The State of X.Org

An anonymous reader writes "Phoronix has up an article looking at the release of X Server 1.4.1. This maintenance release for X.Org, which the open-source operating systems depend upon for living in a graphically rich world, comes more than 200 days late and it doesn't even clear the BugZilla release blocker bug. A further indication of problems is that the next major release of X.Org was scheduled to be released in February... then May... and now it's missing with no sign of when a release will occur. There are still more than three dozen outstanding bugs. Also, the forthcoming release (X.Org 7.4) will ship with a slimmer set of features than what was initially planned."

Comments

Anything else out there?

[CastrTroy]

Is there anything else out there? Why is there such a lack of interest in X.org, when so many other projects depend on it. Most of the big projects have been moving quite quickly, making a lot of headway in the past couple of years. What's holding x.org back?

Re:Anything else out there?

[jeiler]

Probably the complexity of the issues involved, and the ever-expanding environmental requirements X is being written for.

Re:Anything else out there?

[larry bagina]

I agree. I recently discovered the xfree86 project. It seems like a good alternative to x.org.

Re:Anything else out there?

[FudRucker]

RE:"when so many other projects depend on it."

is that a good thing? it is not! i think applications that require an x-window-system should be just agnostic enough to allow for the older alternative to xorg, [eg] http://www.xfree86.org/

Re:Anything else out there?

[Anonymous Coward]

*whoosh*

Re:Anything else out there?

[Kjella]

Uh, a strange thing to say but your posting history seems normal so...

In February 2004, with version 4.4.0, The XFree86 Project adopted a license change that the Free Software Foundation considered GPL incompatible. Most Linux distributions found the potential legal issues unacceptable and made plans to move to a fork from before the license change. At first there were multiple forks, but the X.Org fork soon became the dominant one. Most XFree86 developers who were already annoyed at other issues in the project also moved to X.Org. In short, x.org was xfree86 but that project is practicly dead. Pretty much everyone worth mentioning have migrated from xfree86 to x.org and while x.org may be moving slow, xfree86 has almost stopped dead. Going back there would do little to nothing to bolster X development. Tbe question is rather why there's so little work overall (or so it claims, I don't have enough knowledge to say) since the competition is basicly non-existant.

Re:Anything else out there?

[Yetihehe]

Tbe question is rather why there's so little work overall (or so it claims, I don't have enough knowledge to say) since the competition is basicly non-existant.

Wow, you have just answered your question in the same sentence.

Re:Anything else out there?

[CastrTroy]

First, I believe your parent post was a joke. Second of all, the reason most open source projects go stagnant seems to be for a couple reasons. First, the code is an ugly mess, and nobody wants to work on it. Second, internal conflict about where the project is going, so nothing gets done, or every new feature or bug fix becomes a big argument, about how it should be done. Thirdly, very boring project subject matter. The last one seems to be the big killer. There could be a nice open source Outlook/Exchange replacement. It wouldn't be inherently hard to build, but it seems that nobody is interested in doing it. Most of the stuff that gets a lot of attention is the stuff that developers are interested in building.

Re:Anything else out there?

[moosesocks]

I'm guessing that X.Org inherited an absolutely terrifying codebase from xfree86.

Simply getting xfree to compile was a chore, even on the (few and far between) stable releases.

Personally, I'm still unconvinced that X is a particularly "good idea." 15 years later, and the promises of simplicity and compatibility are still unrealized, as every single implementation of the protocol has suffered from numerous problems. Perhaps it would be best to start from scratch, and revise X11 to be a more realistic/practical specification.

Even back in 1994, it was being called the Iran-Contra of user-interfaces.

Re:Anything else out there?

[fireboy1919]

I have a theory.

We're using X as our windowing system because it's what we have, and we need it. But I don't think anybody (or not many people) really *believe* in it.

That is to say, I doubt anybody takes a look at it and says "this is it! This is the way we should do Windowing!" And so the followup, "...and if it this thing worked, then it'd be more awesome."

What people actually say when they start looking at it looks more like this.
"Okay! X.org is a good project! I think maybe I'll contribute my time to it! Hold on...what is this? Why does it have all these features that nobody cares about? Why the nonstandard build system? What's with all the crazy legacy code? This thing is way too complex for me to spend my time on, and what I learn won't transfer to any other work. I'll pick something else."

Re:Anything else out there?

[Foske]

I think the main thing that holds back X (either .org or free86) is the legacy mess. What we see as X is actually a combination of the graphics drivers and a windowing system.

There used to be the KGI project trying to seperate them and stabilizing the interface for the drivers, now Fedora is trying it again with kernel level mode setting, and I think this is something we need to clean up the mess.

Furthermore the windowing system is so generic and bloated that it is a nightmare to maintain. Even basic features are extensions already ...

Oh and of course: X is not sexy... hacking window managers is on the other hand...

Leaves the question: what does X need ? What should X focus on in the near future ?

Re:Anything else out there?

[CastrTroy]

Open source does not work like big business. It doesn't stagnate because there's no competition. It stagnates because people don't want to work on it. There isn't much competition for the Linux Kernel either. That doesn't slow down it's development.

Re:Anything else out there?

[daffmeister]

Whooosh!

(GP was joking, I think he knows the history)

Re:Anything else out there?

[VincenzoRomano]

There are few points here.
Developers need (new) money.
Developers need (new) ideas.
Developers need (update) documentation.
It could be also time for a brand new project, but those points still hold true, in my opinion.

Re:Anything else out there?

[Enleth]

It's a HUGE, and I mean, REALLY HUGE codebase that deals with hell lots of different concepts (graphics, input, networking, ...) that requires a good deal of understanding to modify it properly. Yet, there are less than 30 (!) active developers. That's probably one of the most under-manned Open Source project out there, proportionally to its size. And it's, again, because it's complicated as hell and nothing can be done about this - it's just the way a windowing server has to be.

I've tried to help the project two years ago, I did dome work on input hotplugging and while not much of the code I wrote finally made it to the upstream (Daniel Stone, the man behind the input subsystem, finally decided for a different solution than what I was thinking about - maybe that was a good decision, I'm not the one to judge), I could experience myself how difficult developing X is. Besides skills and experience, you need to be able to keep track of such a big structure mentally, all the time. Not every programmer can do that, even skilled and experienced.

And, no, you can't always abstract everything out and make a nice, clean structure for the code to adhere to. Maybe the X code could be a bit easier to modify, but just a bit. Trying to force that, you would end up with an Xserver counterpart of GNU Hurd, if you know what I mean...

Re:Anything else out there?

[pebcak]

There isn't much competition for the Linux Kernel either. You mean like FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Darwin and OpenSolaris?

Re:Anything else out there?

[Kjella]

Wow, you have just answered your question in the same sentence. The Linux kernel for example, is completely without competing forks that I know of, yet seems to be making good strides. xfree86 was going slow, and even after the x.org revival things again appear to be going slow. With a lot of people focusing on the desktop performance of Linux, why isn't this project interesting? A lot of other projects seem to be progressing nicely even without the competition breathing down their necks. I wonder if part of the reason is that the code is X11 licensed, which is fairly close to BSD so you don't have even LGPL protection of your code. If Stallman is looking for a non-(L)GPL project to replace, maybe he should drop the Hurd and start working on a GPL'd X instead...

Re:Anything else out there?

[Jellybob]

Ahhh, because Windows' display manager is truly amazing.

Now, let me just open an application on another machine, and show it on this one's X server... hmmm... what's that - I need to be running Windows 2008 Server, and have a terminal server license?

How about running multiple display managers, so that I can have more then one person using the machine with seperate monitors and input... no. Thought not.

I could go on, but I think you'll get the point.

Re:Anything else out there?

[larry bagina]

Smelly hippies?

Re:Anything else out there?

[ewoods]

Glad that was modded as funny. Wow.

X.org should scrap the network transparency cruft. It's never worked well, been a slow performer and is used by a small portion of the user population. It's been supplanted by better tools such as vnc and nx (better as in faster, easier to use, more widely accepted). Scrap that and it would make X.org a lot easier to maintain and use. It doesn't have to implement everything in the protocol specification and that's one thing that could go the way of the dodo.

Re:Anything else out there?

[Rob Riggs]

Seems a bit derogatory to call the BSD, OpenSolaris and Darwin users "smelly hippies". Not all of them are like that.

Re:Anything else out there?

[Enleth]

Geez, people bash on the network transaprency all the time, while it's actually the least of the problems. And it's completely irrelevant when an application connects locally because it happens over a shared-memory IPC (which unix sockets actually is, despite having "sockets" in the name).

I'd say all the old, device-dependent xfree86 code is to blame for most of the needless complexity and while it is being rewritten, it's a slow process that requires more developers than are involved with the project. Working with the new X.org code, while still demanding, wasn't really bad, just required thinking and getting "the bigger picture" well.

Actually, the new code is perfectly capable of dropping network transparency, integration of needless extensions and so on *when it's appropriate*, just take a look at Kdrive. But still too many important things remain in the xfree86 part.

Re:Anything else out there?

[mikael]

How would we go about replacing X-windows? It seems to be one of those API's that if you tried to replace it with something "simpler and more modern", by the time the developers added the features that everyone else wanted, we would be back to what we had already. The wikipedia entry for the X-Window System"> explains why the designers made the decisions that they made.

Just by looking at all the research papers and articles that have been published relating to X-windows: X-windows, there seems to be plenty that needs to be changed/added/optimized/enhanced.

I wonder how relevant is the paper: "Why X Is Not Our Ideal Window System" today, considering it was written just over 18 years ago.

Re:Anything else out there?

[Anonymous Coward]

AFAIK NX needs the network stuff you want to remove and VNC is quite slow unless you use a VNC X server.

Re:Anything else out there?

[m.ducharme]

I for one, welcome our irony-lacking Overlords.

Re:Anything else out there?

[bsDaemon]

oh, sure... blame it on the license... 'cause, you know, all engineers and programmers are more worried about politics than products.

Sheesh.

Admittedly, I know next to nil about the internals of X, however I think that it does its job well for what it was intended. The problem is that home-use of "desktop" linux is NOT what X was intended for.

When it comes to running applications on other, more powerful servers while being able to display the graphics on your workstation, it's tops. I've done it numerous times at school and internships.

In my freshman comp sci class, I'd use PuTTY and a local X server on the windows machine in the lab to access my FreeBSD machines in my dorm room and do my work on them, FROM the lab, in class. (i managed to get the school's admin to pony up static IPs and host names for my machines).

For "desktop linux," I don't see why the system isn't reworked to run off of a frame-buffer and scrap all the X crap -- still keep X for running networked apps.

oh, wait -- that's more or less how OS X is organized, isn't it? Or Windows... you know, the successful "desktop" operating systems -- not the systems that were designed for collaborative efforts in scientific and research environments.

Yes, I am simultaneously defending the UNIX way, and saying that it doesn't really address the problems that "normal" home users have.

It's worked for me, since I was 12 or 13 when FreeBSD 2.2.8 hit my machine, but I never expected anything other than what I was getting and so I got just what I wanted.

Re:Anything else out there?

[Anonymous Coward]

or new developers to tackle bite-sized portions of the stack without being overwhelmed. Anyone care to comment on whether this was done?

Yes, it was - hence rapid development things like mpx, xrandr, xrender, composite xinput 2.0 and so forth. Have people really forgotten so fast that a couple of years ago linux /didn't do/ all those gee-whiz window explodey effects?

Really, the /. story is inflammatory flamebait. Loads of pretty cool new stuff has appeared recently in X.org. Actually, IMO that's more likely why the release schedule slipped - stuff like MPX is very cool but represents very major changes.

Emacs' release schedule recently slipped too - but it was because they're merging ECB and window groups into Emacs 23, not because emacs devel has stopped!

Re:Anything else out there?

[mhall119]

I remember when X.org started one of the things they promised was that the code base would be modularized allowing for new developers to tackle bite-sized portions of the stack without being overwhelmed. Anyone care to comment on whether this was done? It was done when they moved from X.org 6.x to 7.

Re:Anything else out there?

