Linked by Guillaume Maillard on Thu 10th Oct 2002 05:44 UTC
Being a BeOS user (a purely desktop system) and because I code under Linux, I see XFree86 (v4.1 on my machine) as a user and as a developper. And this is where the problem lies. My Gnome or KDE desktops are slow in comparison with other operating systems, but XFree86, the 'engine' behind these desktops, proves me that it's not. Let's look at what I have in front of me: a dual Pentium III at 933Mhz with 512MB of memory, a Radeon 32 AIW, a modified Mandrake 8.0 powered by kernel 2.4.18.
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When speaking of a XFree replacement people usualy mention DirectFB and Berlin, but there's another vaiable alternative - use DRI. DRI can be separated from XFree (see http://fbdri.sourceforge.net/ ) and OpenGL can be used to draw primitives and copy/blit bitmaps. All the problems that the author mentions are resolved - the communication is as direct as it can get, no useless coversions (most OpenGL implementations are optimized for all supported color formats - not just 32bit), blindingly fast blits(just don't use glCopyPixels, but textured rectangles) and transparency are supported, the memory of the graphic card can be used to store the bitmaps or alternatively the AGP memory can be used. Also each layer can be rendered into a separate texture so you won't have to update overlaping regions. And you get lots of new features that no XFree extention can give you.