we can get QT4 and GTK+2 working on something -other- than X, that will be major progress.Both work on top of things other than X, on top of several different things in fact.
Not being psychic, if the best vocalization of your problem is "I have a problem", but refuse to say any more detail at all than that, then yes, you can't be helped, sorry. You appear to be inserting words into the OP's mouth beyond that -- the OP didn't even say they had a problem! They merely said X is old, and had no actual criticism to offer at all. Being old isn't in and of itself a problem, but it's the only issue that poster appeared to have. You don't have to be tech-savvy to say you have a problem, and to try to explain as best you can what the problem is, but OP didn't even get as far as saying they had a problem, much less even offer a clue as to what the problem might be.
If the problem is bugs, then the bugs need to be fixed. If the problem is inherent in the design, then the design needs to be redone. But if the problem is "it's over X years old and running software over X years old is uncool" then the software doesn't need fixing, the user's attiude needs fixing. Since OP appears to have no problems other than age (no complaint was made other than the age of the software), then frankly his comment should have been modded as the obvious troll that it is. Even if it's true that X actually needs fixing or replacing, that doesn't justify pointless trolling.
It's a sad commentary on the rampant abuse of the mod system that you admit you'd give him mod points merely because you agree with him, rather than objectively mod him down, not because you agree or disagree, but because it was a bad, content-less post. Your own post was actually interesting and informative of what the actual issues are that people have with X (unlike the post you're replying to, which was in fact nothing but a troll). Mod points shouldn't be handed out because you support a cause, they should be handed out because the post is a good one, whether you agree with it not. (Or negative points given if it's a bad post, whether you agree with it or not.)
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
What you mean is that the Xfree86 and xorg implementations of the X server for the PC are single-threaded. I don't think there is anything in the standard that prevents X servers in general from being written differently. X clients, like browsers or window managers, are not single threaded.
The problems of being single-threaded are simple and easy to find: something hanging causes all updates to stop. The bugs that you get in multi-threaded code are generally much worse: locking problems and concurrency issues can be very hard to track down.
Access to the hardware has to be serialized anyway, so its not clear that multi-threading the server is going to result in any major improvement. It would speed up any rendering that is done in software and could be parallelized, but would not help X operations that are a single call to the graphics card.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
Quite a bit of XP's 2d drawing functions are accelerated using video card driver supports. All the blitting, etc.. which may be supported in Linux drivers was pretty much stock in every well used Windows graphics driver since 2k.
You ever run into the issue that Firefox scrolling is sooo slow? Its probably because the scrolling routines aren't being 2d accelerated like they should be.
Putting too much in user space might seem like a good compromise, but depending on how often you context switch to achieve this separation, the trade offs could be quite inhibitive. I'm not much of a driver programmer and I've never even looked at a graphics driver implementation, but given the cursory glance at the ATI released register mappings, I imagine that the setup and maintenance of said buffers requires quite a bit of hand-holding.
Bye!
Jim is one of the original authors of X. Keith is essentially the de facto overlord of the current X.org, although he doesn't play dictator except in rare cases.
As for rendering bottlenecks, they are many and varied and none of them have to do with the network transparency issue. When local clients talk to a local server they do so via local sockets or shared memory, both of which are very fast and impose minimal or no penalties.
What accounts for bottlenecks are things like the inability to do compositing, leading to tearing of windows when they're being dragged. This is fixed by the composite extension and a fast compositing manager, like the one found in compiz.
Another issue is that the old driver architecture (XAA) was geared towards old-style drawings. These days we don't really look at stipple patterns much, so the new driver architecture (EXA) is geared towards solid fills and fast blits for bitmaps instead, which is what you end up doing on a modern desktop anyway. It turns out though that this is very hard to get right and the bugs are still being worked out. I don't think that this is really an issue with X being old so much as that this is just a damned hard problem to get right. It is being worked on (check out Carl Worth's blog for some examples on this particular front) so hopefully things will improve.