[gid]

Every tried running a local X server and running clients over the internet? I've done so many times and it's slow as molasses, at least when running oracle installers, which is where most of my experience comes from. Xvnc for me, thanks.

Re:Anything else out there?

[Undead NDR]

Open source does not work like big business. It doesn't stagnate because there's no competition.

Not entirely true, IMO. Even though no money is directly involved, a team of open-source developers will still want their project to be successful over competing projects as a matter of personal pride and potential business opportunities.

If there's no competition, they have one less motivation to keep up work.

Re:Anything else out there?

[drinkypoo]

There's no reason the graphics system and drivers have to be anywhere close to the same project as the window manager.

They aren't.

Well, the drivers are. But obviously at this stage they DO have to be coupled to the server for a variety of reasons, not least that no one else wants to take over.

But let's face it, twm hasn't had any major work in a long time, and the window managers we all use on a daily basis are nowhere near the X.Org codebase.

Do we really need network transparency?

Yes, we do need network transparency. I use it all the time. It's a major feature. Keep your hands off my network transparency!

Re:Anything else out there?

[Enderandrew]

I believe xorg-x11 version 7 was the first modular one. That was a good three years ago.

Re:Anything else out there?

[Per Wigren]

Use, NX instead of plain remote X11, it almost feels like sitting at the local computer even over slow DSL. It's free as in GPL and very simple to set up. I really don't understand why it hasn't become THE standard for remote windowing yet.

Re:Anything else out there?

[kripkenstein]

In addition to those factors, I'd say the problem is also a lack of interest.

On the one hand we have things like GNOME and KDE, Firefox, Blender, etc. etc. - software that the user knows by name and interacts with directly. People happily join such projects and contribute code to them.

On the other hand you have software that the typical user might not not even know exists, like the Linux kernel. However, for geeks the kernel is perhaps the pinnacle of programming, and furthermore by lucky coincidence (or unhappy, if you are GNU) the name of the kernel has become synonymous with the entire OS, making it high-profile just like the more obvious software projects mentioned in the previous paragraph.

Whereas the X server is somewhere in the middle. It isn't well known, even geeks might not know exactly what it does (i.e., where the separation is between X, the window manager, and so forth), and for some reason it lacks the 'coolness' factor of the Linux kernel.

All of this is unjustified, and a shame. Perhaps more stories on Slashdot like this one will raise awareness? Maybe we should also motivate people, by e.g. telling them that hacking X is even harder than hacking the kernel ;)

Re:Anything else out there?

[fastest fascist]

Seems a bit derogatory to call the BSD, OpenSolaris and Darwin users "smelly hippies". Not all of them are like that. Not all of them are hippies?

Re:Anything else out there?

[vrmlguy]

Admittedly, I know next to nil about the internals of X, however I think that it does its job well for what it was intended. The problem is that home-use of "desktop" linux is NOT what X was intended for.
[...]
For "desktop linux," I don't see why the system isn't reworked to run off of a frame-buffer and scrap all the X crap -- still keep X for running networked apps. X uses multiple communications channels. There's TCP and DECnet, used for apps running on a different machine than the display server, and there's Unix pipes, which provide much higher throughput for local apps. But Unix pipes are nearly legacy now, because most servers also support MIT-SHM (the MIT Shared Memory extension), which lets an app have direct access to the X server's graphics buffers, and GLX (the OpenGL extension), used for running 3D graphics over a network. Finally, there's VirtualGL, which is a layer that can be used on top of either X11 or VNC. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VirtualGL for more info.)

X11 already provides desktop Linux with you need to run high performance graphics.

Re:Anything else out there?

[Hatta]

When displaying to a local server X uses unix domain sockets. Those are very fast, and they're caching friendly, so they compare well with other forms of inter-process communication like shared memory. If you have some evidence that network transparency is any kind of a bottleneck, I'd like to see it, but no one has been able to produce such numbers as far as I've seen.

Don't optimize before you've proven where the bottleneck is.

Re:Anything else out there?

[Wdomburg]

Considering Linux the kernel targets everything from the embedded space to the mainframe, I'd say they are.

If you're talking about the desktop space, there's really little to nothing that a user interacts with that wouldn't run on any of those platforms. Linux just happens to have the most traction (which has a multiplying effect since it encourages vendor support and attracts new developers).

Re:Anything else out there?

[mrchaotica]

Being able to have two pointers might be pretty cool, but you'll not get much attention for that.

Really? You do know that "multiple pointers" is also known as "multitouch," right? Why can the Apple iPhone and Microsoft Surface get attention for it, while X.org can't?

Re:Anything else out there?

[bsDaemon]

Xorg is a major advance from XFree86. I dipped out of the 'nix scene for a couple of years because I was doing other things and frankly, I'm surprised by Xorg.

I used to buy XiG XAccel in high school because it was worth $150 to not have to fuck with XFree86 to me.

I like X -- it does exactly what I want. However, for the people who switch to Linux 'cause the hate Windows, but are used to being greated with some smiley little graphical login prompt (yes, I know most distributions of linux have gdm/kdm/xdm set to run automagically), not having to think about the graphical interface really "starting" or as being separate from the os, etc - confusion can arise.

A lot of Mac's success *IS* because its gui framework.

it appears to be managed in frame buffer, with custom rom that makes sure you never see bios info -- just pretty pictures.

the removal of large swaths of abstraction make it load and "talk" faster.

the use of pdf rendering and enforcing policy rather than just providing tools means that things like cut and paste work from app to app, every app.

That is the sort of thing that X fails on for the casual or home user.

different tool kits and object models mean that apps all work differently. choosing between KDE and GNOME means that if you want a "seemless" environment, you're pretty much limited to their set of apps, which normal people are used to on Windows/Mac, but the fact that they can co-exist on a linux system, and often do, can lead to issues.

Then what do I know, I'm using WindowMaker and xterm these days.

Just saying, *I* like X, but if you're one of those who finds it necessary to "convert" people for whatever reason, it leaves a lot to be desired for people who expect "free windows" or "all the flash of leopard without the mac hardware"

Re:Anything else out there?

[Novus]

Yes and no. Most of the core technology is GPL, but the front-end stuff, and therefore the actual client and server packages, are freeware or commercial. FreeNX is a fully-GPL fork.

Re:Anything else out there?

[kosibar]

Okay, so here's an idea...

We should revive XFree86. To start, we should generate a list of features for the next release. We'll spread some rumors about what we're doing, let the world see how hard we're working on it.

This should get some attention from /. and other sites to get people involved but we'll freeze the code and not allow any new developers/submissions on the project. Frustrated, they'll go over to X.Org to try to work for the competition.

Now for phase II. About this time next year we announce a release date, delay it a few times, then release it about two years from now. Make it a big deal. Major release. Get everybody talking about it.

For the release we'll drop all of the major new features on the list. We'll fix a bug or two, something major like a spelling error in a log report. Of course, we'll add a few new bugs. We could drop support for some hardware. For new features we could change a few things in the conf file. Instead of "Section" you now have to use "Block". We could totally change the format of the ModeLine to something totally crazy (crazier?)

If this follows the corporate model we have today it should drive major innovation and more frequent releases from X.Org, though our XFree86 project would unfortunately take away most of X.Org's market share.

Open source projects would probably earn the respect of more businesses and government agencies if it would just follow these common sense models from the corporate world.

Re:Anything else out there?

[peragrin]

that was the point of the fork though. Xfree86 developers moved slowly before X.org was formed, and wouldn't introduce changes like 3D accelerated desktop, period.

Developers where complaining about xfree86 for years before the fork, When the license changed it was just enough to push the fork. X.org began a long boring process of breaking X into smaller modules which will accelerate overall development. The problem is that process is still on going, and will take a few more years before any major upgrades can take place.

Think about the Mozilla project. They spent years cleaning out the core codebase and upgrading the core gecko engine from Netscape before they even had a decent beta. X.org is doing the same to something far larger, and uglier.

Re:Anything else out there?

[Luyseyal]

It isn't well known, even geeks might not know exactly what it does (i.e., where the separation is between X, the window manager, and so forth), and for some reason it lacks the 'coolness' factor of the Linux kernel.

Oh, what sad times are these when even persons calling themselves geeks do not know the difference between X, the window manager, windowing toolkits, etc. There is a pestilence upon this land. Nothing is sacred. Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.

-l

Re:Anything else out there?

[0xABADC0DA]

I would like to contribute to the X, but mostly what stops me is that the code is written for the 80s. Lots of internals are using macros and bit values and optimization hacks, and directly 'speaking' X11 protocol. The code is disorganized, with files in weird locations and with two-letter names. I'm not blaming the developers, because in the 80s this is what had to be done. And they are making huge progress making it modular and organizing the code. But it's still not an attractive codebase to dig into.

Then, once you have decided to work on it and have fully absorbed X11 protocol into your being, you basically need a vmware license in order to develop. It's almost as hard to try out the changes you made as it is for kernel developers... slightly easier, especially for debugging, but you still need to either shut down everything you are doing to run a new build or have multiple development systems.

So basically it is a really step hill to overcome just to start developing X. Perhaps steeper since the kernel at least has excellent, 'simple', modular code to work with.

Re:Anything else out there?

[Hatta]

I don't see anything in there that's really a problem with X.

Yes, booting linux takes time, I'm sure Ubuntu can come up with a splash screen without touching X. Actually starting X is nearly instantaneous on any machine I've tried in years, starting KDE or gnome takes forever.

Yes, there are many toolkits on linux that work slightly differently. That has nothing to do with X. There's nothing you could do to "fix X" that would affect the toolkit situation.

You may have a point with cut & paste. I haven't tried to copy a graph from gnumeric and paste it into koffice or anything like that recently. But I'm still not sure that's the job of X. We have standards from freedesktop.org that should allow interoperability of clipboards. It's up to the application authors to follow those standards.

So I stand by my point, X is very good at what it does. The problems people think they have with X are mostly problems with the software that runs on X, or the software that X runs on top of.

Re:Anything else out there?

[larry bagina]

Yep. We recently swapped our production servers (from gentoo) to FreeBSD. Most of the senior linux admins quit in protest (they spent all day recompiling kde and testing themes so no big loss). Withe FreeBSD, we've seen better performance under heavy loads, but more importantly, that overwhelming stench of rancid pizza and dorito farts is gone.

Re:Anything else out there?

[cerelib]

I have done and do this quite often. The killer is latency, not bandwidth. Running apps from within my company's network is nearly as fast as running them on my desktop. If I want to run from my university a few miles away, it feels a bit sluggish. If you try to run from across the country, you will feel the latency. If you are using satellite, you will probably feel the latency. So, it does have its uses, but a user needs to understand the limitations as well.

Re:Anything else out there?

[mrsteveman1]

Perhaps if someone were being paid to develop it this wouldn't have happened.

Re:Anything else out there?

[jeiler]

Agreed. X needs to fork--have half the team maintain the current implementation, the other half do a start-from-scratch coding marathon.

Re:Anything else out there?

[nguy]

A lot of Mac's success *IS* because its gui framework.

The GUI framework on the Mac is Cocoa. The equivalent of Cocoa is Gnome (or KDE). The underlying display server, the equivalent of X11, is Quartz.

it appears to be managed in frame buffer

But it isn't. OS X has the same client/server display architecture as a Gnome desktop.

with custom rom that makes sure you never see bios info -- just pretty pictures.

What you see on OS X is that the boot loader quickly throws up a gray screen to keep you from seeing the boot loader text; the text itself is still there. If you like, you can boot OS X completely in text mode, just like a Linux system.

the removal of large swaths of abstraction make it load and "talk" faster.

The OS X display server has at least as many layers of abstraction as X11. It is not intrinsically faster than X11 (if anything, it's slower). Mostly what you perceive as speed on OS X is massive amounts of backing store.

the use of pdf rendering

OS X doesn't really use PDF rendering.

and enforcing policy rather than just providing tools means that things like cut and paste work from app to app, every app.

I own several Macs. The notion that "cut and paste work from app to app, every app" is laughable, and Apple couldn't enforce that if they tried.

Furthermore, if anything, policy is determined by the GUI framework, not the display server.

That is the sort of thing that X fails on for the casual or home user.

