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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Amiga speeds : 7.14MHz for PAL, bit faster for NTSC as CPU speed was slaved to the custom chip's clock and hence to the video mode.
WinXP: Hmm, not played with XP much, but these look glitches caused by screen redraw not being slaved to refresh or similar - I guess still shots don't really tell the whole story though...
XFree - yep, X is an interesting system, but on a single desktop, its rather like using a sledgehammer to crack an egg. What is needed is a screen manager that has a simple API and uses efficient methods to render, but can forward draw requests to X where the window is on a remote system, and receive requests/input from a remote system to forward onto te actual screen manager. In other words, make X a wrapper around the screen manager, not a screen manager as a wrapper round X.