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I think the way forward is something like Fresco aka Berlin (www2.fresco.org) - which probably won't appeal to most people here because it's really a research project, slow, and years (?) off from being usable. Nevertheless, it holds alot of potential, and tries to do the Right Thing.

I'm really close to the developers and currently working to get it running on Windows. However, it is not slow moving. It is a misconception that it is slow moving because:
- They don't release too often. 0.3 is coming out, and the current CVS version that blow X away feature wise (but it lacks a lot of things like drivers and applications to do so).
- They have a weird history. Berlin itself was quite old. It was written in assembler in the beginning, and then in 98, because of Stefan, they forked on Fresco, an X toolkit and start a new chapter. Berlin 98 (the assembler window system) and Fresco 98 (the X toolkit) are so much different from Fresco now. So, logically, I would say the current evolved form of Fresco is only 4 years old, and it made much more progress than XFree86 did in it's first four years you gotta admit that.
- Fresco is writing something new. Well, actually, it's an combination of different old ideas, but the combination is new. By using CORBA and being vector base, it is made for the future.

- do they really need to run the whole thing as root? jeez.

IIRC, Xfree runs rootless on Mac OS X.

The only good news is fewer apps are using X11 directly and are instead using graphics libraries which aren't dependent on X11. Unfotunately they still don't behave the same so the major old problem will remain for decades from now. Personally I find X11 more bothersome than simply using the terminal, it's far too chaotic and human unfriendly.

I don't know. Now, a large portion of Linux/UNIX/X11 apps are in GTK+ and Motif, which are very dependant on X. Then you are blaming X for the problem of the front end (like KDE, or the distributor) fault for being human unfriendly. But anyway, I agree with you we need a brand new design.

However, the new XFT library will be incompatible with both KDE 3 and Gnome 2, so these projects they will need to add support for the new font library in their future versions, in order to get native AA support.

They already have AA support. In fact, if XFT2 exist back then, there wouldn't be Pango and QFonts.

Nah, XFree does a good job, I just think it does too much... Currently I'm in a very strong "less is more" mood. Gtk on DirectFB is buggy and useless but still damn impressive (fast). I whish I would understand a little bit more about DirectFB. They constantly have interesting news (like the rootless X Server) but I never really get what those really are, what they do and what they don't. For example I just don't get what "rootless" X Server means.

I'm planing to try GTK+ on DirectFB. I used DirectFB once as a Fresco console, but Fresco just broke support for all consoles except GGI with the SDL support. However, IIRC, DirectFB is Linux-only... not a terribly good idea for those not using Linux, which makes X an ideal choice for them.

Berlin is a nice toy, but I don't ever see it entering production use as an X replacement. It will always be slow due to a number of inherent design decisions.

Like? I don't know any bad design decissions. There are some minor ones like the abstration layer between the console and Fresco, which they are busy fixing (more of a bad coding job than a bad design decission). And of course the bidir support in Warsaw was actually forked from Pango, which is kinda a bad fork cause all they did was remove Glib and insert some C++ code to make it C++. As for CORBA, I think it is the single most ingenious decissions ever made. Why? One must reliaze first that Fresco is a vector-based window server, and therefore cannot be compared with pixel-based window servers like X11.