Whatever problems you think the Linux desktop may have, they have nothing to do with X11; consistency and policy is determined by the desktop environment, not the display server.

Re:Anything else out there?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because starting from scratch is such a good idea - just look at Mozilla!

Re:Anything else out there?

[PitaBred]

Really? With xrandr, it's trivial to get multiple monitors working. I have my laptop set so that I can connect to an external monitor and switch to the spanned desktop on the fly. And get this... I can get it to remember how it was configured! Every time I had to connect under Windows, it forgot something, whether it was the resolution or the layout of the two screens, or whatever. I can just set up a simple script (or use the dialogs if that's your bag) that always does the right thing when I hit the screen switch button.

Re:Anything else out there?

[Randle_Revar]

X.org began a long boring process of breaking X into smaller modules which will accelerate overall development. The problem is that process is still on going, and will take a few more years before any major upgrades can take place. X.org has been modular for several releases now. I don't remember for sure now, but if 100% of the modularization wasn't done in 7.0, then 90%+ was, and the rest was done in 7.1.

Think about the Mozilla project. They spent years cleaning out the core codebase and upgrading the core gecko engine from Netscape before they even had a decent beta. No, they didn't. They threw out the original Netscape 5 code (evolved Netscape 4) and started completely from scratch to make gecko and everything else.

Re:Anything else out there?

[ThePhilips]

My personal bet is that X is overly complicated.

E.g. it takes 20-30 minutes to start doing something with Linux kernel. Entry bar is set low - many people like to participate. Needless to mention that to compile (properly configured) Linux kernel (with subset of drivers and features you really need) only few minutes. There are piles and piles of documentation and forums where you can find anything.

E.g. KDE + Qt. To compile KDE - you might need days. Or just grab precompiled binary packages. But after that you can in 5 minutes create something useful and interesting. Documentation is near perfect and complete. Also reading source code is quite easy, since most of the code is human readable.

But X is different beast. Even compiling it is challenge on itself. There is literally no documentation on its innards. There is no "Hello World" for X. There are bunch of example modules which you need to spend hours after hours to only understand where they plug into the all X mess.

I'd say main X problem is its strive to be cool and sit on all chairs. I'd say they need to scale down the project and split it into smaller independent pieces. Forget large releases (installing apt-get would help! kidding). The smaller sub-projects would have more chances attracting people, since (at least theoretically) then entry barrier would be lower.

Re:Anything else out there?

[lysse]

From my cold, dead hands! As far as I'm concerned, that "network transparency cruft" is the only compelling thing about X!

Re:Anything else out there?

[Hal_Porter]

So what is the important stuff that the Windows display manager does, and X doesn't? Umm not suck? I hate having to use X. It's slow because you have to aptget unfree-leachware-closed-source to get an accelerated driver which will probably fuck the machine up. Cut and paste never works. Keyboard accelerators don't work. All the applications look different. The fonts are too small and are ugly. It's fail, complete and utter.

Whereas on Windows I have a nice accelerated display by default. I can Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V to cut'n'paste between applications. Decent windows applications have accelerators so I don't need to move my hands off the keyboard. And because Windows is a look and feel rather than just a toolkit I can see how to use a Windows app pretty much instantly. And Windows has had True Type since 3.1 so the fonts look right to me.

Now it used to be that X Windows had network transparency and Windows didn't. But now there's Remote Desktop and VNC to handle that. And it was a far better idea to optimize for the common case where the application is running locally than across the network. It meant that 16 Windows apps could run quite well on Windows 3.1 on a 286 at 12Mhz.

These days a 32 or 64 bit Windows app in C or C++ is seriously simple to write and it very efficient since you build the UI out of built in Windows classes. You subclass 'em and override the 1% of behaviour you want to change. And since you're only overriding 1%, everyone knows how to use it. You can make small exe files too, e.g. uTorrent.

There is a good alternative to X Windows, it's called Win32. From what I've read uTorrent on Wine is still pretty lightweight.

Re:Anything else out there?

[Frank T. Lofaro Jr.]

Ever try writing code for opening a window in Xlib?

Doing one's taxes is FAR simpler, the IRS rules are more logical, less complex and more sane than those for writing Xlib applications.

Re:Anything else out there?

[kipman725]

Don't forget GNU HURD.. now with 120% more feedom!

Re:Anything else out there?

[0xABADC0DA]

Personally, I'm still unconvinced that X is a particularly "good idea." 15 years later, and the promises of simplicity and compatibility are still unrealized, as every single implementation of the protocol has suffered from numerous problems. Perhaps it would be best to start from scratch, and revise X11 to be a more realistic/practical specification. The main problem I think is that X is written in C. Originally the X server did graphics itself, scan converting lines and such, so it had to be in C (and there weren't many real alternatives then). Now all it really does is manage a lot of information -- and C is a really really bad language for managing lots of information. Even a simple desktop has over a thousand "windows" that all have position, change listeners, and other properties. Then there are all the bitmaps, pens, backing stores, repaint regions, etc. Events, queues, messages.

The X server should be mostly scrapped and rewritten in Java. Java is a language that is suited for managing information like that, while still being high-performance (enough). The server could be rewritten in C++, but C++ is messy and is a complicated and archaic language at this point anyway.

Take a look at for instance weirdx which basically one person did. It handles most of the core functions of X and plenty fast (of course it is incomplete since it is one person's hobby). Or see Sun's Project Looking Glass, an opengl X server written in Java -- that was also written in one guy's spare time. With more development on these they could be real competitors to X.org while being more approachable, and I'll bet faster than the C code.

Re:Anything else out there?

[ushering05401]

Feel free to make a donation.

Re:Anything else out there?

[Abcd1234]

Which is why a) no one ever writes directly against Xlib, and b) Xlib is being replaced by Xcb.

Re:Anything else out there?

[Randle_Revar]

If you mean "take out the tcp/ip part", that wouldn't really change anything. If you mean "take out everything that enables networking" that would be a lot of work, and it still wouldn't get you very much. The hard part of maintaining and working on X internals doesn't really come from the network transparency stuff itself.

Now, if you have to deal with xlib for the X protocol, that can be a pain. But that is why XCB (X C Bindings) was invented.

XCB is apparently very nice to work with, and it has "a small footprint, latency hiding, direct access to the protocol, improved threading support, and extensibility". The most recent distros are using XCB/xlib which uses XCB internal, while allowing xlib apps to function without changing anything. When XCB is standard in enough installed systems, apps and toolkits can begin migrating to native XCB. When the Awesome window manager 3.0 comes out, it will be the first WM to use XCB directly.

As for NX, it is really just compresses the X protocol and encrypts it. If you remove X network transparency, NX is useless. I, and I suspect many *nix admins, vastly prefer NX or X over SSH to VNC, RDP, etc (of course plain ssh probably gets used more than all of those put together on *nix).

Re:Anything else out there?

[bsDaemon]

Don't forget GNU HURD.. now with 120% more feedom! and -130% installed base!

Re:Anything else out there?

[moosesocks]

The X server should be mostly scrapped and rewritten in Java. Java is a language that is suited for managing information like that, while still being high-performance I'm confused. Do I mod this as "Funny"?

Re:Anything else out there?

[erudified]

I'd say all the old, device-dependent xfree86 code is to blame for most of the needless complexity

I agree 100%. I'm not an Xorg developer, but recently I put together a hackintosh and started playing with developing a framebuffer driver for my old Radeon X1400 Mobility. Comparing IOPCIDevice and IOFramebuffer with libpciaccess is night and day.

Firstly, and I don't really mean to be insulting here, but libpciaccess just sucks. It's a step in the right direction, but comparing this with IOPCIDevice is... well, it just doesn't speak well for the open source world. The API documentation tells the story pretty well. This is a stable API that hasn't changed in a good, long while. And why should it? It does everything you need to do to speak with a PCI device, it's easy to understand, and it works.

Secondly, IOFramebuffer. Again, an API that hasn't changed in a good, long while. It's simple, it publishes a framebuffer and lets everyone go on with their business. It completely separates modesetting and the publishing of a framebuffer from acceleration. This is a huge win.

The IOAccelerator header docs aren't published, but given what we've seen so far, we can infer that it's clean, it hasn't changed in a while, and it works. Why can't we have this sort of fundamental cleanliness accepted in the open source world? I feel like this stuff is about a decade ahead of Linux.

And the X protocol itself? Well, it sucks. I have an 802.11g network here at home, and X sessions are completely unusable over it. This is failure. It is abject, complete, utter failure. We're not talking long distances, we're talking both machines and the router all within 20 feet of each other. With compression, without compression, over ssh, not over ssh: FAIL. This is a common modern use case, gentlemen. If the X protocol fails it on a wireless home network, what the fuck is the point of it? Xlib is an anachronism. It is the single shittiest piece of the GUI development stack on Linux, and there's plenty of fail to go around. Ditch this bullshit, I beg you.

Follow the Apple model, provide a simple VESA modesetting driver and a software renderer and ship the fucking thing. Why has no one looked at the preeminent operating system for graphics professionals an said "hey, maybe these guys know what the hell they're doing? and omg, some of this stuff seems to be open source!" - I'll tell you why, not invented here syndrome. Those macfaggots created it and fuck them, we'll show 'em good with our 1980s network protocol and 600 pages of completely unreadable API documentation (joke's on you, it's out of date anyways!). How's that working out?

This unholy mess needs to be fixed if Linux is going to stand any real chance on the desktop.

I say we nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

P.S., I know this seems critical but I hope it's interpreted as constructive. In case it isn't, props to the Xegl crew, David Airlied, and the whole RadeonHD team. You guys made a driver for a wide range of modern hardware that basically anyone (if I can, you can) can read through and get an understanding of pretty easily. No simple feat. A lot of truy extraordinary developers have contributed a lot to X, and I salute their efforts and could never hope to be half the programmer that they are, but I recognize that there's only so much lipstick you can put on this pig.

Re:Anything else out there?

[PitaBred]

Yes, it does do primary and secondary screens. Or mirrored. Or whatever.

And I told you that I can do it via config dialogs, just like in Windows. I simply noted that IN ADDITION, I can script it, which I CANNOT do in Windows, at least not without a lot of serious work as far as I know.

Re:Anything else out there?

[erudified]

Ahhh, because Windows' display manager is truly amazing.

It is. The amazing thing about it is that even with a technologically subpar product (on paper), they still kick the living shit out of Linux in terms of responsiveness and usefulness. Here's a quick test: turn on 3D acceleration and use AIGLX on any card that supports 3D acceleration (we can limit ourselves to directX 10 cards to compare evenly with Vista). Open up firefox. Resize it. Watch in dismay as your much vaunted technological superiority falls flat on it's face.

You know what's really sad about Vista? The biggest flop that Microsoft has made in the past decade is still objectively better than any Linux distribution at this simple task. Go ahead, try it.

Now, let me just open an application on another machine, and show it on this one's X server... hmmm... what's that - I need to be running Windows 2008 Server, and have a terminal server license?

Network transparency is essentially useless. Why is it useless? Because there aren't any applications worth running remotely to get the benefit of increased processing power that would be usable over a network connection. Those you would run (heh, xeyes) would be best served if developed as as a client/server app. My laptop has a 2.3ghz dual core processor. Thin client computing sucks. It sucked in the 80s, it sucked in the 90s, and it sucks now.

Why don't you give me a REAL WORLD example of a showstopping application that you run that takes advantage of X's "network transparency" so I can laugh and point at 10 better ways to solve your problems on both Linux and OS X?

How about running multiple display managers, so that I can have more then one person using the machine with seperate monitors and input... no. Thought not.

How about justifying the need to do this when dual core multi-ghz laptops cost $500 new with a warranty? This is, for lack of a better word, retarded.

It's not 1990, and even if it were, X sucked then.

Re:Anything else out there?

[sentientbrendan]

>E.g. it takes 20-30 minutes to start
>doing something with Linux kernel.
That may be true in some cases...

>There are piles and piles of documentation and forums where you can find anything.

Ahah... ahaha. No. The Linux kernel is very poorly documented. Your comment should read "there's *out of date* and *useless* documentation, scattered around the internet where you will never find it."

