Slashdot Mirror
X11 Chrome Reportedly Outperforms Windows and Mac Versions
An anonymous reader writes "In a curious contrast to conventional wisdom, there are reports of X11 Chromium being faster than Windows or Mac versions. In the thread titled 'Why is Linux Chrome so fast?,' a developer speculates that it is due to the use of X11 capabilities: 'On X-windows [sic], the renderer backingstores are managed by the X server, and the transport DIBs are also managed by the X server. So, we avoid a lot of memcpy costs incurred on Windows due to keeping the backingstores in main memory there.' Has the design of X11 withstood the test of time better than people tend to give it credit for?"
"Has the design of X11 withstood the test of time better than people tend to give it credit for?"
Yes of course it has. X11 is great and anyone who thinks otherwise doesn't understand it properly, or have an accurate idea of what it's genuine problems are actually due to.
Interesting comment from one of the developers:
We could also just move process creation to a background thread. An unused process might just get swapped out and be no cheaper to "make live" than it would be to create a new process.
Surely this reusing of a process would negate the supposed security benefits of Chrome/Chromium's multi-process spawning architecture?
Does anybody know if it's possible to compile a version of Chromium for X11 Mac?
It's OS X, not "Mac", just like it's "the Windows version", not "the PC version".
I know it's hard, so very hard! And I know it's whiny to comment, but, for f***s sake... get the terminology right so as to avoid confusion, avoid mistakes.
I usually don't agree with him but I am with Linus on this one.
X11 has never been a bottleneck in performance on the desktop. Many people have been confusing X11 with the desktop system/kernel/applications and wrongly blamed X11 for any slowness.
HTTP/1.1 400
I like how you took a bunch of graphics and video related words and threw them together in a post that sounds coherent, yet is totally wrong.
"X window" not "X windows"
From the later discussion on that topic, it seems the conclusion was that windows had a large history in the profile and may be bitblt'ing the first draw operation from main memory. Both of which have an impact on how slow it feels to the user.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
After doing a fresh install on both systems the guy determined that it was just some sort of freak occurrence. He had one laptop with a 2.0ghz processor and another with a 2.4ghz processor and after the reinstall on both systems, VOILA...it was only roughly a 20% difference...
TFA - just keep reading further and further down the usenet post
Oops, my chrome just crashed.
Framebuffer is an unaccelerated bitmap display, X11 is an accelerated graphics layer (that can use a framebuffer)
something that writes directly to a framebuffer is going to need a lot of additional programming in order to be as fast as X11 is.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
So in other words, those who programmed on X when X was the only big player are now older where you lose hair and sexual virility.
Colour me surprised.
Meanwhile X is still working better than Mac or Windows as a GUI framework.
Thing I don't get is why so many guys have a hard-on for dissing X.
Why?
Google's main purpose in developing Chrome is currently as the browser in Chrome OS, so it's natural that they would optimize it for Linux.
win 7 does not copy to ram-backingstore afaict, so it should also be faster than vista...
Wheres the proof for the "If"?
What if X isn't generally slower at all?
What if generally it's faster but in a few cases slower? This, then would be one of the few cases where it is not slower.
Compared to yours?
Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
If you choose your abstraction carefully, you can hide expensive details from user space.
In the short term it may not gain you anything.
But if the abstraction lives and thrives, then much can go on behind the scenes to improve the situation.
Java is another example of this: they carefully designed the language so that it would be possible to make vast simplifiying assumptions and implement optimizations that really improve performance without impacting the "other side" of the wall. Originally java was slow, but hard work behind the scenes means that your java programs run much faster now, without any extra effort on the part of the application developer.
X Windows is a great example of this. Originally we had dumb frame buffers with no acceleration at all. And yet X provides an abstraction that allows lots and lots of hardware optimizations to take place.
The Windows and OSX abstractions for the display don't provide an API that allows these sorts of optimizations to be done behind the scenes. We have incredible display hardware with awesome features that go unused in these environments because the display abstractions do not allow for them.
But the 4.X beta runs incredibly fast on my dual core Windows workstation. If the Linux version is significantly faster in rendering, I would be very surprised.
I'm pretty sure that the biggest slowdown for Chrome isn't the memcpy/bitblitting for the display - it's probably something to do with the insanely big history files it generates as part of it's searchable history.
