OSNews

Most of the real problems these days are being worked on in the DRM/Gallium3D repositories.

Just like we heard before that all problems will be fixed by EXA, GEM and DRI2.

Unfortunately such things have been sitting in repositories for ages and never seeing the light of day. The open source world is great when it comes to ideas and starting up new projects but when it comes to following it through to the logical conclusion its an entirely different matter. Xorg unfortunately is what holds Linux (or in fact any *NIX for that matter) from mainstream adoption. Distributions talk and talk about 'improvements' but most of it is tweaking around the edges rather than addressing the fundamental flaws in Xorg. It will require some heavy lifting but so far the parties that yield the most benefit from Xorg seem to give back the least amount.

If you were counting monetary value for the hours being used to develop a system like KDE (and we get for free), what we have here amounts to millions of euros - and you are unwilling to spend a few hundred EUR on decent hardware?

For obsolete hardware, there are other environments like xfce.

And what about current netbooks? What about possible ARM-based netbooks in the future?

It isn't always about spending money or not.

Conversely, the worst thing about X is Linux.

There are too many Linux-centric changes entering X.org, which is supposed to be a cross-platform graphics architecture. First, breaking it up into a bazillion packages, like a Linux distro, whereby any bit can be updated at any time. There's no real "X.org" releases, just distributions with almost random version numbers of packages. Then there was the inclusion of a dependency on HAL, even though every platform except Linux already had a (working|better|dependable|power-conscious) hal-type system. Finally, there's the upcoming removal of all user-space mode-setting support, effectively turning X.org into a Linux-only system.

Maybe development of XFree86 was slow and took a few wrong turns, but at least it was true to its roots as a cross-platform system, usable on commercial Unix, free Unix, Unix-likes, and more.

Firstly, they are excising HAL and going towards using the platform libraries. So that problem is going away.

Secondly, the other OSes are more than welcome to add support for modern X. There's nothing in the newer architecture that is at odds with non-Linux OSes. In fact, KMS equivalents are what commercial Unixes have traditional used for X. It is the only sane way to do it. If the other OSes don't want to support that, it's their loss, really.

I wonder why the X server from SGI was never open sourced? They had the best one from all of the Unix vendors.

Oh no, not another one blaming X for all the world's problems.

Xorg is fine. Get over it already.

What happened to Wayland?