Unless you consider the source itself documentation... which is hard to argue for a source tree that is millions of lines.

Re:Anything else out there?

[ArsonSmith]

2003 called they want their Xfree86x.org fork and release strategy back.

Re:Anything else out there?

[Anonymous Coward]

My personal bet is that X is overly complicated. Overly complicated? Or just inherently complicated? A graphics driver (which is essentially what X is) has to interact with the kernel via an interface defined by the kernel, with hardware, and with the window manager. The only one of those that it can define is the relationship with the window manager.

By contrast, the linux kernel can define both its driver interface (how it interacts with hardware) and its API (how software interacts with it). The kernel pushes complexity into the driver space. X is stuck managing that complexity.

X also suffers from having a complicated function. Managing graphical relations is computationally intensive and difficult. That's why the GPU is separate from the CPU -- to allow for specialization of these complex functions.

A third problem is that X is more general purpose than many drivers. It would be easier if it only had to work with one monitor and graphics card, but the reality is that it is expected to work with all of them. This is also true of the kernel, but the kernel has greater ability to push the heavy lifting into the hardware's driver than X does.

Finally, I think that one of the biggest advantages that the kernel has over X is that it is adjacent to more things. X lies between the kernel, the graphics hardware, and the window manager. Generally, X uses the kernel rather than the other way around. Therefore, it's only people that are working on graphics hardware and the window manager who are interacting with X and therefore likely to find something that they want to change. By contrast, any program might make a kernel call.

Similarly, KDE/Qt and Gnome are accessed directly by many programs. Programs should be accessing X through the window manager.

All that said, you are probably correct about X needing to split itself into smaller, more elegantly abstracted pieces. However, even if X does that, it is still likely that it will be under documented with relatively less participation than other projects. While fundamental, it's simply not adjacent to enough other software to recruit easily. Without recruits, who is going to write the documentation and tutorials needed to gather more recruits?

Of course, we may simply be confusing words here. You may be using complicated to refer to what I would call inelegant or non-modular.

Re:Anything else out there?

[Just Some Guy]

It's almost as hard to try out the changes you made as it is for kernel developers... slightly easier, especially for debugging, but you still need to either shut down everything you are doing to run a new build or have multiple development systems.

Can't you run your development X on a different tty? I'm ignorant about such things, so maybe that's not possible.

Re:Anything else out there?

[jeiler]

It would ... but do you keep sailing a sinking ship, or try to build a new one?

Re:Anything else out there?

[RAMMS EIN]

I think the network transparency in X (which I use quite a lot) is both underrated and overrated (by different people, to be sure).

Many people don't know it, but when they discover they can use a computer remotely, they go "wow". With X, that has been possible for over 20 years now.

Unfortunately, many X clients don't work very well over medium to high latency links. When I want to use the Eclipse at work from home, I'm better off using VNC than X over the remote link.

For years, I've been sitting on an idea to improve remote applications by, basically, pushing more code to the display side of the connection. That would reduce the amount of information to be sent over the link, in particular latency-sensitive things like pointer positions and key strokes.

Of course, this could probably be implemented (among other ways) as an X extension.

Re:Anything else out there?

[chromatic]

Why is it one or the other? I prefer to avoid false dilemmas couched in inappropriate analogies to physical constructs; there's a whole field of research and practice in software development dedicated to improving the design of working code without changing its behavior.

Re:Anything else out there?

[0xABADC0DA]

Is this the funny part? Java's reliance on garbage collection makes it perform too poorly for graphics. I like Java, but not for something like this. The only funny part is how stupid the mods on slashdot are. Starting openoffice writer did four garbage collections for a total of 0.03 seconds with a not even optimized server. Garbage collection is not a problem, and if you had read the post the X server hasn't done graphics for a long time -- it's just a middleman between the applications and hardware acceleration.

Have you guys ever actually tried Looking Glass? It doesn't stutter. There is no reason not to use Java for something like this except prejudice.

Re:Anything else out there?

[fcr]

You won't need a vmware license because there are excelent alternatives like qemu and virtualbox.

Re:Anything else out there?

[jeiler]

My personal bet is that X is overly complicated.

That's kind of like betting that water is wet. :D However, "overly complicated" is unavoidable when the users want X to have the features it does, and to work (however well or poorly) on as wide a range of hardware/OS platforms as it does.

I started looking at some of the code for the X server back when I started with C. To a C-language newbie, it looked like the line printer had puked at random all over the paper. Now I have some experience with C, and it still looks almost as bad, but I can also see that the programmers did some pretty amazing work--considering the miracles they were trying to pull off, it's a wonder that any of it works, but they did a pretty damn good job.

Re:Anything else out there?

[chromatic]

Oh, so by "X needs to fork", you meant "I have a brilliant idea that the experienced software developers working on X.org have surely not thought of, and all I need is to convince someone else to do it, and I'm going to respond to any criticism of my brilliant ideas with the insinuation that other people should do this work for me."

I have other projects to refactor, thank you. I'll leave the X.org developers to decide how best to approach their code.

Re:Anything else out there?

[Anonymuous Coward]

Then, once you have decided to work on it and have fully absorbed X11 protocol into your being, you basically need a vmware license in order to develop. It's almost as hard to try out the changes you made as it is for kernel developers

You don't need any vmware license.

You can safely run more instances of the Xorg server on linux - just start on another screen (ex. Xorg :1). It's just that easy - the server will run in another virtual console. If you know you made changes that could lock up your screen/keyboard, you could conveniently schedule an at(1) process to kill it after 2 minutes (or ssh into the box from another machine).

And if your messing with video card driver code, then again vmware won't be of any use. Unless you're working on the special driver for the vmware virtual video card itself.

And finally, at least for debugging and testing purposes, qemu (which is free) works just as well as vmware.

Re:Anything else out there?

[Wdomburg]

Alrightly then. I'm not one to waste my time arguing with irrational stereotypes.

Re:Anything else out there?

[0xABADC0DA]

The average collection time using openoffice to load and edit a document was 0.0018 seconds and max 0.004 on a pretty old pentium 4 system. Java 7 (ie openjdk) allocates objects on the stack using escape analysis. Malloc/free are often slower overall than gc unless you can allocate more than one object at a time, which for a lot of requests won't be the case.

Re:Anything else out there?

[RWerp]

But it's already a fork!

Re:Anything else out there?

[Hal_Porter]

It's slow because you have to aptget unfree-leachware-closed-source to get an accelerated driver which will probably fuck the machine up.

As opposed to a closed source driver from ATI that fucks your machine up on Windows?

ATI aren't that bad. My old machine had an ATI card and it was rock solid. I prefer NVidia's drivers though, the ATI .Net bloated control panel annoys me.

NVidia Windows drivers always seem to mature faster than ATI's for new cards or new Windows versions, usually they are stable in a couple of revisions. ATI sometimes go through bad patches for driver stability.

Or even better one of those noname brand cards that have better support on Linux than the crappy drivers on the CD that come with the card?

I don't buy cards like that.

2D acceleration is enabled for all major brands of video cards (ATI, Nvidia, Via, and Intel [and probably Matrox too, but I don't have a card to test it on]) in the default free Xorg drivers. Sometimes the X configurator in the distro decides to use a generic framebuffer for no good reason. It's easy to fix.

Really? Last time I tried it didn't support my card, the latest NVidia. Given that it takes people time to reverse engineer hardware in the free driver I suspect that the latest card will always be like that.

It was actually pretty hard to get X out of 320*200 256 colors, non accelerated. Eventually I nuked the system and put XP back on it.

And lets face it, if I have the latest and greatest graphics card, I really want accelerated 3D, not just 2D. Not that there are any games for X I'd actually play of course. But it seems like one of the stengths of Windows is that most games target DirectX. The drivers are stable and you can get fast hardware. The fact that DirectX is supported for most games mean the graphics cards are optimized to implement it efficiently. Of course, the NVidia Windows driver has accelerated OpenGL too.

All of which means that a Windows PC is still a tempting target for videogames.

I can Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V to cut'n'paste between applications.

The Windows clipboard beats any clipboard KDE or Gnome has. This is primarily an application level failure, since X doesn't even know what applications put on the clipboard (and none of the applications know what another application has put on, either). Just throwing a mime-type on the clipboard blob would probably do wonders for KDE/Gnome clipboard functionality. The content negotiation X supports is just not specific enough (and it's old formats).

See it's the "X doesn't know what the applications put on the clipboard" thing that makes me hate X. Clipboards are not a recent invention. The problem with X Windows is that its creators seems to have this hippy view of the world where the Windowing system shouldn't impose choices on application writers but rather leave them free to make their own choices. Fuck that, I want a machine with a fascist conformity where every application conforms to the style "guidelines" or it is sent to a digital death camp by brownshirts like me.

And the thing is most users are fascists like me. 90% buy Windows machines where applications have a high degree of conformity. Another 3% buy Macs which are even more fascist.

Now it used to be that X Windows had network transparency and Windows didn't. But now there's Remote Desktop and VNC to handle that. And it was a far better idea to optimize for the common case where the application is running locally than across the network.

Remote Desktop is not truly network transparency; it's just remote desktop. Same with VNC. X lets you run applications anywhere and view them anywhere.

Yeah, but I don't need that network transparency, I only need remote desktop. And having it there means you can't optimize for the common case where video memory is local. On Windows there are lots of neat ways for applications to get

Re:Anything else out there?

[EsbenMoseHansen]

Yeah, I have. Of course, I use the magic -C to ssh, that helps quite a lot. Certainly fast enough to be usable, though I could be better.

Re:Anything else out there?

[chromatic]

I do know a few things--and one of those things is that on some projects, even if you have thousands of man-hours dedicated to the current codebase, a fresh start is needed.

If the X.org developers don't have the resources to maintain the current code base (and it's easy to make that argument, based on what's happened), how is splitting their developer efforts and likely spending several years adding back the features the current code supports going to make them go faster? Magic unicorn wish-land candy-flavored fairy glitter?

If you don't like the fact that I express my opinion...

Irrelevant; express away. I only care if someone else takes your idea seriously without considering the drawbacks. I have no illusion that the X.org developers care about either of our opinions on what they should do.

Re:Anything else out there?

[kelnos]

You're presupposing that X.org is sinking. I don't see that.

Re:Anything else out there?

[kelnos]

Yes, but depending on what you're working on (say, input handling), it's certainly possible to lock yourself out of even changing ttys. If you're working on graphics drivers, it's pretty easy to hard-lock your machine. Of course, if it's not hard-locked, you can probably grab another machine, ssh over, and kill your separate X instance, but if you can do that, then you might as well just develop using both machines, one as the dev machine, and one as the guinea pig. If you're working on parts of X that are device-independent, it makes a lot of sense to do your testing in a VM.

Re:Anything else out there?

[Grishnakh]

X isn't sinking.

A better comparison is: do you keep sailing a ship that floats just fine, but is butt-ugly, slightly slow, has some odd quirks, and is missing some nice features found in the most modern ships, or do you build a new one? If you have plenty of resources at your disposal, you might as well build a new one. If you're resource-constrained, however, you better stick with what you have and just continue to patch it up.

Re:Anything else out there?

[Trogre]

GP does have a point. On the rare occasions I'm forced to work with Windows boxes, I can rdesktop to them from my Linux box at home and get a virtual desktop with *much* better responsiveness than any remote X client I've seen. I can also close the session and log in from another computer and get the same desktop back, with all my applications still running. I haven't seen anything in Linux that comes close to that. Screen is about the closest I can think of, and it comes in a very poor second.

Re:Anything else out there?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, what sad times are these when even persons calling themselves geeks do not know the difference between X, the window manager, windowing toolkits, etc. There is a pestilence upon this land. Nothing is sacred. Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.

"Nu!"

"No no, it's not that; it's Gnu!"

Re:Anything else out there?

[bit01]

And the X protocol itself? Well, it sucks.

You are exaggerating hugely.

I have an 802.11g network here at home, and X sessions are completely unusable over it.

You have a problem and it doesn't appear to be X. I use X11 over a similar network via WPA2 and ssh -X all the time with no problems. GUI editors, utilities, whatever. I don't bother with NX or ssh -C. A few programs are badly coded and do unnecessary screen updates causing slowness. Working with images can be slow also. Fortunately I'm not interested in running those programs remotely.

