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Canonical Developing Ubuntu OS For Tablets
snydeq writes "Canonical is preparing a version of the Ubuntu OS for tablet computers as the company looks to extend its presence in the mobile space, InfoWorld reports. The OS will be a lightweight version of Linux with a simplified, touch-friendly user interface, and tablets with the Ubuntu OS could become available late in winter 2011. The focus will be on developing an OS with a simplified user interface that provides quick access to the most-used applications. Development efforts will also focus on adding on-screen keyboard features and compatibility for multitouch drivers."
AFAIK you can install your own version of Ubuntu onto the Joojoo, which is way cheaper than an iPad but has decent enough hardware specs.. this could be really awesome!
which is totally what she said
No, it won't be a "lightweight version of Linux".
It will be a lightweight version of Ubuntu.
Unless they are going to roll their own kernel fork, that is.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
What about getting it ON a Tablet? Anybody agreed to or even thinking about putting Ubuntu on their tablet?
I don't see a lot of people wanting to buy a tablet only to replace the existing OS.
Though it'd be nice to get some kind of slate for a cheap price - this should cut down the price by $100, if Ubuntu can get someone on board with it.
The iPad is out NOW. Windows tablets will be out SOON. Why be so late to the game? I don't understand the slowness of FOSS to catch Win/Mac.
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
Are you claiming that apple invented the tablet computer?
When will comapnaies/websites with worldwide audiences wake up and realise that usign terms like 'ready in the winter' is NOT conducive to setting expectations equally? 'Winter' is completely relative to where in the world you are located.
How about using something somewhat universally acepted like '3rd quarter', or even better - state the damned month directly and give youyself an actual target/deadline!
If this has X11, I doubt it will be especially lightweight. I also doubt that graphics will be worthwhile.
For a tablet device, why is Ubuntu better than Android?
The answer to your question: Money. By the way, Windows tablets have been around for over well over ten years. I had an IBM slate with a monochrome screen!
I hope they hire a UI designer who isn't an Apple admirer. We need fresh ideas...
I wonder if anyone over at Canonical is now thinking this:
"Okay, so we're now designing a touch-screen version. Considering how many right-handed people are out there, maybe it wasn't such a good idea to move the window controls to the left-hand side of the screen."
Doesn't seem so ergonomic anymore, now, does it?
I dunno... who wouldn't want a uPad?
Are they going to redesign those "most used apps" too? A simple touch friendly veneer won't do much good if all it does is throw you into an instance of the Gimp or OO.org.
DCMonkey
Unless every app were designed to run in the new constraints, they won't look, work or act right. Netbook spins of Linux are always just menus with large icons that just make you feel like you are playing with a toy with extremely limited options and usability.
Maemo just about got it. Droid definitely got it. Making an "Ubuntu" version would need to be more than a new Window manager and selection of packages. It needs a controlled and contained UI that will work within that environment and integrate well.
This rather leads me to an idea... one that is either really stupid and/or impractical or something else.
If Linux's X apps were created with an application's equivalent of HTML's "CSS" then perhaps applications could be tremendously more adaptable to different user environments.
Are you claiming that apple invented the tablet computer?
They put it on the map, regardless of how long it's been there.
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
I'm just dying to see the user interface. If there is any instance when I need to use scroll bars to scroll in any application its insta-fail. Same goes for windows.
Canonical or Google?
Do you see what I did there?
No, but that doesn't change the fact that Ubuntu is me-tooing on Apple's success with the iPad. If they weren't why didn't they announce this years ago?
I'm not a huge fan of Ubuntu because of its kitchen sink installations (which I know I can change or I could just track debian...). I'm a huge fan of Ubuntu for others ... because of its kitchen sink installations :)
That said, one thing I will give Canonical is at every technology turn they take a real crack at it.
Will this work on the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dell_Streak
Ubuntu as a "something newer" OS would put real computing power and freedom into a larger pocket/messenger bag.
Could we finally enjoy a flash supporting, codec rich, web friendly OS on usable hardware with real usb?