Files you can't limit in size, can't compress, can't optimise. Instead all you can do is to delete them and loose all your precious history information.
It also has the bonus of providing a searchable address bar that performs significantly worse than firefox's searchable address bar !
I use both firefox and chrome simultaneously at home and at work, dedicated each browser for different tasks I do. It's a real shame that Chrome is being seriously degraded over time by this fault - I've started switching back to firefox because of it as my laptop just struggles too much with it now...
Yeah, at least the first one was succinct.
What a bunch of incoherent nonsense. Are you one of those college computer experts I've heard so much about? Also, who the hell thumbed your post up...
If you can take risk of re-compiling every X related app/library in case you give up in future, try the semi official/unofficial at http://xquartz.macosforge.org/ , it is newer than the Apple bundles. Install anything with the help of Fink/Macports like Konqueror from KDE 3 and see the amazing GUI speed, scroll speed, widget drawing speed.
I don't understand, as an OS X user, why a modern x.org on a good, supported hardware should be surprising to give better results. Also remember the insane things x.org has to do on OS X like using Aqua layer.
X11 is not bloated nor slow, GTK is both. Put 100 or so spinedits on one form in Win32 and in GTK. On netbook or anything other than quadcore machine, you will see significant difference in speed. And it is not because of the graphics. Sometimes I think GTK render fractals somewhere just to keep processor busy. Meanwhile, when I draw 100 spinedits using only cairo, it is almost as fast as Win32 while giving the same output as GTK including shadows, gradients, etc... I've being noticing this GTK behavior since forever.
GTK folks, please fix it.
Until Chrome starts supporting NTLM, I know it will not get any respect at my firm, and likely many others....
Maybe it's because Chrome is based on Webkit that is based in KHTML that was developed mainly on Linux
How about a Qt build of Chromium as opposed to a GTK build of Chromium? I'd be real curious to see how it performs.
I was also saddened to see the port team bitch and complain initially that they had to use GTK, because GTK is "the standard toolkit" for Linux, while in the same paragraph complaining that Linux doesn't simply have one standard toolkit. Last time I checked, Windows has a bevy of toolkits and APIs to choose from as well. They also complained that writing audio in Linux was difficult.
If they had written a Qt app from day one, porting would be minimal, they wouldn't have to maintain this huge separate trunks, it would have worked from day 1 on Solaris, Mac, Linux, Windows, BSD, etc. Audio would have been very easy to code with Phonon.
I'm curious to see if Chrome (the browser and OS) are indeed both developed with GTK, then will they both need some retrofits when GTK 3.0 ships, further complicating the matter?
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Yeah. As opposed to tests made by Microsoft and Apple paid "impartial and reliable" entities.
\sarcasm
very funny. That's some old game.
It's been called X-Windows for a long time. Longer than the term "X11" has been around. It's not a misuse of Microsoft's Windows® brand name.
I've been using the daily Chromium PPA builds for a couple months now (updated weekly usually), and Chromium is by far more responsive than Firefox on my Ubuntu 9.04 laptop. For some reason FF just seems to get laggy in the UI dept, and if I open up a handful of tabs, especially if there is Flash involved, the whole thing chokes and the app turns grey. Chromium seems to perform much better.
That said, it still feels very much incomplete. I don't think printing is working still, although I haven't tried it in awhile. For some reason there are no "arrow button clickers" on scrollbars...not sure why that is the case. I can't open a file download directly or inline - for example to view a PDF I have to save it somewhere first, THEN open it. FF lets me choose what to open it with without having to save first. 99% of my browsing on Chromium is super fast, except for the Gizmodo.com RSS feed through Google Reader. I don't really know why, but it seems like it has something to do with the adds loading or something...does FF pre-fetch or cache things or something?
I've switched back and forth off and on for awhile now. I"ll get tired of the UI laginess in FF, or I'll break it on a nightly update, and then use Chromium for some time. Eventually I'll miss some features or speed in the RSS reading of Firefox (I wonder how much of that is due to Adblock?), and then return. All in all both browsers are good, and I'm looking forward to Chromium becoming a full fledged option on Linux.
The font rendering settings are locked in. There are some Google Groups discussions about why this is so, but it was all white noise -- every other application can use .fonts.conf (even if it is a workaround to do so) and Chrome can't/won't for a while, so it got promptly uninstalled.