I'd suggest you check your wireless network throughput. I get 1.2-1.7ms ping times with 100KB/s throughput on mine. Possibly there's interference from another WiFi network running on the same channel or other interference like metal, an electric motor or faulty network hardware.

The X11 code base is crufty and needs cleaning up but it works, and for many use cases it works well.

---

Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.

Re:Anything else out there?

[tehcyder]

I prefer to avoid false dilemmas couched in inappropriate analogies to physical constructs

So, what you're saying is that given the choice between a SUV and a racing bike, you'd take the hat-stand?

Re:Anything else out there?

[mrsteveman1]

Windows doesn't use GDI anymore.

In fact, as much as i dislike Windows overall, their graphics subsystems are much better than Xorg at the moment.

Quite recently Xorg was touting input device detection as a new feature, and on the fly screen switching. These are things Windows, even XP and i think Me, were doing 7 years ago.

X11 just completely ruins Linux for me, it gets in my way constantly, from having to RESTART x11 to add a screen to my laptop while working (losing all my work in the process), to the screen tearing all the time, to the synaptics driver which randomly jumps the mouse to new places while in use.

Given all the problems causes I'm happy to avoid it, even if that means using Windows. Luckily I don't have to make such a horrible choice.

Re:Anything else out there?

[vrmlguy]

Not when draging a transparent window freezes the system for seconds. Are you refering to problems with xcompmgr, or something else?

Not when X runs in ONE SINGLE THREAD. I'm not sure what you mean by this. Xlib has been thread-safe for years. As for the other parts of X11, http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=50400&cid=5099482 has a good explanation of where your train of thought jumped the tracks.

Not when X crashes. Do you have specific experience, or are you just rumor-mongering?

Not when X can't be compatible with the only two graphics chipsets on the world (ATI and nVidia, the rest is either complete crap - Intel - or forgotten, obsolete, and massively overpriced crap - Matrox). Gee, my copy of X11 seems compatible with everything you named. There are lots of ATI drivers available; see http://www.x.org/wiki/VideoDriverFAQ for assistance. Any problems you're having with nVidia drivers are due to nVidia only providing binary blobs. See http://www.x.org/wiki/NVIDIAProprietaryDriver for more details. As for the rest, well, "different strokes for different folks." If you're not running games, a low-end chipset is fine.

Not when X crashes. (I have yet to see Aqua crash, ONCE.) Now you're just repeating yourself.

Not when X has one new line of code a year, never fixes bugs, releases years too late, etc. etc. Looking at http://www.x.org/wiki/Events/XDC2008/Program, it seems that they are keeping busy.

And I haven't even started on the politics/license stuff... Yeah, politics has never raised its ugly head on the lkml (http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Akerneltrap.org+politics). And what's wrong with the current license?

Finally, developers' ignorance and childish

[BattleCat]

selfness show up on large scale. Jumped Linux ship two years ago in favor of MacOS X, never looking back, starting to get job done, instead of another OS/DE fight won.
While I was long-time subscriber to xorg-devel and other related MLs, every holy war fought there was nailing X coffin slowly but surely. Do they still sing "network transparency out of the box" mantra every time someone suggests changing architecture ?

Re:Finally, developers' ignorance and childish

[Anonymous Coward]

Do they still sing "network transparency out of the box" mantra every time someone suggests changing architecture ? That's the complaint you're going to go with? Seriously? Something that degrades gracefully into the ideal solution (shared mem and unix sockets) for a local-only graphics server?

There's a LOT wrong with X.org right now, even mentioned in TFS. I personally wish they would put a lot more work into the transition to evdev and HAL, so we can get rid of xorg.conf and finally make strides to being as user friendly as "the other" OSes.

But network transparency? You're fighting the wrong battles here.

Re:Finally, developers' ignorance and childish

[Anonymous Coward]

Internally, X11 running in local mode works the same way as Apple's window server - using shared memory and local sockets. Hell, even Windows Vista works this way (except using Windows IPC mechanisms instead of Unix ones).

Everyone who suggests changing the architecture of X by removing network transparency is arguing from a position of ignorance. There isn't a faster mechanism for doing a GUI server without either building the windows server into each app (allowing only one app at a time), or building the window server into the kernel (bad idea).

Re:Finally, developers' ignorance and childish

[kaiman]

But network transparency? You're fighting the wrong battles here. That is so true. Using Macs myself since a couple years. I have a recent MacBook Pro (mostly occupied by my wife) and an iBook G3 left for my stuff. While I can ssh into the MacBook Pro and do command line stuff fast, I so wish I could simply

    export DISPLAY=skarabrae:0.0

and get actual work done fast!

Network transparency is *the* feature of X.

Re:Finally, developers' ignorance and childish

[BattleCat]

Ok. Let's get this straight:
1. X wire proto is ugly. fscking ugly and so fscking low level I don't even know what to compare it with. Pushing ugliness faster via unix domain sockets (which are, presumedly, zero-copy on Linux ) (does anyone know about FreeBSD/Solaris implementation of UDS ? ) does not help in improving overall picture.
2. Changing protocol to work with higher level blocks (client-based widgets with server-backed structures) will probably break network transparency (since instead of low-level user IO and graphics resources, they'll need to work with complicated scenarios and behaviours)
(Keith Packard integrated client-side fonts relatively smoothly, but it was relatively easy task (relative to introduction of client-side widgets, of course)).

Re:Finally, developers' ignorance and childish

[diegocgteleline.es]

Internally, X11 running in local mode works the same way as Apple's window server - using shared memory and local sockets.

It doesn't uses shared memory, I think. There's a "shared memory" extension, but there's not a "shared memory transport" for the X11 protocol. Sun's propietary server has a shared memory transport, and it was said that they'd opensource and port it for X.org, but so far nothing has happened. It'd be an interesting thing to have, i think - today, when an application wants to display a image in the server it must send the whole image to the server (the protocol is network-oriented so it can't send a "reference" like a file, it has to send the whole data of the image). If the client app keeps the image in its memory after sending it to the server, the image is using 2x its memory size (one in the server, one in the client). With a shared memory transport, client and server could shared the memory that the image is using. Or so I've heard.

Re:Finally, developers' ignorance and childish

[siride]

No windowing system has anything resembling widgets on the server-side. It's all done in client-side libraries, where that kind of stuff belongs. The server-exposed interface just provides the mechanisms needed for implementing widgets. That part is fine and doesn't need to change.

As for the protocol, only a few parts are actually poorly designed. Grabs need to be reworked as they can result in subtle race conditions and lock-ups. There's a lot of old cruft that nobody uses that could go away, but isn't really causing a problem by remaining in the protocol. The main historical problem was Xlib, which did a lot of stupid things with the protocol, resulting in reduced performance, especially over the network. XCB fixes that, although no toolkits have been ported to pure XCB yet (and it may be a while).

Ultimately what's going to be happening is the move towards Composite/EXA, OpenGL and DRI(2) for everything, which should negate a lot of the existing problems with X's rendering infrastructure. Again, the lack of manpower is going to prevent these projects from making much forward progress.

Re:Finally, developers' ignorance and childish

[bytesex]

Exactly, what you want is a pluggable gui-object model in the server. I want to be able to say, through the X-protocol: scrollbar there, these dimensions and gimme these events on it. Apart from the time it would save on the wire (gobs and gobs of it), there would be no more bad-headed implementations of a scrollbar. Also, cut-n-paste and drag-n-drop must be taken out of icccm and be given a decent implementation - what a load of crap that is !

Re:Finally, developers' ignorance and childish

[siride]

The only place such a system might be of benefit would be over slow network connections, which is precisely the scenario where uploading server-side binary blobs to draw widgets would be an absolute nightmare. The idea of server-side widgets has been discussed and deemed to be a bad idea. The fact that none of the major windowing systems (Windows USER/GDI and Mac OS X Quartz/Aqua) use such a system should also indicate to you that everyone else thinks it's a bad idea too.

Re:Finally, developers' ignorance and childish

[Anonymous Coward]

local sockets *are* implemented as shared memory by most (all?) operating systems. The X-SHM extension you're referring to, has nothing to do with how the operating system implements local sockets; instead it allows applications to make use of shared-memory even when client and server are not on the same machine.

Re:Finally, developers' ignorance and childish

[spitzak]

You are correct that X wire protocol is ugly. However this is NOT a reason to abandon network transparency. If you removed network transparency you would still have an ugly protocol, just communicated in shared memory instead. But if instead you fixed the protocol while keeping network transparency, you would have the good protocol PLUS network transparency.

The fact that you even remotely consider communicating larger objects than drawing commands to the server, such as widgets, is proof that you have never even thought seriously about how these things are programmed. It will not work, it would be unbelievably complex. In X this is where the horror of the ICCCM window manager hints and protocol come from (basically it is an attempt to put a complex "window+frame" object over the api). Windows and OSX do not do this at all, all communication that leaves the app's local address space is pretty low-level drawing commands.

Client-side fonts are done by sending the bitmaps of the fonts over. It is a huge win, because no longer is there a "font object" that is attempted to be communicated. It is exactly the OPPOSITE of your proposal.

Re:Finally, developers' ignorance and childish

[spitzak]

You have absolutely no idea what you are talking about.

Here is a small dose of reality: If X had done this, they would have done it in 1985, and the widgets and api would look like Athena. And they would still look like Athena today, with absolutely no change (ignoring the fact that X would have been abandoned long ago). There would have been MILLIONS of assuptions about the design of the widgets that programs would make or would be neglected in the api they designed. It would never have been modifiable in the way your fantasy believes. And don't go thinking that "we know how to do it today". Even five years from now some ideas we have in GUI today will be considered ridiculously incorrect.

The fact is that X lasted for 30 years and can run stuff that was not considered in the least when it was invented is proof that it's design was at the correct level.

Re:Finally, developers' ignorance and childish

[Wdomburg]

Erm, no. X-SHM came from MIT, not Sun, and is a mechanism for bitmaps on the same machine to be stored in shared memory segments.

There have been several proprietary shared memory transports added by vendors over the years, including Sun, so the poster is correct. And once upon a time Precision Insight wrote an implementation for XFree86 as well.

However the conclusion after benchmarking various operations was that there was little to no benefit over the unix domain socket transport since it doesn't speed up render-bound operations at all the most significant transport-bound operations are already optimized using the SHM extension. Though performance was improved slightly on some hardware the recommendation after initial implementation and optimization was to abandon the effort.

Re:Finally, developers' ignorance and childish

[agristin]

He could run X apps on the mac, but you can't export native OS X apps over X from the mac.

And to be pedantic from a mac to a linux box, it is actually "ssh -Y linuxserver" for whatever reason the X auth doesn't work but the Y option for the auth works fine.

I run X apps from the server to the macbook all the time. The other way doesn't work as well because Quartz doesn't have network transparency.

What's the problem?

[larry bagina]

It's Open Source -- unlike proprietary software, we're not at the mercy of a company to dictate the release schedule or fix bugs if they get around to it. If bugs aren't fixed, it's because we failed to fix them.

Re:What's the problem?

[cjjjer]

Maybe not at the mercy of a company, but a team of core developers that don't want to do it any more. Now tell me which is worse?

And don't try and throw the "oh we can do it ourselves crap". The issue here is maybe the casual developer has contributed are you saying that this casual developer now has to work on it full time so the project can move forward?

Not likely to happen.

One of the problems facing OSS is the people who move it forward are the ones who live, breath and feel passionately about the project (99% of the time the core developers), take away those people away and the project usually dies no matter how popular it is.

Phoronix will pay to fix X

[mrchaotica]

From the article:

At Phoronix we are even willing to offer -- cash and/or computer hardware -- bounties for having X.Org release schedules met and bug lists being cleared out.

Re:Phoronix will pay to fix X

[Anonymous Coward]

From the article:

At Phoronix we are even willing to offer -- cash and/or computer hardware -- bounties for having X.Org release schedules met and bug lists being cleared out.

1. Clear bug list by deleting all unfixed bugs from tracker.
2. Release new version of X.Org, exactly the same as the old version.
3. Profit!!!!