Finally, there's the constant bottleneck due to incomplete or inadequate drivers. The new radeonhd, for example, only recently gained 2d acceleration support, and still lacks any sort of 3d accel. This sort of problem prevents X from adequately taking advantage of all the hardware has to offer, so performance can suffer. As a result, you lose the ability to run things like compiz, which address these issues.
Finally, I haven't watched it yet, but I recommend you take a look at Keith Packard's google talk on remaking X. X has been largely rebuilt from the inside over the past several years, and things like Render, RandR, Composite, Damage, Fixes, Input Hotplug, and EXA have really sprung from that initiative. It's wort
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
I've been using X since 1998 and it has *never* been fast enough for my purposes, even when used entirely on the local host.
Even on my recently installed Ubuntu 7.10. You can move windows around and watch them wobble, which is nice. But if you minimise and then restore something like firefox and thunderbird, it takes a second or so to completely redraw itself.
In fact, if you open this discussion say, in fifteen tabs on firefox in an X environment, the whole system will grind to a halt. Do the same on any Windows or Mac OS from 2000 onwards and it'll be fine. When moving from my puny Mac mini onto my relatively powerful ubuntu machine, I suddenly have to be really careful not to do anything that might slow the system down.
X may not be fast enough for high performance games or 3d stuff, that may very well be true, but considering the number of games available on X platforms, that is hardly important.
Err... cause and effect?
Absolutely. That's why I find the standard response of "well fix it yourself" to be so boorish and irritating. Criticisms should not be dismissed simply because they come from someone who's not a programmer. I think you put it very eloquently when you talk about helping people to contribute.
... and then they built the supercollider.
It's not that it's difficult, they do a pretty good job now, it's that noone has come up with anything better. A decade ago, some guys got together with something called GGI which was intended to be a non-networking X11 replacement. Its main distinguishing feature was that it would be closely tied to the kernel, much like the graphics in Microsoft Windows is tied. Nothing much came of it.
The biggest problem with X11 has always been looks. Always. The core stuff is ugly, difficult to code with, ugly, not integrated into a single desktop environment and did I mention that it's ugly? The KDE guys fixed all of that, though X11 has been pretty decent though not always integrated since X11R4.
My biggest like about X11 is how easy it is to network with. Your server runs locally, your windows can run natively on any machine in the world. Outstanding!
It's not broken, so it really doesn't need any fixing or rewriting for the sake of rewriting and I like my KDE/X11/RedHat workstation at work more than I like my MacBook Pro.
I'm not offended, although I purposely tried to make myself sound that way in my post to incite your response. So I guess two can play at that game huh ... :)
... I think that a large part of the perceived inadequacy of X is due to the nature of modern desktop implementations. I'm really going to show what an old man I am here, but I *still* run twm, one of the original X window managers, and I have it 'tuned' using a configuration file that does things like remove window title bars (they waste space don't you know), and binding most windowing operations to keypresses (or key/mouse combinations). I don't run any kind of 'start' menu bar, I just type the command name of any program I want to run into an xterm. While my desktop is in no way representative of the reality of modern desktops, it does demonstrate, I think, that performance is to a large degree dependent upon the complexity of the desktop, much more so than the underlying graphics subsystem. All X programs have always run speedily for me, because there is so little running on my system and contending for CPU and video card cycles. I have no fancy effects going on. No D-Bus servers, or clients, no big and complex window managers like the K window manager or whatever one Gnome uses. It's all streamlined and simple. And as a result, I get to see the performance of X when it's not bogged down with 'crap', and honestly, it's pretty good.