I'm wary of any real old legacy code.
I also know that graphic displays and inputs are vastly different today than they were 10 and 20 years ago.
Do I know that X11 is inefficient? No, but I sure read plenty of other people making those claims. However, I suspect that X11 wasn't developed initially with today's needs in mind. I do know that the X team keeps promising features, cutting them, and then still shipping six months past their projected release dates.
Novell has guys working on Mono, Evolution, OOo, KDE, Gnome, the kernel, etc. What I don't see a whole lot of is major distro companies (Red Hat, Novell, Canonical) paying for major upstream development with X. Maybe it just needs a little more love, some deprecation of old cruft, and a new forward-thinking design. There seems to be somewhat of a future direction (GEM, DRI2, MPX), but perhaps X needs a revolution.
Is Wayland a step in the right direction?
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Give the guy a break. He's only trying to create synergy among web-enabled paradigms.
As seen on TV
I read TFA and all there is are feelings of some people that its faster, no numbers. I guess that is what "reportedly" means. Weasel words.
I call DIBs on the X server. Especially if it sucks.
"The body may heal, but the mind is not always so resilient." -- Deus Ex: Human Revolution
I had the same problem with Google Desktop. It was a great tool and worked well for a while, but eventually its little database file was immense and was dragging my system down with it.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
I haven't noticed any degradation of performance, but yeah, the history files are 900mb for me for only 9 months of use and the thumbnails are 300mb. That's pretty big.
s/then/than/g
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
Forget performance.
Network Transparancy man. Thats what X does so well that no one else can.
Which is the same for any other program that indexes the text inside different types of files...
The idea behind file/text-indexing is to generate that searchable index trading searching-time with hard disk space.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
"I also know that graphic displays and inputs are vastly different today than they were 10 and 20 years ago."
Really what is so different other than the number of pixels on the display?
"I suspect that X11 wasn't developed initially with today's needs in mind."
Then perhaps you should read about the original goals of the X window system.
Firefox on Linux already leaned heavily on X11 just like described. The problem that caused was constant memory leaks... In X11. Firefox crashing especially tend to leave a lot of stuff into X11's raster caches. When I was still using Linux I had to restart X11 several times of day because of that problem... Your mileage may vary but for me normal usage is some 500+ tabs open simultaneously and some 10 000+ page loads in one day..
Aren't the history files regular sqlite3 databases? You should be able to run sqlite3 vacuum on them, which should at least help somewhat.
Do you even know what the fuck you are talking about? Do you know what XAA, EXA, UXA, etc are? You need beaten with a clue-stick!
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
With all due respect, it sounds like you want to blame everything negative about Chrome on one feature you don't like. Just sayin', the developers might have a reason to think that the rendering speed has something to do with the windowing system - they're a lot less likely to be just guessing and calling their guess "pretty sure".
But for the sake of argument - if the history files are the big slow-down for Chrome, why is that slowdown less pronounced on the X11 version?
Framebuffer is an unaccelerated bitmap display, X11 is an accelerated graphics layer (that can use a framebuffer)
something that writes directly to a framebuffer is going to need a lot of additional programming in order to be as fast as X11 is.
"A framebuffer is a video output device that drives a video display from a memory buffer containing a complete frame of data. The same term is also often used to denote the actual memory used to hold a picture frame, depending on computer systems and context."
It doesn't have to be unaccelerated.
"For whatever reason, Linux drivers have NEVER taken advantage of this, and that is why Linux often looks clunky compared to Windows on the same hardware."
This is just BLATANTLY WRONG.
All you need to do is read the feature announcements for the nVidia and ATI display drivers, which you apparently DON'T DO.
nVidia's REAL target market is the folks who work at animation companies, and the hard-core data visualization people. Their products are designed to fly in THIS environment. This market is VERY HEAVILY tilted toward Unix. That is WHY you can get such EXCELLENT display support under Linux. The rest of us are just piggybacking off of this.
What is this "X11" of which you speak? It sounds like some sort of Windows(tm) imitator. How can that be? Our wise leaders at Microsoft told us that using Lunix forces you to live in the command line!