Re:Phoronix will pay to fix X

[BattleCat]

Heh. "At Phoronix", my ass.
Once I badly needed one particular bug (proper video init on laptop resume) fixed . Asked about probable fix timeframe/schedule of this bug on lkml , most responses were in form "it's free, we're doing it in our spare time, so don't ask when" . Then I tried to determine if any amount of money can help, asked developers if they can pricetag bugfix/patch and how to pay them - there was no definite answer at all. Children , playing in their sandpit and bearing no responsibility for their code at all, unmotivated and unmotivateable by anything but most basic urges .

Re:Phoronix will pay to fix X

[ShieldW0lf]

Once I badly needed one particular bug (proper video init on laptop resume) fixed . Asked about probable fix timeframe/schedule of this bug on lkml , most responses were in form "it's free, we're doing it in our spare time, so don't ask when" . Then I tried to determine if any amount of money can help, asked developers if they can pricetag bugfix/patch and how to pay them - there was no definite answer at all. Children , playing in their sandpit and bearing no responsibility for their code at all, unmotivated and unmotivateable by anything but most basic urges .

Yeah, doesn't it suck when people are safe and happy enough that they can't be bribed, and they just sit around labouring to use their talents according to their own interests and desires and sharing the things they create?

I hate that. These people need to have some shit ripped away from them so they can be bought and sold like everyone else. How else am I going to solve my problems?

Re:Phoronix will pay to fix X

[The Ultimate Fartkno]

Bribery? I completely fail to see your logic here.

BattleCat needs to have a bug fixed. He approaches coders who, for free and in their spare time, code.

"Hey there, coderman. I see that you do this sort of thing for free and for fun, but what would you say to doing that coding thing that you love to do, hitting this one bug that I really need fixed, and ending up with all the satisfaction that you normally get from your work and a shiny nickel on top of it?"

"ZOMGBRIBERYYOUCALLOUSBASTARD!"

Really? Is that what you call bribery? Where I come from, bribery entails a breach of ethics. All BattleCat wanted was to add a little icing to the job that people were already doing for free in an effort to have something fixed that was a priority for him. That's about as straight-up, ethical, and non-bribery a way to get things done as I can imagine.

Re:Phoronix will pay to fix X

[kunwon1]

If I give you five bucks, will you go away?

Re:Phoronix will pay to fix X

[The Ultimate Fartkno]

If someone is going to pursue a task because the task is its own reward, and you entice them to pursue a different task that isn't its own reward by offering them money, that's bribery.

If someone is going to pursue a task because the task is its own reward, and you attempt to relieve them of outside pressures and distractions by offering them money so they can focus on the task they already intended to do, that's support. Aren't those two scenarios the *exact* same thing though? Given enough money / support doesn't any specific task become its own reward? We're not talking about coercion or duress here, we're simply talking about hobby programmers being offered money to prioritize one bug over another. I appreciate your argument, but you make it sound like this is some Dante-esque moral quandry that has the perilous capacity to eat a man's soul. In my eyes this is about as complex as "do you want the $20? No? Alrighty then."

Re:Phoronix will pay to fix X

[tinkerghost]

If someone is going to pursue a task because the task is its own reward, and you entice them to pursue a different task that isn't its own reward by offering them money, that's bribery.

'I will pay you to make my problem your top priority' is among the many things that people are saying about how a FOSS economy is supposed to work. Paying people to do work for you that you can't/don't want to do dates back to at least the bronze age, and probably farther. I would go so far as to say that it's one of the cornerstones of civilization.

I think the OP went about it the perfect way:

1. Identified his problem
2. Identified the existing bug
3. Identified the existing timeframe on fixing the bug (there was none)
4. Offered some financial support to the project as a whole in order to get his problem addressed as a priority.

Essentially, he tried to hire a programmer/programmers to fix his problem from the pool of programmers who know the code the best - the active developers. Anyone with a serious intent to fix a software problem is going to go the same route - grabbing a coder off the street isn't going to be nearly as productive as grabbing the guy who wrote it in the first place.

Re:Phoronix will pay to fix X

[db32]

Bribery, a form of pecuniary corruption, is an act usually implying money or gift given that alters the behaviour of the recipient in ways not consistent with the duties of that person or in breach of law.

Your problem here is fixing bugs in X is consistent with the duties of that person. In fact, you could even go so far as to saying writing code is consistent with the duties of that person.

What you are attempting to call bribery is what damn near everyone else in the world calls a job offer. He was attempting to hire someone, not to bribe them. If that was indeed bribery the job market would be a very scary place where employers could be convicted for making job offers for perfectly legitimate work.

Re:Phoronix will pay to fix X

[ShieldW0lf]

What you are attempting to call bribery is what damn near everyone else in the world calls a job offer. He was attempting to hire someone, not to bribe them. If that was indeed bribery the job market would be a very scary place where employers could be convicted for making job offers for perfectly legitimate work.

Sounds good to me. Working for money is the antithesis of integrity, and the social systems that make it necessary are constructed for the purpose of overcoming the integrity of the individual so they can be put to use like some inert tool. Personally, I consider every job I accept to be a moral compromise.

Re:Phoronix will pay to fix X

[searlea]

I'm guessing the parent poster doesn't code, as they're implying all coding is equally enjoyable.

It isn't. There's a world of difference between coding new features, and fixing other people's bugs.

For comparison, take an artist who loves to paint landscapes and modern art:

Would they do their own interior decorating? Maybe.

Would they paint *your* house? Unlikely.

As to bribery: there's nothing wrong with offering artists money to paint your house - just don't be surprised when they turn you down without a flicker or interest...

Re:Phoronix will pay to fix X

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been working on open source projects for a long time. I've received a good deal of offers from incredibly kind people who want to donate cash just to say 'thank you'. I love people like this.
I've always said no thanks.

If anyone wanted to provide some 'incentive' to work on feature 'x' I'd have to say their heart is probably in the right place but I would consider this offensive. Here's why:

1. I love to create and interact with people. I love the feedback in the emails and the forums and in the blogs other people write. I've found my happy place in this world. If I were to accept money to build or improve feature 'X' it now becomes a J... O... B... and I lack the time to explain how utterly demoralizing that is. There is a not so insignificant caveat to this:

2. How much are you going to 'freely offer' me? $50 would probably be the upper end of a wonderfully giving offer, and yet it won't change my life in any positive fashion. If someone just gave me $50 because 'I love you man'. Well, that's awesome. But if I now have a 'J... O... B...' to do well, I don't have the time to explain just how stressed out the thought of that makes me.

I think folks forget that open source devs are talented individuals who are already stressed out enough from work. Doing open source work provides balance - it allows us to be creative, work with a community of users and love what we do. At work it's all too often the opposite.

There is an alternative. It's obvious and I think fair but no service exists (that I'm aware of) to make this happen: easily allow the users of the software to pool together cash to pay the developer to fix/enhance/create JOB task X. Make this feature integrated with Bugzilla.
There I've said it. The cat's out of the bag. The current cash incentives are so small they are irrelevant and not an incentive at all.

If you read this and think, "how dare you disregard my $50 incentive!" then I've failed to make you understand the _cost_ of turning something you love doing into a J...O...B...

Peace.

Re:Phoronix will pay to fix X

[Grapes4Buddha]

If someone is going to pursue a task because the task is its own reward, and you entice them to pursue a different task that isn't its own reward by offering them money, that's bribery. No it isn't. That's employment.

Re:Phoronix will pay to fix X

[Rogerborg]

Can I have your Compound after The Man comes for you?

Re:Phoronix will pay to fix X

[ojustgiveitup]

I find this viewpoint incomprehensible but intriguing. Tell me what the anti-antithesis of integrity is in this system. What motivates people in your ideal world? What if instead of working for money, people are simply working for food, as they did way back when all humans had to directly work for the food they ate, either by farming or hunting. In your view, was that work also the antithesis of integrity? If not, why is working for money fundamentally different? When was integrity lost? Was it the first time someone gave something valuable they worked for and received something valuable someone else worked for? Was it when certain things became valuable to many people and thus began to be accepted as the basis of many trades? Was it when that system was formalized into those valuable things being universally accepted as money? Was it when money lost any inherent value and became nothing but a universally accepted abstraction?

I'm not trolling, I'm really interested to know where, in your view, we lost our integrity with regard to trading our ability to work for our ability to eat.

Haven't really noticed any reduced quality ..

[Idimmu Xul]

From the article:

What do you think about X Server 1.4.1, X.Org 7.4, and the X.Org release quality in general? Are these delayed and much drawn out release cycles a barrier to the greater adoption of Linux?

I've been using Ubuntu for 4 years now and it's pretty much shielded me from any lack of quality in the releases. Probably if I spent more (unnecessary) time under the hood it would expose issues but I've been living in a very blind 'trust Ubuntu' atmosphere where things pretty much just work (ok, lets not mention the recent key generation problem :)

In short, I guess the only people that might find the quality lacking are the developers and maintainers, and anyone specifically in the graphics industry? Not your average desktop user..? Or am I being naive?

Free Playstation 3, Wii and XBox 360

Re:Haven't really noticed any reduced quality ..

[RobBebop]

I agree wholeheartedly. The current release of X is suitable and works well for me.

The "upgrade every year" mentality is the wrong one to have. They missed their date? Okay, that's fine. As long as they don't buckle under the "release schedule" mentality compromise quality. I may be naive, but I don't know any reason they would want to push/rush their next release.

Re:Haven't really noticed any reduced quality ..

[andrewd18]

I've been living in a very blind 'trust Ubuntu' atmosphere where things pretty much just work

On the one hand, this is why I dislike Ubuntu. It doesn't require that the user learn much about how the system works. They plop the CD in the tray and it takes care of them, breeding a generation of Linux users that barely have an idea how to file a proper bug report.

On the other hand, I realize that Ubuntu is a good thing for Linux adoption because Linux needs a critical mass of people using it before it can start making inroads into the home and gaming markets. That critical mass is much larger than the number of people interested in --funroll-loops, so a system that's plug-and-play is important.

I think I'm starting to understand kind of how the 70's computer geeks felt when their friends came over asking for help with their Windows boxes.

Re:Haven't really noticed any reduced quality ..

[siride]

It's not that they missed their date because they were busily fixing bugs and adding new features; they missed it because they're just not doing that much right now. There's no management, there's very little direction, and there's really not that much going on at all. That's not a good thing.

Re:Haven't really noticed any reduced quality ..

[andrewd18]

Umm...Windows? 70's?

Ummm... Average US lifespan of 75 years?

Re:Haven't really noticed any reduced quality ..

[diegocgteleline.es]

I disagree that there's not that much going on - using the standard pci interfaces to access the devices, the recent input hotplug work, the new acceleration architectures in the DRM side...

Typical of Microsoft

[elrous0]

Oh, wait.

Re:I don't like this

[debrain]

I don't know whats stopping them from fixing the bugs in it.

The salient question would be: What's stopping us from fixing the bugs in it.

Gots to pay people...

[tjstork]

People aren't going to work on X because a lot of developers want to make new stuff, not fix up someone's old junk. So, the only way to get them to do it is to pay them. There's not enough money for that. Bounties are nice and all, but you really need to have a foundation with big money coming in to get the people to actually work on this stuff.

With maturity is this a problem

[Neil Watson]

Xwindows is one of those nice things that just work. With such dependabilty it is all that important the we get our instant gratification with superficial features like transparent windows? The X.org group made great strides after the fork from XFree86. Can we really expect them to keep that pace?

Lazy Developers

[Doc Ruby]

X.org is an open project. It's as good as its developers. The fact that millions of people's daily computing depends on it, but developers don't fix bugs very much, is the fault of the community.

"X.org" is you. Lift a finger to help sometime. That gives you the right to complain when you don't like it. Otherwise, you're just a mouthy freeloader.

Re:Lazy Developers

[sfraggle]

By that logic, Windows sucks because I never applied to work at Microsoft.

