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KDE and Canonical Developers Disagree Over Display Server
sfcrazy (1542989) writes "Robert Ancell, a Canonical software engineer, wrote a blog titled 'Why the display server doesn't matter', arguing that: 'Display servers are the component in the display stack that seems to hog a lot of the limelight. I think this is a bit of a mistake, as it’s actually probably the least important component, at least to a user.' KDE developers, who do have long experience with Qt (something Canonical is moving towards for its mobile ambitions), have refuted Bob's claims and said that display server does matter."
If they don't matter, why mir?
He is a Canonical developer and its not a post about his family cat.
X.org, not Wayland. Wayland is still under development. Wayland devs must be elated that Mir has made the debate "Wayland vs Mir" rather than "Tried, trusted, works, and feature complete X.org vs Wayland."
X.org is not "feature complete" in any meaningful sense. It is incapable of doing the kind of GPU-accelerated, alpha-blended compositing that is expected on a modern user interface. Sure, you can get around most of this by ignoring all the X11 primitives and using X.org to blit bitmaps for everything, with all the real work done by other toolkits. But in that case, it's those other toolkits doing the heavy lifting, and X.org is just a vestigal wart taking up system resources unnecessarily.
Although better graphics would be nice calling them amateurish is rather silly.
Why? The KDE desktop looks like the state-of-the-art from say 1993. If I wanted my desktop to look like Xaw3d, I'd just fall through a time warp and go back there. At least the music was better.
I'm pretty happy with my KDE desktop, but I use it as a tool to get work done, not because it looks pretty.
I bought a hammer from the hardware store that looks almost exactly like the 1920's era hammer my great grandfather used (though the handle is fiberglass instead of wood), but it works well and gets the job done. Just because a desktop "looks" old doesn't make it useless. I tried Unity and Windows Metro and found them to be much less usable for my developer/operations tasks.
KDE 4 is great except for Akonadi, which killed Kmail.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Today, X uses far less memory than Windows 8
Nice, you just compared a single process on one OS to the entire OS and its subprocesses of another. Totally fair.
How about you compare X to the Win32 Desktop Window Manager instead? Which is a lot closer, though still not exact since Windows has this mentality that GUI in the kernel is a good idea.
My point however is that your comparison is not really a comparison.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Sure a DE is an acquired taste but it does have to be functional without being ugly.
Nor is there outside the commercial offerings any DE with such a well integrated package of applications.
That doesn't mean I don't see the attractivity of something like Enlightenment but compared to KDE it is seriously limited, both in options and looks.
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