Slashdot Mirror
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?
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.
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.