I really hope this works and we see a generation of creative computing again vs the DRM, rented, book erasing, push dreams of an Apple, MS, Amazon ect.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Wait why exactly is a scroll bar bad? Given sane restrictions on how small the scroller can be, it offers a pretty decent way of getting directly to any vertical or horizontal location when presented with more information than the computer can handle. Yes obviously gestures can be used for relative scrolling (Scroll up from here, down from here, etc.) - the beauty of a scroll bar is the potential for either the "tap and you're there" functionality often associated with playback position for audio/video, sometimes volume level, etc. - as well as a "tap and you've scrolled a great distance" functionality more familiar to say, a word processor or web browser, allowing you to click or tap in one place and quickly scroll to that place, covering pages at a time, and stopping when it reaches your absolute position. It seems to me that, in the case of viewing a substantially large amount of information, the combination between a scroll bar and a gesture for scrolling would in fact be QUITE powerful.
http://wiki.openice.org/index.php?title=Main_Page
Linux is a kernel. This means it's part is a dispatch and control mechanism for the operating system as a whole. The complete operating system includes other things such as libraries and utilities to name some. Correct me if I'm wrong?
Shh.
F/OSS is reimplementing quite a few areas to make that code compatible with itself. On top of that base there are also quite a few innovative and novel F/OSS initiatives already.
Shh.
If there is some kind of a scroll bar type area to show you your place in the document or to quickly jump further down is one thing. I just don't want to use my finger to tap on the down arrow to move through the document/application/whatever. I'm just curious to see how a windowed user environment could be rigged to facilitate touch gesture. For example, if you have two windows open concurrently side by side how would you move them around on the screen? Will you be able to flick to scroll elements within a windowed application. Obviously the iPad deals with this by allowing a single application in the forefront. Don't get me wrong, I just want them to compete with the iPad. But if the touch interface is still centered around a pointing device paradigm then it defeats the whole purpose of the form factor.
8.04's focus was stability.
9.04's focus was netbooks.
9.10's focus was cloud computing.
10.04's focus was pretty themes (and apparently dyslexia).
10.10's focus is now tablets.
Am I the only one that thinks that a Linux distro should stick with focusing on doing one thing very well? Seems all of these half-baked ideas are just late-night bong-induced dreams that get left at the wayside 6 months later. You just end up getting a bunch of "won't fix" bugs in LP because "the focus is now release+1". /me grows weary of this runaround...
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
mozilla firefox = instafail? I'd hate to see this entire page smooshed into a single, non-scrolling pane.
The buttons default to the left with the Ambiance and Radiance themes right now. If you select the other themes the buttons go back to the right automatically. No command line voodoo involved for less-seasoned users.
Shh.
Who really gives a shit if Ubuntu copies Apple? Apple is the market leader in some areas, like UI for example, but their shit is expensive and non-free. They make locked down shit that I would never purchase (for myself) or use. Canonical makes a distribution of a free operating system that anyone can use, and they are steadily trying to improve it. If Canonical can make something to emulate the market leader in UI design, and their product is also FREE, then what is the problem with that? I can't see how that is NOT a good thing for the average person. Apple may not like it because they are trying to make money, but I don't think we should shed any tears over that.
It's not like you have to use this tablet OS, anyway. You can use the standard Ubuntu UI if you choose to. That's the nice thing about having a choice, and choices are something that Apple will never willingly give you if you buy their products. I, personally, don't care for dumbed-down interfaces. I didn't care for the netbook remix on my netbook so I installed full-blown Ubuntu on it. If I ever get a "tablet" (i.e. a regular netbook with a touchscreen, not any of this faggy no-keyboard ipad crap), then I will most likely run regular GNOME or KDE on that as well. For my grandma, sure, I will give her Ubuntu Tablet Edition or an ipad or whatever. She would benefit from the simplistic UI and lack of options to confuse her. It's nice that the option is there for those who want it, but that doesn't mean I have to use it.
Wait why exactly is a scroll bar bad?
for the same reason that having a scroll area on the touchpad is bad, and multitouch scrolling is good. sometimes you mistouch and you scroll when you meant to move, or move when you meant to scroll. but most humans can touch with one finger or two, or for that matter, drag instead of tapping.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
to supersede the neo-cons, it's world domination by ubuntu no less!
it's just the best by the sadists!
Insta-fail? Lack of scrollbars cripples the mobile browsers. Their absence on the iThing is merely annoying. Whereas Android could sorely use real scrollbars.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Having tried Canonical's last 2 releases on my two Intel-based laptops, and getting only blank black screens once X starts up, I hope they fix their video driver problems.