As a final point, something I mentioned in another post I made just a minute ago to another poster in this thread
I mentioned in my other post about how my father-in-law's approach to computers is to buy (or build, actually he likes to build his own systems, to his credit) the fastest stuff available, and the absolutely *load* it down with the newest version of Windows and every task bar application, quick-launcher, drag-and-drop utility, browser toolbar, etc, that he possibly can. It is absolutely no joke when I say that he, for example, will have two or three browser toolbars installed at once (who needs BOTH Yahoo and Google toolbar at the same time? You end up with the top 1/3 of every browser window being covered in little buttons and doodads that are totally redundant and useless). And he'll have 2 or 3 drag-and-drop CD-burning applications running from the taskbar at the same time. On top of that, every little task bar icon known to mankind; there'll be literally 15 - 20 of them in there. His computer, despite being way faster than anything I ever owned, boots in like 5 minutes, and once booted, every windowing operation is sluggish; redraws can be watched as they occur. Opening windows or pulling up the Start menu or clicking on a drop-down menu literally takes several seconds. It is insane.
This is an example of how the exact same poor performance that you are ascribing to X, can be achieved on the supposedly superior (from a performance perspective) Windows "directly in the kernel" graphical system.
I installed Linux on a USB drive and booted his same computer up with it, and it was so fast and snappy in comparison to his Windows XP installation, it was amazing.
So my point is, that really the slowness is almost certainly caused by the amount of work being loaded onto the graphical system, not by the underlying performance of the system itself. And Windows and X are no different in this respect.
Not bashing X as its got its place and is universal, but no one can honestly say its resource friendly.
Are you sure? I've personally used X on these machines:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARCstation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_80486
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Indy With accelerated 3D in 1993.
Not to mention a bunch of other machines I can't find convinient references for. Bear in mind that a well written X11 program will still display on those machines (albeit probably missing some modern features).
Perhaps you're including the mapped graphics card memory as part of its memory usage (as top does). It will also happily cache as many pixmaps as it's allowed to. Perhaps you're including that as well.
20 years ago, X was a monster. These days you emulate the machines it ran on then faster in emulation than the old machines ran in hardware.
But if you still really care about the so-called `bloat', then try installing KDrive (part of the recent X11 distributions) and use that instead of the main X server. It's used find for embedded systems, so it will be OK for your PC. If your PC is still suffering under the load, then you machine is probablu so old that you could drag a faster one out of these for free.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
(Argh, why did I not use preview? Sorry, posted again with formatting!)
It's not at all clear that we could gain anything by starting over, and in fact we'd probably lose quite a bit. Yes, there are old methods to do things, but they are being deprecated or replaced outright. XCB replacing Xlib is a particularly good example, as is the replacement of server-side fonts with client-side. Essentially these things aren't real issues any more, so they don't take up any real mental bandwidth when you need to work on X.
The drawing model and things that the UNIX Hater's Handbook talks about have been pretty well addressed over the last half decade. Cairo is the official replacement for the old drawing model that X provided, and Cairo works really well and is getting better all the time.
The problems you're talking about, like compositing well and having video work well with OpenGL, are not trivial problems, and they are often unsolved. We don't really know how to accelerate all sorts of rendering operations (glyph rendering is proving to be particularly difficult at the moment, for example) and for things like video in a composited opengl context it's highly unlikely that the code would get written any faster or cleaner if you were starting from scratch rather than reworking the existing codebase to make this necessarily complicated thing happen.
You're also ignoring many of the problems that X solves remarkably well. It's an incredibly modular design that allows for extensibility with simultaneous backwards compatibility. It actually does a very good job of managing windows. Finally, it does a ton of the dirty work like knowing how to read EDID blocks, parse a configuration file, or allow drivers to execute x86-mode BIOS calls on non-x86 hardware. All of this can be unpleasant code to write where you'd gain little or nothing by rewriting it.
So yeah, a cleaner design would be nice, but a vast amount of code has been fixed by deletion from the X server, to the point where the size of the server actually has gone down between some releases. So things are improving, and while it's slow, at least it's moving at a visible pace these days. Because of this, I'm really not convinced that starting over would get you more than the joy of reimplementing solutions to hard problems.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."