OSNews

I think (but am not certain) that was supposed to be a central point in the (not overly coherent) editorial. But it's mixed in with so much irrelevant, over the top, and frankly, rather bizarre and vitriolic stuff like claims of not being able to trust Linux with his data, a completely unrelated sub-diatribe about Evolution, and defensive sounding preemptive attacks upon people who use Linux before they even get a chance to say anything, that it's hard to tell.

I quite agree that throwing out X is one of the more inane ideas which floats around at OSNews. And the misinformation which floats around "in support" of doing such a ridiculous thing is pretty tired.

However, mixed in with all the irrelevant ranting and raving, this piece might actually have hit upon something new. Applications die with the X server. That's actually just a more specific part of the more general idea of making X more robust in the face of adversity. But still. I suppose we ought to give the author credit for it.

For my part, I administer about 80 X servers in 3 cities, on a variety of hardware, and have done so over the last several years. And have not found X reliability to be a problem. (Most run Evolution, BTW.) But still, I'm all for improving reliability further.

Other posters seem to have put the lie to the author's claim that Windows 7's video is crash proof.

So I will just finish by mentioning that there is one thing which any new X replacement will absolutely have to do to ever gain any traction whatsoever. And that is to... implement X. If it can't do that and do it well, you can forget its chances of getting anywhere... unless its devs are also willing and able to port and maintain The World to their "wonderful" new IncompatibliX display server.

Edited 2009-08-16 02:49 UTC

I believe you're right and I think it is a problem. Network transparency may be significant in the UNIX desktop world, but it's an infinitesimally small factor in the overall desktop market. Unwavering adherence to the X architecture means that X will always be, fundamentally, a networked pixmap engine with an abomination of a modern, hardware accelerated graphics stack bolted on the side.

I like Linux-- the kernel, the GNU userland, even the toolkits and some of the apps that sit on top of them. It was the only OS on my desktop 14 years ago. I'd like to be able to use it today. But things have changed significantly since then. A modern graphics stack is important to me, and as long as X wants to play gatekeeper to my graphics hardware, Linux won't have a place on my desktop.

And I think we'll see this become more and more of an issue as time progresses and X falls further behind.

I'd give more credit but it's nowhere close to an original idea. I've been asking for a way to move X apps between servers for years, primarily so I can move them to a dummy server and back (thus allowing them to survive an X restart).