Don't think the business model will work. Let's use the iPad as an example. The OS isn't the expensive part of that product. Apple sells the iPad for $499 with the understanding that the purchaser will likely buy several apps and many movies through iTunes. You put Ubuntu on there, and the user can apt-get to bypass the App store. Same with movies.
The other problem is that tablets are media consumption devices, and Netflix doesn't work on Ubuntu.
Using Linux isn't going to save any hardware manufacturer a significant component cost. And since Android is there for free, there's not a good business argument for bundling Ubuntu.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Given sane restrictions on how small the scroller can be, it offers a pretty decent way of getting directly to any vertical or horizontal location when presented with more information than the computer can handle.
I second this. Kinetic scrolling is OK, but sometimes a scrollbar is just easier. You hear that, phone OS designers? Give me back my fucking scrollbars! Oh wait, I still have them, because I run Windows Mobile 6.5. Lucky Me :)
I've lost hope with Ubuntu making a user friendly desktop experience.
The full desktop distributions, for a long time, had this obsession with brown and orange, nothing neutral. Now it's purple, which is still not neutral. Even with changing themes it's hard to get rid of all the purple.
Apps tend to get changed from the default UI to some bastardization of it. I've run into many issues where I'd update to the latest Ubuntu release and I had to relearn various programs.
Ubuntu Netbook Remix is a half assed attempt at a netbook friendly distribution. Power management is a joke (I get 5 hours out of my netbook in UNR, and 9 hours in Win7). The apps aren't actually modified to work with a netbook; instead, a hack is used (modified window manager and a maximizer tool). Dialogs are left alone, and many are larger than most netbook screens. In short, UNR has been a disaster since its inception and it still is today. Multi-window apps (ie: Empathy) totally break the flow of UNR.
Ubuntu doesn't really do anything innovative. I only use the server distribution. And really, I could get away with just using Debian, at that point.
This leads me to believe that a tablet edition will be very poorly designed, engineered, and developed if they are going to stick with a pure Linux root similar to all of their other distributions.
Sorry, I don't use garbage like Loonix.
And I don't use garbage like iPads. See how that works? Now get back into your cave, troll.
Apology accepted.
We can just grab the source of Canonical's touch interface and apply it to other distros, like say Gentoo or Arch?
Indeed, the winters in Ecuador sure are cold.
First of all, I don't like to use my finger; I prefer a stylus, on a passive digitizer. I may change my tune after using multi-touch, but I have not had the pleasure as yet.
The Apple Newton deals with the scroll bar issue by limiting the UI to vertical only, and supplying a set of scroll arrows in the toolbar at the bottom of the screen. Tapping an arrow scrolls one page. The important thing is that the location never changes. Some apps add a second set of scroll arrows. In Dates (the calendar), tapping the standard scroll arrows moves forward and back a day, and tapping the special arrows scrolls the current day forward or back about an hour.
I want a tablet to have all of the power of a current notebook, to include vertical and horizontal scrolling. I like the idea of some key pads located close to the edges of the screen, with four button clusters like a typical game controller. Don't waste valuable screen area on buttons that do not need to be dynamic. I also like scrollbars, but not the Windows/Mac style. I prefer the old Unix (or was it Smalltalk?) style where the size of the scroll depended on how far from the center you clicked.
Where Windows and Gnome fail is in the implementation of mouse buttons 2 and 3. On my Fujitsu T-1010, Win7 sort of emulates button-2 by a long tap-and-hold, but this does not work well in all applications, most notably Squeak Smalltalk. And, there is no button-3 support at all, which Squeak expects. I have a simple tablet input working in Ubuntu, but it only does button-1, so it is mostly worthless.
Next up is text entry, but this post is long enough. All I will say is that even in Win7 text entry is too great a compromise. Nothing comes close to a Newton in this regard.
Gary Dunn
Open Slate Project
http://www.ubuntu.com/news/ubuntu-for-mobile-internet-devices
TAIPEI, Taiwan, June 7, 2007 - Canonical Ltd., the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu, announced more details on Ubuntu Mobile and Embedded Edition at Computex 2007 in Taipei.
Nice fail there, bro, but that's not the same thing. There's not even a single mention of tablets in that posting. This tablet edition that is announced in the article for this story is separate edition from those.