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
I don't know about Chrome being faster on Linux than Windows, but I do know that it cleans the plate vs. Firefox on Linux. I'm using the Ubuntu version at "deb http://dl.google.com/linux/deb/ stable main" and I can finally pull Slashdot stories up in a second tab without locking up the browser while it loads. Scrolling and rendering are also noticeably faster .
once more into the breach
X has it's problems. It also has it's advantages. Some of those
advantages aren't so much a matter of X itself but side effects
of the old school Unix way of approaching a problem.
Seeing MacOS going through vnc side by side with X apps being
run remotely (and viewed locally) certainly gives me no
burning desire to get rid of X.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Really? I thought he was trying to leverage the cloud architecture to optimize his software services enterprise based on open standards.
Today's Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e.
If you want a bunch of features to tweak, you shouldn't be using Chrome. Its not intended to be full of a bunch of crappy features that 3 people use and 1200 extensions to make it run like crap. Its meant to be lean and mean.
Chrome supports cleaning up the history with a few options, you can delete the last day, last week, last month, or entire thing. If you want more options, you're using the wrong browser. More features bring more bloat, which is why Firefox has become such a pig. Please don't try to make Chrome another Firefox, then we'll just have to start ANOTHER browser to get back to where it runs fast.
Use Firefox if you want feature rich and bloated. Use Chrome if you don't want a toolbox, an Application development environment, the kitchen sink, and more code than needed to power some small countries.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
But the 4.X beta runs incredibly fast on my dual core Windows workstation. If the Linux version is significantly faster in rendering, I would be very surprised.
Just because it runs quite fast on your machine in no way precludes it from running faster on a setup that's more optimized and/or with less overhead (ie. X11/Linux). And just because things happen in nearly the blink of an eye doesn't mean that relatively they couldn't be significantly faster...it just means that you'd be nearly unable to notice a difference and thus wouldn't be inclined to care ;) "Whoo, this webpage loaded in 0.16 seconds instead of 0.20, I'm so glad I switched operating systems!"
(P.S. at this point, isn't dual-core the new single core? It's almost less "this system is so fast" and more "maaaan, this program is so non-bloated that it runs fine on a mere dual-core; suck it, Crysis!" I kid, I kid).
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
Why are you called MemoryDragon when you've forgotten that X uses direct access to ram on a local machine?
It doesn't use direct access to machine memory over a network, but then again you can't: it has to go over the network and if you want to use Windows GDI it wont go over the network at all (you have to have a wrapper protocol to pipe the display over, but MS is beginning to get the idea...).
So, memorydragon, why did you forget all the thousands of times this meme has been promulgated and proven false?
"It's been 1 hour, 7 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment"
Good, eh? I wonder what would happen if you posted, say 10 minutes later, if 70 minutes gets you a "slow down, cowboy"?
Mac, Windows, and X11 all are client/server window systems with a separate user process for rendering. X11 was designed from the ground up for that model, while both the Mac and Windows started off with different models and tried to retrofit an X11-like model onto their existing APIs. It's not surprising that they don't do it so well.
People tend to overestimate Windows and Mac performance for a couple of reasons. For example, Macs cache a lot more stuff than other platforms (and use a ton of memory to do it). And the X11 back-ends for cross platform libraries and ports are usually not very well written, and people blame X11 when they should be blaming those libraries.
I don't know why I read Framebuffer as Flamebuffer, but I guess you were trying to buffer yourself from a flame...
Works great for me on a slow connection.
Most of what they've listed is as the reasons its faster on X are entirely possible in Windows. Specifically, things like letting the GUI handling backing stores have been there since at least Win95, I don't know about before that, but I doubt Win 3.x or earlier had them. Sadly, it is not the default. Of course, X doesn't do it by default either.
At a low level, I found coding for X enjoyable, but requires more work for trivial tasks. But for writing any sort of complex app, just the dependency tree alone gets to be a headache compared to how lazy you can be in OSX and Windows and still get good performance and feature balance.
They are different environments, if you focus or code towards the style of one, the others are going to suffer. Its just as easy to code towards the Windows way of doing things and end up with some REALLY shitty X performance.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
It's great to listen to the fanbois and folks who don't know what they're talking about go on and on, but.... Quoted from someone above: After doing a fresh install on both systems the guy determined that it was just some sort of freak occurrence. He had one laptop with a 2.0ghz processor and another with a 2.4ghz processor and after the reinstall on both systems, VOILA...it was only roughly a 20% difference... TFA - just keep reading further and further down the usenet post --- Personally if someone does this type of comparison on different hardware, I wouldn't even bother to read their findings. If you can't be bothered to compare it on the same hardware (where there may still be driver differences for the various OSs, but at least you're minimizing the variables) you really shouldn't be posting.
