Linked by lopisaur on Fri 25th Jun 2010 22:21 UTC
Based upon a recent email to the X.Org developers' mailing list, Canonical is nearing the point of one of their goals for Ubuntu 10.10 of a rootless X Server, or being able to run the X.Org Server without root privileges.
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Member since:2009-10-04
I don't claim to love X (in fact I am programming my own window system similar to Wayland), basically all the things you said about it are wrong.
It's slow
Well, its architecture is not the greatest, but pretty much any computer can handle it fine. (By comparison, Windows Vista and 7 and very slow, even though their graphics architecture is fairly well designed.)
it kills all apps when it crashes
No, apps decide to kill themselves when they crash. And guess what, if Windows crashes, all your apps crash too!
its standard widgets (Motif) haven't been updated for ages
Motif isn't really the "standard widget toolkit". It was in old toolkit used many years ago that got replaced with much better things.
leading to appearance of a bunch of incompatible toolkits...
By a bunch, I think you really mean two. Gtk+ and Qt. However, they both cooperate pretty well, and can be themed to look the same very easily.
However, I do agree that we should only have one standard toolkit: Qt. Gtk+ is simply technologically inferior in every way. I would be very happy if GNOME was rewritten in Qt...
Member since:2010-03-08
Well, its architecture is not the greatest, but pretty much any computer can handle it fine. (By comparison, Windows Vista and 7 and very slow, even though their graphics architecture is fairly well designed.)
Try to play with it when some heavy calculation is running in the background, and see if it remains responsive ^^ Though you're right that "slow" is not the good word. In terms of performance, X is acceptably fast, except for demanding things like games where I think that crappy drivers and compositing are more likely to blame.
No, apps decide to kill themselves when they crash. And guess what, if Windows crashes, all your apps crash too!
Wrong. If windows' graphic layer crashes, and I've seen it crash many times, the desktop disappears for a moment, then reappears with all your apps on top of it. You can safely save your work before rebooting your computer and investigating what's wrong if crashes happen again.
By a bunch, I think you really mean two. Gtk+ and Qt.
There's also the Enlightenment toolkit which is slowly getting popular lately, but you're right that the UI toolkit mess on Linux is not nearly as complicated as the media API mess...
However, they both cooperate pretty well, and can be themed to look the same very easily.
I know, QtCurve is one of the first things which I install on my Linux boxes. However, it's just about looks. Things like open/save dialogs are still inconsistent... However, I do agree that we should only have one standard toolkit: Qt. Gtk+ is simply technologically inferior in every way. I would be very happy if GNOME was rewritten in Qt...
Well, I agree that QT looks much better for the most part, but developers are lazy (tm). Properly rewriting GNOME in QT would take a long time, during which people would continue to complain that the Gnome desktop stagnates. The result of the rewrite would be extremely buggy. Do you think the Gnome devs would ever take this risk ?
Edited 2010-06-26 15:04 UTC
Member since:2005-08-07
In fact, no theming is even necessary. Qt treats GTK/Gnome similar to how it treats OS X and Windows these days: it assumes the widget styles of the system. To use a Qt/KDE theme on a Gnome desktop, you actually have to jump through hoops, which I think is a very good thing.
Whether GTK is or isn't inferior, there is no denying that it is faster to take advantage of native Linux features.
Member since:2008-10-23
However, I do agree that we should only have one standard toolkit: Qt. Gtk+ is simply technologically inferior in every way. I would be very happy if GNOME was rewritten in Qt...
I don't agree. First off, GTK solves less problems than QT. If doesn't integrate its how xml or svg parser, network tools and everything QT does. Gtk is just a widget toolkit and is lighter. Secondly, there is an at-spi bridge that works. QT with at-spi does not work yet. It's ready to work with at-spi over dbus (at-spi2) but at-spi over dbus is not finished. There is no C binding and applications will not be ported to python.
So yes QT is very good toolkit and superior to GTK in many ways, but not in every way.
Member since:2010-04-21
Member since:2005-07-11
"Xorg is one of the best piece of technology available in Linux.
As a former Linux user, I find this insulting for my previous OS of choice. There is great tech in the Linux world, sure : JACK, networkmanager, udev, APT... "
Well, out of that list, really only JACK and apt are noteworthy. The rest are just kludges on top of missing kernel features. Other OSes have better solutions that Linux is still catching up with.
But X.org is *not* among them.
X11 most definitely *is* one of the greatest pieces of OSS available for Unix-like systems.
It's slow,
Define slow.
it kills all apps when it crashes,
Yes, that is an issue.
its standard widgets (Motif) haven't been updated for ages,
Do any modern apps still use Motif?
leading to appearance of a bunch of incompatible toolkits...
And how is this any different from Windows or MacOS X??
And let's not consider the time it took to get mouse hot-plugging working.
Mouse hot-plugging in X11 has worked on non-Linux OSes for many many many years (FreeBSD has had moused (/dev/sysmouse) support since the early 3.x days, for example). Don't blame X11 for a shortcoming of Linux.
Member since:2009-10-04
Mouse hot-plugging in X11 has worked on non-Linux OSes for many many many years (FreeBSD has had moused (/dev/sysmouse) support since the early 3.x days, for example). Don't blame X11 for a shortcoming of Linux.
I don't know how long FreeBSD or Linux has supported it, but I know that I've been hotplugging USB mice since I started using Ubuntu four years ago. FreeBSD may have supported it earlier, but it's not like Linux got support yesterday...
For some reason, you really seem to have a strong anti-Linux agenda. Whenever anyone points out some problem with anything, you immediately attribute it to a shortcoming of Linux, and point out how FreeBSD has done that right for years. I'm sure you're sometimes correct. FreeBSD is awesome (I just use Linux because it's given me less hardware problems). Just try not to be a fanboi.
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Member since:
2010-03-08
As a former Linux user, I find this insulting for my previous OS of choice. There is great tech in the Linux world, sure : JACK, networkmanager, udev, APT... But X.org is *not* among them. It's slow, it kills all apps when it crashes, its standard widgets (Motif) haven't been updated for ages, leading to appearance of a bunch of incompatible toolkits... And let's not consider the time it took to get mouse hot-plugging working.
The sole thing which Xorg does very well is error messages. /var/log/Xorg.0.log is a great way to know what has happened when X has crashed. Again.
Edited 2010-06-26 14:04 UTC