Actually, they're not me-tooing it. They've had this in the chips for about the last 3-4 years in some form or another. They've got hardware partners in the mix at this point, though those haven't been announced yet.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Considering that the iPad's nothing really special there- it's just an iPhone with a bigger screen. A tablet computer, done right is probably always be an expansion of a MID. The article refers to MIDs- and the iPad's no different there. It's a MID, with a larger screen and 3G access, that's all.
I'd be careful of calling a "fail" there as it's not where you think it is. :-D
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
We need to come up with new terminology to differentiate between lightweight, embedded iPad-style devices that are not as powerful as laptops, and the traditional laptop with digitizer tablets. The iPad would be better referred to as a PDA than a tablet.
Well they did invent the graphical user interface, the mp3 player and the smartphone.. oh and they just invented multitasking.
tablets are media consumption devices
Says who? Plenty of artists use more expensive tablets such as Cintiq for media creation. Or by "consumption" did you mean an old name for TB, which sounds like TV?
I don't buy the whole thing about Apple being a market leader in UI. I'd say quite the opposite, actually. From phones with touch screens instead of buttons (how do you use it without looking at it?) to laptops that you have to click with two fingers at once instead of just having a two buttons, their products are full of 'features' that do nothing to improve the user experience. Instead, they just look flashy or are simply different for the sake of being different. I find OSX the same, it's full of silly little quirks that make no sense other than to differentiate them from other OSs. Originally a windows user, I found it MUCH easier to find my way around linux operating systems than OSX. I still struggle every time I have to do set something up on a mac.
Obviously Apple are market leaders in a number of areas -- perhaps most notably advertising, but also in making attractive, well constructed hardware etc. For all their faults, I do like the well built feeling of their newer macbook pros. I just don't see that their UI design is anything special at all. For this reason, I'll be interested to see what canonical come up with. Pity it'll probably be based around gnome....
'Winter' is completely relative to where in the world you are located.
There's more land mass in the northern hemisphere and more disposable income too. For example, the majority of the population of industrialized English-speaking markets do not live in Australia, New Zealand, or South Africa. They live in United States, Canada, Great Britain, and Ireland. So with more land mass in the Northern Hemisphere and more developed countries in the Northern Hemisphere (apart from South American countries and South Africa), the majority of wealth experiences winter in the first quarter of the Gregorian year, not the third.
Desktop and server Linux depends on GNU. Embedded Linux does not to nearly the same extent. I tend to use the term GNU/Linux to distinguish desktop-style Linux from the sort of Linux you see on a router appliance.
Orphan Electronics Apad M800 $150-$200 Street Price
http://pricedinchina.com/buy-orphan-iped-mid-slate---m800-wifi-7-android-tablet-pc---m800-iped.aspx
It looks like China already beat everyone including to a degree the Open Source community with a clone of the iPad. They are already selling an iPad clone in China. It looks just like the iPad in everyway, but the guts. I understand it is suppose to have an 600mhz Intel CPU inside, and 2gb of storage with USB port and I thought a memory card. It also has Wifi and web cam built in.
Seems like this thing beats the iPad in almost every area that people complain about for the iPad. Much lower price, same size screen (7"), open and can do all the things the iPad can't or won't. Seems like a pretty good iPad killer to me, and it run Android already so there isn't really an issue of limited apps either. Runs Flash, MKV/H.264, MPEG 1&2, RM/RMBV, MP3, WMA, APE, FLAC, AAC,AC3, WAV.
If I were going to buy a tablet computer I would certainly give this one a serious look.
If the screen isn't big enough for you. I have seen other Orphan Electronics tablets advertised with bigger screens, but of course they cost more than this version does.
Here is one with a 10" screen for $290 and has more storage and still uses Android.
http://chinagrabber.com/buy-10-orphan-iped-m16-1024-x-600-android-apad-wifi-tablet-pc-m16-mid.aspx
At $100 retail in China and $150 retail on some web sites. Seems like this is exactly the kind of table that all the Linux companies like Ubuntu should be looking to use as their hardware platform. At the price of $100-$150 it beats even most eBook readers on price, and it has wifi built in so adding more books/music/software isn't an issue, not to mention the USB port on it.
Howdy cow... Steve Jobs reality distortion field is growing stronger than even!
I guess that for the kids who have been around computers and IT just in the last 10 years, Jobs is the inventor of all electronic devices.
