Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Mon 15th Sep 2003 20:37 UTC
Today we feature a very interesting interview with Havoc Pennington. Havoc works for Red Hat, he is heading the desktop team, while he is well known also for his major contributions to GNOME, his GTK+ programming book, plus the freedesktop.org initiative which aims to standardize the X11 desktop environments. In the following interview we discuss about the changes inside Red Hat, Xouvert, freedesktop.org and Gnome's future, and how Linux, in general, is doing in the desktop market.
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"The point is to get rid of X11. If I gonna use xDirectFB then there are basically NO serious benefits and it would raise the questions wether using the native driver made for the GFX card wouldn't be better in this case. But you seem to have carefully read the DirectFB issue that I raised here and that you figured out from my writing that I was strictly NOT refering to xDirectFB. "
Speak for yourself. There are more than a few people who _need_ XF86's network transparency, myself being one of them, and find the idea of getting rid of X11 absolutely idiotic. Just because your needs don't include network transparency doesn't mean that you have some sort of G-d-given right to tell everyone to axe it.
As usual, this is a case where people attack XF86 because someone told them it was bad. Sure, network transparency has a touch of overhead - but how much is too much? Do you really know where the bottlenecks are happening? What are _your_ credentials to tell me so?
To address your benefits:
"- No loading of X"
So what? Loading up X takes a hot 10 seconds on my P166MMX laptop. I find that loading GNOME takes a lot longer than loading X - let's just go back to TWM so we get instant load times, right?
"- getting rid of ~150mb in favor to 200kb FrameBuffer"
I run X fine on my 96mb laptop. Stop confusing the issue with blatantly false claims of memory bloat.
"- DirectFB supports AA fonts (because GTK uses Pango)"
XF86 does, too. Ever tried RedHat 8 or 9?
"- you safe a lot of Memory because you boot linux straight in the framebuffer and have still all your memory left for applications rather than having it suck up by the X server"
And the magical framebuffer doesn't take up memory, right? Have you ever considered that the only way I _can_ run some apps is via X? Let's see your 32mb laptop run SAS on its own - the only way you're going to do it is to use X's network transparency to run it from _another computer_.
"- speed through direct hardware communication."
XF86 can do this. It's called RENDER and DRI.
"- native transparency and shadow support and all the nice effects that Havoc has dreamt of. "
These can be coded into XF86. In fact, I've heard general talk indicating this will be true in the (possibly near) future.
XF86 is a mature, tested architecture. DirectFB is not. You make slightly more sense than your inane "KDE is the greatest" rants, but that's not saying much.
-Erwos