Because Linux has better I/O performance than Windows does.
Fucking asshole
Let's just say you're wrong and I've seen flickering on plenty of Mac OS desktops.
And with X11, the flickering you get is more likely due to the program ignoring X backing store and "doing their own thang". Well guess: their failure isn't the fault of X11, is it.
"To be fair to X, managing compositing et al isn't it's job---but it should be!"
Compiz: It IS!!!
Sheesh.
And Enlightenment had compositing freaking YEARS ago.
" Between X's by-design paucity of features"
You mean like C's "paucity of features" that means libraries that do whatever you damn well want?
There is no "by-design paucity": by design X11 is extensible. See X extensions.
"Had X been designed a little more smartly (eg, for actual people and not for computer scientists) this probably wouldn't be such a problem."
Uh, what design WOULD have been for "actual people"? This statement, bald as it is, makes no sense.
X11 is designed for the task it has to solve: drawing a GUI.
One program: one purpose. Expose capability and don't impose process: someone may think of a use you never considered when writing it, so don' t write a program that will hate them for it.
The UNIX way.
Which, oddly enough, Apple have embraced to a large extent since bringing out Ten.
"By comparison, again, we have MacOS X's system, which again just works, even if in theoretical terms it's a little slower."
Two problems: the dissing of X is how slow it is. So Ten's system being slower should be more dissed, yes?
Secondly, ten's system doesn't just works else there would be no problem with "But Mac can't support clones, they have to have a limited selected hardware to deliver the eXPerience!". Ignoring that this just works meme is wrong. I've seen it often just stop a lot.
"The UNIX Hater's Handbook, which is a little bit out of date now, goes into the design errors of X "
And here we see where you've been misled.
The UNIX paradigm is extensibility. Policy is set by the use of the program. not by its programming. And the UNIX haters hate UNIX so hate the UNIX paradigm. Ergo they hate X too.
Maybe they're just a little bit predisposed to a priori conclusions...
And it's not the "why does X drive people nuts" it's why do people get a stiffy when the opportunity comes to diss X?
(oh, and a quick look at that, hmm, *discourse* seems to be a person who gets a real big boner over getting to rant and rave about how X is teh devil. Could he be any less coherent?)
http://browser.garage.maemo.org/news/10/
One of the architecture mistakes in the Google browser was *not* using Qt.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
I've noticed that X unfortunately gets a lot of metaphorical rotten vegetables thrown at it from Linux users; even people who apparently are fans of Linux in every other respect.
In my own opinion, however, X qualifies as one of the greatest pieces of software ever written. Put it in perspective, here; the system has been in continual use and evolution since 1984. That's 25 years this year. Granted, its' configuration process in particular has needed radical reform, and fortunately it has recently got it.
I don't understand why people criticise its' stability, either; for me it has always been rock solid, particularly on FreeBSD.
I'm also not really surprised that Chrome might run faster under X than under Windows or the Mac. If there's one thing that's always been true of UNIX in general, it's that the system doesn't include unnecessary frills. When you're wanting to be optimised for speed in particular, that can only be a good thing.
I love X.
let me try with a car analogy:
Even If the Model-T is usually slower then Horse drawn buggies it doesn't mean it is always slower for all roads... For most roads sadly the Model-T runs slower then Horse drawn buggy based transportation. However Model-T does do better then the buggy for roads that are better made for Model-T. Model-T is great at the flight based information, It does get bogged down on bus routes. Buggie Carts wheel like trails much better then Planes automobile.
It is not that Model-T cant handle bus route nor can buggies handle flight well. But Model-T does flight better.
- As to overwriting. This occurs because the update events follow behind the UI. The problem is resolved by the composite extension, or by enabling backing store -OR- by increasing network bandwidth. Some old X Servers didn't have backing store (and certainly no compositing), AND ran over constrained pipes. It hasn't been a problem with desktop X for years.