OK, I'll shut up and keep laughing at how people spill the kool-aid while drinking more than they can
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
Hi Steve, do you still "shit different"?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Good. Yet Another OS for the xPad/Tablet. Let's count:
1. Win7 tablet edition (rumors of a wp7/CE edition)
2. Android
3. Chrome OS
4. WebOS
5. Ubuntu
I'm waiting for AmigaOS and BeOS to get a port.
The touchscreen trend launched by the iPhone is a definite step backwards in user interface terms.
A functional user interface should be unobtrusive - it should integrate seamlessly into your other activities. In the case of mobile phones, that means being able to type out a quick text in your pocket, being able to go forward or back a song without looking at the device, or changing the volume mid-call without taking a look.
Touch-screens demand your attention if you're trying to do all of these. That might be a good way of promoting enhanced addiction to the device itself - a key aspect of Apple's success in all its products - but it takes away from usability.
I've filed news stories on an old-style Nokia candybar keyboard - 450 words or so - just using the 10-key numeric keyboard and text-message style tapping. I'd hate to have to do that on a touch-screen. And that's before you remember that the huge, energy-consuming touch-screen would probably have left you without battery power sometime the previous day. Quite an issue when you're travelling long distances at short notice.
I installed Ubuntu OS the other day on my Ubuntu computer. I got a ubuntu boot loader and I selected ubuntu and booted ubuntu. then I got a ubuntu login screen. I logged into my ubuntu desktop. I was greeted with a nice ubuntu wallpaper. I double clicked on 'Computer' and it opened the ubuntu file manager. then I opened the ubuntu web browser and downloaded a media file. then I opened ubuntu music player and listened to the media file. :P). It worked flawlessly without any additional configuration. .ppt (nice!) :D
Then I remembered I have tv tuner card. I checked on google and says ubuntu kernel has a driver for tv card. so I opened ubuntu package manager and installed ubuntu tvtime television viewer (shocking, huh?
Then I remembered I needed to prepare a powerpoint presentation for work. so I opened ubuntu office program and wrote my document. Ubuntu office program saves in
Then I went out for coffee. when I came back, there was a ubuntu screensaver on my ubuntu computer. so I moved the mouse, typed in my ubuntu password and I was back in my happy Ubuntu desktop.
I think its great that linux is a competitor in the market. Ubuntu has there desktop OS a laptop OS and not a tablet OS I hope they break into the mobile market.
http://www.thetechnologygeek.org
They even invented copy-past. They invented Ads, they invented touchscreens.
What is with Linux developers/distributors that the absolutely must "create their own" ?
Nicholas Negroponte has already announced that he's going for a diet-Linux on his tablet.
The WePad ( http://wepad.mobi/ ) is already at point of mass distribution, mixing Android and Linux in an innovative way.
Others are already doing diet versions of Linux for tablets (lenovo springs to mind)
Why can't they just cut the crap, get their forces together and create that ONE diet-Linux monolith GUI distro that not just debunks the "Linux always comes third" myth, but destroys the iTampon ?
I mean... it's not that hard. Talk to each other. Use Google and see if anyone already started a project. Take off your shades! (They look dorky when sitting in front of a computer screen anyway!)
This signature is DRM protected. By the DMCA, you are not allowed to counteract or oppose to it.
Dude, didn't you know that Apple invented the fucking computer?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I thought that was one of the main goals of Ubuntu - if not explicitly stated, the obvious conclusion for other stated goals and objectives.
(Would anyone want to provide either a complicated interface or make it harder to access most-used applications? I bet Microsoft had the very same goals in mind when they designed/developed Win 3.1, Win95, Win2K, WinXP, Vista, and now Win 7. If Microsoft met those goals or not is up for debate, but I'm pretty sure that was their goal as well.)
Ken
Ubuntu netbook remix is perfect on my acer aspire one. You've never actually tried it, have you?
I agree with you, but would add that good ideas are better than fresh ideas. Fresh ideas just for the sake of being fresh doesn't work. That is a distinction that a number of FOSS UI makers do not appreciate.
People who are computer users and who are not computer enthusiasts do not want to take the pain ( even a trivial amount ) to relearn how to do a task that already know how to do with an existing system.
If a system has a dramatically different UI it had better have some highly visible, highly appreciated...unique, benefits for the user.
Otherwise, there is no point in using it, let alone liking it for the end user.
I have a touchscreen HP, and the upgrade to 10.04 completely horked the touchscreen until someone reworks the evtouch driver.