Re:Lazy Developers

[heartless_]

Awww and people wonder why Linux isn't mainstream. I'm sorry to inform you, but X.org is one of the fundamental hurdles to be cleared before Linux can even dream of climbing out of the hole it is in. I am a huge Linux advocate, but ignorant people blaming missed release cycles on the "community" is just stupid. There are developers and users, and if the developers want to go open source they damn well need to accept that fact. Just as the user accepts that their open source project of choice may not be updated (sounds familiar huh). We're in the same boat, but don't for a second blame users for developers short comings, open source or not.

Re:Lazy Developers

[Doc Ruby]

How many bug reports have you even bothered to file with X.org? That's what makes a user part of the community. Not just using the software for free, which just makes you a user.

You don't understand open source projects at all. You think they just mean that you can get whatever you want for free. Do something to help and then your whining will mean something.

Re:Lazy Developers

[Theolojin]

X.org is an open project. It's as good as its developers. The fact that millions of people's daily computing depends on it, but developers don't fix bugs very much, is the fault of the community.

"X.org" is you. Lift a finger to help sometime. That gives you the right to complain when you don't like it. Otherwise, you're just a mouthy freeloader. Asserting that one does not have the right to complain about Free software until one has contributed code is like saying one does not have the right to complain about one's government until one has been elected to office. I call bullocks. I am not nearly skilled enough to play professional basketball but I know how the Celtics could have beaten the Lakers last night in the NBA Finals (okay...this illustration is really just to point out that the Celtics are in the Finals after years - decades - of frustration). I have the right to complain about the officiating and the lack of team defense stopping Kobe and Vuja-whatever-his-name-is. I do not have to become an NBA referee to offer criticism - even insightful criticism.

I have been a Linux user for eleven years and have contributed *zero* code (being neither a developer nor even in IT). When I come across Free software that does not work properly I complain. I have a right to complain. I do not have a right to force you to fix the problem; I could learn to program and, perhaps, how to fix the problems I encounter. But choosing not to learn how to write programs does not disqualify me from complaining. Does that mean I am simply a mouthy freeloader? Perhaps, but who really thinks the xorg developers really only write code for themselves and their fellow xorg developers?

Re:Lazy Developers

[lysse]

There are developers and users, and if the developers want to go open source they damn well need to accept that fact.

I have to say that I believe you are completely and utterly wrong about this. The segregation of users into developers and consumers is something that only happens when you actively prohibit the latter from being able to become the former - for example, by locking up the source code in the safe of trade secrecy. The whole point of free software is to break down the barriers between the two - to allow anyone to dip into development any time they need to, without subjecting them to restrictions or limitations. It's about empowerment. Of course, not every user will participate in development, for a whole range of reasons - but no user is prevented from doing so; every user is allowed to participate. And in that climate, the idea that there is some big glass wall between the developer and the user is simply ridiculous.

I am a huge Linux advocate, but...

Why does that comment sound so much like "I'm not a racist, but..."? Perhaps some of your best friends are penguins...?

ID games?

[couch_warrior]

Clearly X.org is being held up because it is the new game engine for "Duke Nukem Forever"....

Paid developers?

[siride]

Aside from Keith Packard and Dave Airlie, and maybe one or two others, how many paid full-time X developers are there? Watching the mailing list, it seems like there's a couple of volunteers, some people who submit the occasional patch but otherwise work on Qt, or GNOME or whatever, and then the core listed above. I think there just isn't enough manpower right now and the distros, instead of fixing that problem, just maintain their own patchsets and do a "good enough" job to make X work smoothly for their releases, and leave it at that. Clearly, nobody wants to make X a priority and it shows. The Wiki is almost never up to date, it's nigh on impossible to build a working X system from git, even with the couple of half-arsed build scripts available from the mailing list (for my part, I have never been able to get it to build completely, and not for lack of trying or ability). The mailing list is full of academic arguments over color specs and other pointless things, or people asking for help. There used to be a lot of discussion on how to improve X and also, how to get things done. That no longer happens. What the distros and Linux companies need to do is get more people working directly on X and get serious about making X a serious project. It's not just some option piece of software that nobody has to care about. It's only one of the most important aspects of desktop Linux. And it just makes no sense to me that no distros are really spearheading X development. If they don't take the time to make this an issue, X will continue to atrophy, further limiting Linux's potential in the market.

Re:Paid developers?

[axxium.us]

What the distros and Linux companies need to do is get more people working directly on X and get serious about making X a serious project. Hi. I am the X11 maintainer for Zenwalk Linux. While I can't fix it all myself I have been updating the wiki and fixing documentation with the available time that I have to commit to it. I agree and think that if each GNU/Linux distribution had at least one developer helping in what we he/she can it would make a significant improvement.

Duh

[Gazzonyx]

Mostly the time we spend posting on Slashdot.

That what's wrong with Open Source

[DrYak]

Pfff !...

Those pesky open-source project. Always speaking about their wonderful communist idea, but never able to ship software on schedule, always dropping features or postponing them to the next release. Never working hard enough to meet their users' expectations.

They should take example on legitimate hard-working commercial corporations like.. uh... Microsoft for exa...
No, wait !

Well, excuuuse me!

[Chemisor]

Well, excuuuse me! Blame the community. I would blame the code instead. I happen to be one of those few people who actually wanted to contribute something. Specifically, there was this bug where the server would crash after a VT switch, so I thought I'd take a look. Have you seen the X.Org tree? It's not just huge. It's unreadable. I honestly didn't even know where to start. Documentation was minimal. If you wanted to trace one of your Xlib calls, you wouldn't be able to. There are modules, but they don't seem to have any clear purpose. There are libraries that are wrappers around something which is a wrapper around something else. Try and find the real code! I dare you! Even just building the damn thing is a major ordeal. With the current XOrg tree from git, I can't do it at all. Yes, that's right: I can't even compile it, and that ought to be the simplest thing you can do with a project. You want to know why I'm not helping the XOrg project? Because it's a pile of steaming crap, that's why, and I have better things to do with my time than trying to build a windowed skyscraper out of it.

Re:Well, excuuuse me!

[Doc Ruby]

The code's low quality is the fault of the community, too. Who do you think wrote that complex code?

If you're that savvy, why not spend a little of your time patching that existing code to factor out some of the unnecessary complexity? Instead, you're spending your time yelling at me on Slashdot, which does precisely nothing.

Re:Well, excuuuse me!

[RAMMS EIN]

I don't know who modded that comment funny. I think it's rather insightful and sad. One of the problems with a lot of widely used open-source projects is that there are a lot of people who _would_ contribute (especially by fixing bugs) if the barrier to entry were lower.

Even if the source code is available, the developer tools are freely available, and the knowledge about the necessary languages and tools is free for the taking, there is still a lot that is specific to a given project. Who do you need to contact, who can you ask questions to, how is the source code organized, how do you build it, how should you submit patches, what are the things you absolutely must or must not do, etc. etc. All this is usually poorly documented, if at all. Contributing to an open-source project is a daunting task.

I think X.org has done a lot to make contributing easier, but "easier" doesn't mean easy.

Xorg

[mlwmohawk]

Could someone please tell me, clearly, what the problem is?

OK, X.org has not made a release. OK. Lets see, there are a few bugs, OK, what software doesn't have bugs? Are they show stoppers?

We can't use Apple for an example as they control the hardware. So, we are forced to use Microsoft as an example.

Lets look at Vista. Is the graphical rendering system of Vista any more robust than Xorg? I think not. Will that same system in Vista run on as variable a set of hardware? No, Microsoft has removed compatibility for a lot of drivers.

Xorg works and works quite well. Is it perfect? no. Is it more reliable than Windows' graphical engine? yes. Is it more flexible than Vista's graphical interface? Yes.

The only thing missing, quite frankly, is a small amount of eye candy and acceleration for games.

Sorry, I'm having a hard time mustering up any real concern.

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[account_deleted]

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Not yet.

[krischik]

Leaves the question: what does X need ? What should X focus on in the near future? Nothing - it should be replaced with something new entirely.

Martin

Maybe it's time to dump X

[archeopterix]

Here[pdf warning] is an interesting article from James Gosling and it pretty much explains why making the GUI system a server was necessary in the past but is not such a good idea anymore.

Perhaps X should be replaced, not improved.

How X got to where it is

[jonsmirl]

Three main trends got X to where it is.

1) Proprietary hardware. NVidia and ATI didn't release specs. That resulted in what little dev talent there was being used to do reverse engineering. ATI has gone a long ways towards fixing this.
2) Insistence on cross platform support. Cross platform support means no device drivers - everything in user space. There are all kinds of security issues with everything in user space. This also mean no integration with the underlying kernel. OOPS isn't visible, VT interaction, mode setting, no intergration with framebuffer, etc. Insistence on cross platform means that one OS can prevent progress from occurring on the others. There seems to be some movement on this issue.
3) Failure to endorse OpenGL-ES as the core driver system. The embedded world went OpenGL-ES and ignores X (N810 is an exception). There is money in the embedded world and not in the desktop. The money went to OpenGL-ES.

From a developer's point of view the architecture of X has not evolved in a way where a developer can work on one chunk of the code without having comprehensive knowledge of the entire system. Requiring that level of knowledge really reduces the number of potential developers. Finally there is a giant amount of NIH that goes on.

X and Max

[krischik]

export DISPLAY=skarabrae:0.0

and get actual work done fast!

Network transparency is *the* feature of X. And what stops you - Macs come with an X Server as well.

But then: only X applications can grind my MacPro to a halt. Maybe you can't get network transparency and performance at the same time.

Martin

Re:What exactly is X.Org missing ?

[zeromorph]

One interesting bit of reworking is MPX Yes, MPX looks quite promising (MPX demo video) and will also enable multi-touch which will be relevant for several areas of application (e.g. embedded stuff). Really exciting stuff seems to be coming up. I really hope they will get all the support they need.

1 Million Monkeys

[suggsjc]

That maybe true, but not the number of monkeys...

I think we should take the same approach to streamlining the code base as we have taken with rewriting the entire works of Shakespeare...lets just get 1 million monkeys and let them have at it. We'll just snapshot their work every hour and try to compile it. If it compiles, then just do a blind commit.

Eventually, you'd have a perfect software release that fixes all bugs, and even adds in new features that users haven't even thought of yet!

Re:As good as Xorg is...

[spitzak]

It cannot be fixed unless they get rid of the seperate window manager process. Programs should draw their own windows including the border.

The problem is that it is politically incorrect. People will scream that the users will be "confused" by the different window borders, despite the fact that they obviously aren't when Windows, OSX, and even Linux programs such as music players, bypass it. And you can clearly see that those windows run faster.

It would be partially-patchable if the window manager sent some kind of event to the program that said "resize the window to this" and relied on the program doing it so the internal graphics could be synchronized with the resize. The problem is that the border would now blink instead of the interior. Certainly I have suggested this for years and never seen any kind of positive response. I now think any such halfway measure is a waste of time, we should scrap window managers.

Re:You Are

[jjohnson]

How many people on here have the capacity to actually make a useful contribution to X.org? Leave aside the organizational complaints about delays in getting patches accepted or commit bits set.

Your "provocative" posts are probably counterproductive if your intent is to get X.org some more community contribution. Legitimate complaints met with 'fix it yourself' are what push people to OSX.

So are they...

[gwolf]

Smelly yuppies?

Mac OS X is technically a *BSD

[MsGeek]

NeXTStep is based on the same BSD Unix that Free/Open/NetBSD was created from. And Mac OS X is being added to by people who started off as FreeBSD hackers. So reports of *BSD's demise are highly exaggerated. Mac market share has been on the rise, while Windows market share, particularly Windows Vista market share, has been on the outs.

Add to this the rise of less expensive Linux-based desktops and particularly "Net-tops," and the OS picture has never been more competitive since the early 1980s.

Ummm, no, it's not

[phorm]

Unless you are going with a very "loose" definition of bribe wherein it is offered as an incentive for a desired action/behavior (e.g. telling your kids they'll get a new toy if they up their grades), bribery is generally defined as offering an item of value/desire in order to obtain an illegal/immoral advantage.

Nothing illegal is being done here. I'd also say that - unless you're adverse in general to being paid for your work - nothing immoral is being done either.