- X is extensible by design. Multiple display support, accelerated 3D, video playback and compositing do work. For $DEITY sake, I use these features on my stinky little Acer Aspire One using Linpus! No particular problems -- "it just works" (tm). I don't like transparent windows, so I just don't bother, but it does work. Why the hell would a user want to know about the alphabet soup? Just use a packaged OS. The alphabet soup comes about because the development of X is an open process.
- And, in comparison with the Mac, you do notice that Apple packages an X Server with OS X? When running in a heterogeneous environment, it's necessary.
- Finally, you bring up the Unix Hater's Handbook. Ok, let's break it down:
1 - xload, xterm and xclock are possibly among the LEAST used programs under modern X based systems. They weren't
even installed on my Acer when I got it.
2 - Motif isn't used anymore.
3 - Cut and Paste really isn't an issue anymore, either.
4 - ssh -Y is usually used to remote X servers - authentication isn't an issue anymore either.
5 - Gnome and KDE provide the "customization methods"; since xterm isn't used anymore (or xcalc, or xedit),
the xresources issues are also gone.
6 - imake has been deprecated for YEARS.
7 - Pretty much nobody uses raw X protocol or XLib anymore either.
8 - NeWS was "killed" because IBM and DEC didn't want a repeat of NFS - they didn't want to send SUN any more money. So, they marketroids forced the issue. I agree the superior technology didn't win, but X is still around. Sucks to be the customer when they get what they have been told to ask for.
The UGH was relevant in the early '90s. No longer.
The "MAC UI Experience" could be planted on top of X. I am disappointed that Apple isn't driving that. It would involve developing several extensions that would be useful to X users. But, if Apple doesn't want to do it, others will:
http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/CompositeExt
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XRender
http://keithp.com/~keithp/talks/randr/randr/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_video_extension
http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/801-6662/6i1196cd6?l=ja&a=view
The first four are generally implemented. The last is not (X/DPS). But, MAC OS X only implements a subset of X/DPS anyway (and, of course, it isn't compatible).
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
No. It's MacOS 10. OS X is just stupid intentionally confusing terminology.
X is the Roman numeral for 10. It's "Mac OS X", which I pronounce as "Mac oh-ess ten".
I pronounce it "Mac O'Sucks"
Bow-ties are cool.
Thanks for the inane and completely uninteresting reply. Creating an index file that cripples system performance is not actually that helpful though. Eventually the trade-off isn't one anymore and the system is too slow maintaining the index to be usable.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
I distinctly remember sitting down with Windows 3.1 when it first came out (and on a Mac as well since we had many more Macs (Lisa's actually) at the time) and thinking "OK great, how do I get this display from that PC to that one over there" which I thought was perfectly logical thing to do since the only GUI I had used before that was X10 and the X11. The fact that it was not possible has always prejudiced me to both Windows and Mac interfaces ever since.
How much of the graphical user interface evolution on UNIX has been put back because the varying WMs and toolkits?
It's better now that we're down to X.org and GTK or Qt, but years were wasted because you couldn't write an app that took advantage of, say, Display Postscript or multi-head or decent colour-correction or a given GUI toolkit without restricting your market.
For a very long time---and ending not so long ago---state of the art, cross-platform GUI toolkits on UNIX started and ended with Motif. That's horrible.
That doesn't really speak to the question of whether the window manager should be built-in...
I mean, I don't want to sound like the situation is all roses here. Yes, as you say, there's been a lack of focus that has detracted from the overall experience. But, you gotta look at the bright side, too. Suppose Motif and/or mwm had been integrated tightly into the X server... Where would we be now? We'd still be stuck with it, probably... Would we really be happier knowing that a clear direction had been chosen, if that clear direction sucked?
I think the lack of focus is an unavoidable consequence of a system that's developed without clear-cut, authoritative leadership. That's a down-side of using a system that's not been designed by a single group like Microsoft or Apple. But the up-shot is that a system like that is open to experimental ideas. The result isn't a true meritocracy of software (that is, no matter how good a piece of software you might write for a particular task, there are still practical problems in terms of getting people to invest themselves in using it) but there are always options...
Going back to the question of tighter integration of the wm with the X server - I remain unconvinced. I could see how X could benefit from better compositing support and other features to make wm's behave better, but I don't see what the benefit would be of having the wm built right in to the X server. It seems like running it on the local machine is just as good...
Bow-ties are cool.