The touchscreen has always been a pain to set up, this is really something that needs working on if they want to go against the ipad.
Oh to have Ubuntu on my HP TouchSmart, and to be able to use my fingers.
This post is considered inappropriate to read for anyone under the age of 50.
Maybe Ubuntu can work on not sucking before they bother with shit like this.
Ubuntu has gotten progressively less useful with every release; it seems they'd rather put more effort into revamping how it looks than making it stable.
Howdy cow... Steve Jobs reality distortion field is growing stronger than even!
I guess that for the kids who have been around computers and IT just in the last 10 years, Jobs is the inventor of all electronic devices.
OK, I'll shut up and keep laughing at how people spill the kool-aid while drinking more than they can
Maybe Steve Jobs really does have some kind of reality distortion field because it really is plain as day to me. Sure, tablets have been around a pretty good while and have been sold as "the next big thing" over and over, but it isn't until Apple does it that anyone tries to do it thriftily to undercut their popularity.
You're also terribly presumptive. I started with a 386, I hate Apple to its core (tee hee), and I can configure Debian just fine but still prefer Ubuntu for its flexibility and consistency across every computer I've installed it on.
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
Hi Steve, do you still "shit different"?
Yeah, the IBS is really acting up lately.
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
This guy explains it better than I can. I ripped the post from another board, link is at the bottom.
To go directly to the point, I think that the "linux desktop" needs a small, fast, fully-featured graphical backend. This backend should provide basic drawing primitives, input device event handling, network transparency, but should not involve itself with higher-level graphical interface design (like buttons and menus). So far, I suspect that most of the above posters would agree with this notion. Here is where we diverge: I do not think that X11 is small, fast, or fully-featured. And I think that there are fundamental aspects of the X11 protocol which will prevent any implementation from working well.
The first fundamental problem is that X11 is implemented using an asynchronous model. In other words, to raise a window one cannot simply call XMapWindow to map a window. One must call XMapWindow, which will transmit that command to the server, then one waits for the server to respond with a MapNotify event, and then one can proceed. When running over a network this potentially allows the client to send off multiple commands before waiting for the response to a single command, allowing improved performance. But when run on the local machine, this requires a great deal of round-trip communication that produces latency that causes many users to perceive X11 programs as "slow." This problem has been reduced somewhat through the use of shared memory, but still hinders performance. The asynchronous model was an excellent decision for the 1980s when most programs ran over the network. But in the current day, the backend is optimized for a use-case that is rarely used.
Beyond performance issues, the asynchronous model is also the root cause of much of the flickering that occurs on the desktop. As widgets are moved around, the asynchronous model causes repaints to occur while the windows are still in flux resulting in flickering. The developers at QT have effectively already abandoned X11 (or at least a good part of the design) by moving all of the event handling into the QT library to circumvent this flickering (see http://labs.trolltech.com/blogs/2007/08/09/qt-invaded-by-aliens-the-end-of-all- flicker).
A second fundamental problem with X11 is the absence of resolution independence. X11 describes all coordinates using integers that represent pixel positions. As screen sizes change and pixels become smaller (or less likely larger), then the display begins to appear pixelated. In a resolution independent scheme, all coordinates are described using floating-point values so that display is rendered correctly regardless of the screen size. Again, going with integers positions was an excellent design decision for the 1980s but is no longer an effective design. In the 1980s many of machines shipped without a math co-processor, so that floating-point operations were much much slower than integer operations and the quality of the graphical output was arguably less important. Today, virtually any modern processor has a math co-processor that can perform multiple floating-point operations per clock cycle. The difference in performance that would result from the use of integers rather than floating-point values is gone, the only thing that remains is the pixelation.
The last main problem with X11 is the profound lack of functionality. Some of the above posters have claimed that now that X11 has compositing it has pretty much everything quartz has. To be blunt, this is very very far from the truth. Competing graphical backends (e.g., Quartz) provide much stronger support for anti-aliased drawing (not just text but lines and polygons), gradients, transforms, shadows, patterns, transparency, font selection, color spaces, and data output (to screen, PDF, or Postscript). Modern linux programs compensate for the inadequacies of the X11 protocol by performing this rendering within the toolkit. GTK use
oh and they just invented multitasking.
To be fair, the "multitasking" that iPhone OS 4 offers to apps is, let's be charitable and say different from what you'd expect from a modern OS...