Aside from my regular job, I fix computers. For friends and family, I often do it for free. For others, I may or may not do it unless my workload and the offerings make it worth my while. It's not a bribe, it's recognition that the service has a value.

Re:You Are

[FooBarWidget]

"Your "provocative" posts are probably counterproductive if your intent is to get X.org some more community contribution. Legitimate complaints met with 'fix it yourself' are what push people to OSX."

Then how else do you want to solve the problem? *Someone* has to do the work.

Re:As good as Xorg is...

[Sax Maniac]

On Windows, when an app hangs, you can't move the freakin' hung window out of the way, because the window manager is the hung app. So they come up with a stupid button which minimizes windows, and due to the way modal dialogs work, the application pops back up in it's hung state when you click on another application. I'll take the separate window manager, thankyouverymuch.

Network transparency

[Craig Ringer]

I'm constantly amazed by people trumpeting the same old line about how network transparency support makes X slow. It stopped being true before some of them were old enough to read and write.

Even if all traffic is forced though loopback TCP/IP by setting DISPLAY to '127.0.0.1:0' (or similar) it still performs quite fine. The network transparency isn't the slowdown.

The slowdown is the toolkits and apps, which miserably fail to consider the influence of network latencies. They issue requests and wait for them to finish before going on to something else. They issue lots of unnecessary requests, do things in inefficient ways, and love lobbing pixels around when higher level drawing instructions would do. Let's not even talk about the themes and styles used by current toolkits and apps (I just got a ~30x speedup out of thunderbird on LTSP by changing the theme!).

*argh*

Re:You Are

[jjohnson]

There are apparently two barriers to entry for potential X.org contributors: the core team is small and overloaded, so casual contributions aren't handled smoothly or quickly; and the codebase is huge, idiosyncratically organized, and covers a wide range of areas of technical expertise, which requires a developer to be very skilled, widely experienced, and tolerant of a long, steep learning curve. Both factors shut out the sort of casual contributions that lead to deeper involvement.

It's a fair point to respond to a lot of whining with "get involved and make a difference", but failing to recognize high barriers to entry on the project means those who take the idea seriously never follow through, and the rejoinder looks like a cynical deflection of user concerns.

Successful OSS projects find a good middle ground between the importance of the software, the skill and requirements of the core team, and interaction with the community that results in progress. X.org is far from that middleground.

Re:X Performace

[Craig Ringer]

(sorry for the extra reply)

The key word is "native". Xdarwin and X11 are not natively supported on Mac OS X. They're supported through a rather poorly supported compat layer that Apple would prefer to forget about. Apple wants native apps that only run on the Mac, not portable apps that run on any UNIX-like OS, so it's not in their interests to make X work smoothly and quickly on Macs.

There's not really any reason why the Xdarwin wm couldn't present X apps on the dock (grouped by ICCCM client identifier), provide application switching for X apps, and otherwise integrate them a bit better. Cygwin's X server and WM can do it on *windows*, and they don't control the platform. Apple, however, doesn't want this to happen.

That's part of why your X is slow.

The other part is that X11 toolkits like gtk are not written with remote X in mind. They do lots of unnecessary synchronous operations, repeat things a lot, use pixel-based drawing where they could use higher level operations, etc etc etc. The themes and styles they use only make this worse. All the unnecessary waiting, the round trip delays, and the unnecessary streaming of pixel data cause a major performance hit.

You'll probably notice that Qt applications are faster over remote X11. The Qt toolkit tends to handle remote X more efficiently, and with a good app it really shows the difference. Put kmail beside thunderbird and you'll see what I mean.

I do agree that the problems need addressing. One of them will not be addressed, because Apple does not want the same things you want. The other is SLOOOOOWLY being addressed by toolkit developers, though it seems like for every fix two more detrimental changes get included.

MOD PARENT UP - HE MAKES A GOOD POINT

[Progman3K]

>>Perhaps if someone were being paid to develop it this wouldn't have happened.

Yes, you are right, if someone had been paying, X.org would not exist.

Because X.org DOES exist and it's far more encompassing of varied hardware than any commercial project, we can conclude that it is NOT the work of one commercial entity. It's a cinch no one company could have pulled it off, it is something that could only (and did only) come into existence the way it did.

Thanks for making that point.

Re:MOD PARENT UP - HE MAKES A GOOD POINT

[mrsteveman1]

I'm curious why you think broad but lacking hardware support trumps a good working system for you. My experience has been that yes Xorg supports lots of hardware, but poorly, and therefor i have little reason to use it, and in turn i have little reason to use Linux itself BECAUSE the windowing system and input drivers and everything else that is built in to X11 (for some reason) function so poorly.

It's also been my experience that this is typical of community projects and software, ESPECIALLY GPL stuff, people work on the exciting stuff and leave the mundane parts of the system to rot and trail behind more modern systems.

There is no other explanation for me for why Xorg and X11 in general are so poor, no one is being paid to develop them like other competing systems.

New windowing system?

[CAIMLAS]

Might this not provide the opportunity for a complete re-implementation of the windowing framework used for Linux and UNIX systems?

Granted, replacing something that's been in use for 40 years will be a little difficult, but it seems to me that we could do, roughly, what Apple did with OS X: provide X as a supplement to run "legacy" XWindow apps.

I'm not intimately familiar with the internals of X or the window managers, but I'd think that, while it'd be difficult, it'd certainly be possible and probably easier for the various TK developers to interface with a new system, written from scratch and designed with modern concepts, as it would be to "fix" the fundamental shortcomings in X. This way there could be a transitionary period where apps could simply be rebuilt for the new architecture.

(Maybe I'm simplifying things a wee bit through lack of knowledge, but this seems at least tenable to me given the number of people who are interested in working on X, but are held back by the antiquated architecture and design inherent in X.)

Likewise, it would be possible to retain some degree of "remote X" type functionality by implementing something technologically similar to MS's RDP.

Re:How close are we to being able to leave out X?

[jeiler]

There's a lot of software out there that doesn't work with the Qt library directly--but I don't know enough about programming to know if that will matter. However, Qt is owned by Trolltech, and Trolltech is in the process of being acquired by Nokia. With Qt's currently using the GPL, Nokia may (or may not) continue to use that license for future versions.

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[account_deleted]

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Re:multiple cursors

[David Gerard]

MPX.

Re:How close are we to being able to leave out X?

[Grishnakh]

Two problems with this.

1) As another poster said, remote displays are still in common use. I use ssh with X forwarding every day at work so I can have my desktop on one machine while running apps on other machines. It's a lot easier to do this than messing around with multiple VNC windows. You simply can't do this without X.

2) Qt still needs some type of display device drivers to interface to hardware. Presumably, those smart devices had streamlined display drivers linking Qt directly to the display hardware, but that's a lot easier to do on a small device with only one possible hardware configuration. In addition to all the display abstraction stuff, X is also a framework for display drivers. Even if you dump X, you'll still have to fork off all the display drivers it comes with, and come up with a new framework to deal with these and interface them to the kernel and apps.

Personally, I think there's definitely some stuff in X which just isn't needed any more, such as the print server. But those things aren't central parts of X anyway, and are already easily omitted.

Re:Anything else out there? Sail or Rebuild....

[davidsyes]

"but do you keep sailing a sinking ship, or try to build a new one?"

But, the submarine community does BOTH...

I've never delved into the code in X

[RiotingPacifist]

I've never delved into the code in X, but I suspect that X... oh who am i kidding, I've never looked into the code, I have no idea how that shit works, in fact it would be rather stupid to continue writing when I have absolutely no idea what I'm talking about.

Xorg is already a fork

[Billly Gates]

I remember using Xfree86 and typing xf86Config in FreeBSD and Linux only a few years ago.

How about a new implementation of x11 written from scratch? Xorg was useful at first with things like the abandonment of imake and true type fonts.

I believe someone had written a new x11 protocal stack in java which I found interesting.

If the code is from the 80's and is unmaintainable then a rewrite is necessary. Perhaps one without legacy macros and algorithms optimized for obsolete hardware like Vesa bus drivers?

Re:How close are we to being able to leave out X?

[Luke-Jr]

If Nokia stops publishing Qt under the GPL, the last GPL'd version automatically gets a nice BSD license slapped on it: http://www.kde.org/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation.php

I've a contributing opinion.

[PotatoHead]

First, let me say I'm far away from this stuff right now. Use Linux where I can, still have my SGI up and running, and it has a SWEET X server...

In this day of virtualization and single user computing, I feel we've missed out on something special by not doing a better job with X.

A Mac, running MacOS and a PC, running winx, is essentially single user computing. Sure, there is terminal server, citrix and other similar things to get more than one user on the box, doing stuff. Really those are hacks though. Hacks we work our asses off trying to improve because we've ignored the hard work done on X.

Like a good Unix is a multi-user environment, so is X. With X, we can have one user using multiple input devices across any number of screens. That user can be connected to any number of machines, running any number of applications, each sending their display data over the wire to where the user actually is! The display is built on the local box, because that's where all the power is too.

Also, one can have the various parts of X running where they make sense. Put your window manager on one box (I like the SGI one still, so I'll run it, just for fun), X server on another, application on another, fonts on yet another still. Damn cool, if somewhat academic.

With X, we don't have to do client server. We can do just application server, and let the user interact with trusted data through the trusted application, never actually seeing the real stuff and only having the level of control we choose to export to the user, through the application. Taken a look at the kludges winx people have to go through to get that done? It's madness, yet that is exactly what they do because they really have no choice in the matter.

Heck, they really don't have simlinks and suid yet. These two things, combined with X, make for some very robust computing options that have very serious advantages on the administration side of things. One copy of some nasty big software, each users settings and environment in their user directory (where it should be, not some global cluster fuck registry), and one admin that handles all of it nicely, from wherever they happen to be.

X is just great. The idea of it is great, the power it holds is great, the utility of it is great, even if it's kind of hard to get your mind wrapped around it. It's still great.

So, what's the deal then?

The deal is mindshare, plain and simple. We have whole generations now that don't actually grok what multi-user computing is all about. They think it's shared resources, or the occasional service running on a box, or remote desktop, or some other largely single user thing.

That's the problem with X.

For those of us, lucky enough to be exposed to multiple computing environments, and who have had those environments be running software that actually knows what X is, why it is, and presents accordingly, we know the score and gladly deal with X to get at the power and leverage that for good results.

The rest simply have no idea. Enter in the applications. Damn near everything that matters is a single user affair. It's gotta be installed on the local machine, talk to another machine maybe, requires administrator permission, root, whatever, and it's just the way it is. We've got software to push software around, software to manage software, software to manage profiles or god forbid a user logs into a different box and all hell breaks loose.

Microsoft Office is a single user deal. CAD, but for those few packages that run on a Unix, is a single user deal. You name it, the most popular stuff is a single user deal.

I got the chance to run a recent build of a CAD system that still knows what X is. Guess what the developers did? They forgot about how to actually write to X, so that X can do what it is supposed to do. Some of those bad mistakes have been mentioned here, and it's all true. Those applications run like shit over the wire because they are not written in such a way as to r

Re:Quartz?

[Macka]

I too moved from Linux & Windows Desktops to Mac OS X some years ago. Now while I love working with OS X, you know what I miss the most? Being able to ssh into one of my Macs and fire up a single application I want to work on while directing the display for that app back to my desktop.

Instead I have to do a full remote desktop login to the box hosting the app I want, just like in the Windows world. It's a waste of time, resources and network bandwidth. And compared to displaying single app as X does, it's slow.

If anything, Quartz needs to take a leaf out of X's book, not the other way round.

Like the other stuff is really that much better?

[quanticle]

There is no other explanation for me for why Xorg and X11 in general are so poor, no one is being paid to develop them like other competing systems.

I don't know about Mac, but, I wouldn't be surprised if the display management code for Windows was at least as quirky that of X.Org.

Basically, developing window managers is hard. Any sort of clean display manager implementation will be severely hampered by the fact that it'll completely break backwards compatibility for almost every application. Even Windows has this problem; look at the incompatibilities and window drawing quirks present in XP and Vista.

Apple got around the issue by saying, "We don't care about backwards compatibility," and providing a virtual machine for those who really needed the older OS to make their apps run.