Intel pay for a lot of X devs at the moment who do upstream development as well as Intel driver development: Eric Anholt, Jesse Barnes, Keith Packard (of at least Xrandr and COMPOSITE fame), Ian Romanick, Carl Worth...
Red Hat employ some upstream X devs too: Dave Airlie, Peter Hutterer, Adam Jackson, Kristian Høgsberg (who made Wayland) spring to immediate mind (I think they also used to emply Jesse and Carl)
Novell employ Matthias Hopf.
Nokia employ Daniel Stone.
There's an (incomplete?) list of xorg devs on ohloh. Just because you haven't heard of them doesn't mean they aren't out there hacking away...
I would answer you but slashdot thinks that over 3 hours between posts is far too long and I need to slow down.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The window manager should have been part of X from the get-go.
The window manager should NOT be part of X. Choice of window managers is a good thing. And what is even better is choosing and changing window managers without logging out. Or running them in different windows (really handy sometimes.)
99% of users don't do that you say? I don't care. It's nerdy goodness, and this is news for nerds.
I already applied for the patent on that.
If you want a bunch of features to tweak, you shouldn't be using Chrome. Its not intended to be full of a bunch of crappy features that 3 people use and 1200 extensions to make it run like crap. Its meant to be lean and mean.
Do you really think that asking for an option to limit the size of the 'cache' is unreasonable?
Of course it's meant to be lean and mean, however it's not because of the problems with the history cache.
Useful options for cleaning up the history would be for example delete all data older than the past month while keeping the history information of the pages you usually visit (the ones you accessed in the last month).
As it is implemented now, is useless.
Even If X is usually slower for all applications... For most applications sadly X11 runs slower for all applications sadly X11 runs slower then Vector Graphics.
It is not that X11 cant handle Bitmapped images. Framebuffer handle Bitmaps much better made for all applications... For most applications sadly X11 runs slower for all applications sadly X11 cant handle Bitmaps nor can Framebuffer based information, It doesn't mean it is always slower then the Framebuffer based information, It does get bogged down on bitmapped images. Framebuffer OS GUI like Bitmapped images. Framebuffer handle Bitmaps much better then the Framebuffer handle Vector better made for X. X11 is great at the vector based GUIs. However X11 does get bogged down on bitmapped images. Framebuffer OS GUI like Bitmaps nor can Framebuffer based GUIs. However X11 does Vector.
Courtesy of Markov
X is the name of the thing. It is a window system. There should be no 's' at the end. "Window" is not part of the name. Look at any copyright notice, or any related site, like: http://www.xfree86.org/ "Home of the X Window System." The display server is an X Server, not an X-Windows Server. the clients are X clients, not X-windows clients. Look at the wikipedia article, it refers to the X protocol, X terminals, ad nauseam ...
So yeah, there should darn well better be a [sic].
Eventually the trade-off isn't one anymore and the system is too slow maintaining the index to be usable.
That is a problem with the design of your selected indexing program (Google Desktop Search from your previous post). Try something like Copernic Pro for a change. There is also PocketSearch which is free.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
No, he said it very clearly: He's trying to render a framebuffer OS GUI like bitmaps when instead he should be using vector based information, using a Synergy2 client with cloud-based actionscript pseudo-code, reverse-compiled on a middle-endian pdp-12 zipdisk array. You thought Web-2.0 was easy. Don't be so condescending....
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
Who cares, when a Youtube Flash video is eating almost 100% of your CPU because it's idiotic use of X11? Playing a plain MPG video in mplayer uses almost no CPU.
My complaint was specifically about Google Desktop. It was related to the parent's comment about a design inefficiency in Google's Chrome.
At no point did I complain that I wanted a better desktop search option, nor did I say I hadn't found one if I was. My comment was solely and quite obviously interconnecting the two as a Google database inefficiency in their desktop db design.
Please learn to read context before replying.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
If you use 'nx' on both the server and client machines, you will find x applications running much faster.
The nx application intelligently caches x commands.
# yum info nx
Loaded plugins: refresh-packagekit
[...]
Installed Packages
Name : nx
Arch : x86_64
Version : 3.3.0
Release : 38.fc10
Size : 12 M
Repo : installed
From repo : updates
Summary : Proxy system for X11
URL : http://www.nomachine.com/
License : GPLv2 and MIT
Description: NX provides a proxy system for the X Window System.
#