begin quoting Andrew Lentvorski as of Thu, Jun 05, 2008 at 02:56:17PM -0700: > SJS wrote: > > >What sort of interactive performance are you worried about with X? > > Basic responsiveness when the computer is under heavy load.
What system provides that? MSWindows boxes don't. OS X Macs don't. I haven't run Plan 9 recently, but what other options are there? To be fair, not all of that is X's fault; it has to do with the interaction between the underlying OS and X. Systems that don't have that level of distinction can play some tricks to give UI threads/processes higher priority. High integration increases complexity, but it has some payoffs. > >Video playback and 3D handling, I'll grant that X is pretty sucky. > > > >Not sure what you're getting at with fonts or international input. > > The issue is that the moment you start poking at international character > sets, practically everything breaks. You have to bash your entire font > system to get a font that works with international characters but then > looks sucky on ASCII characters. Every system and sometimes application > has a different way to enter Unicode characters--and it generally sucks. Well, yes, that's the unicode magic at work there. I don't blame X for that at all: I blame unicode. (I just ran across a description of how some glyphs have multiple legal unicode representations, which means that it's possible to have distinct unicode strings that are *impossible* (as opposed to "very difficult, but do-able if you're very careful") to tell apart. We need another couple of iterations on this problem before we start whining that folks are implementing it wrong.) > And vertical text is an exercise in hilarity. Is that really an X issue? [snip] > >Looking at > > > >http://ftp.x.org/pub/X11R7.1/doc/RELNOTES.html > > > >It looks like they're working on direct hardware access (hello video and > >3d), font support, unicode (international input?), and drivers (new > >video chipsets?). What more do you want? > > Um, the date is 200*6*. Yes, but those are the sorts of things they're working on. If they're not working fast enough, well, that's a *different* problem than the programmers working on the wrong sorts of things. > We have *SHINY* things like Compiz since then, > while rendering multiple fonts in a toolkit window still dies horribly > under *ALL* toolkits (equal blame to X11 and Gtk/Qt/etc.). Hm. I actually would consider compviz more useful than Yet More Font Madness. But then, I'm generally not using too many fonts, so that's a really low priority for me, but managing multiple desktops/users/apps is a common task, and thus it has a much higher priority. > And the Qt and Gtk guys couldn't come to agreement on a common rendering > engine. If I'm feeling charitable, I'll chalk it up to differences in > technical focus (Trolltech looks at portable very strongly). If I'm > feeling uncharitable, I'll chalk it up to Trolltech couldn't extract > money out of an LGPL piece of tech (Cairo) and so had to roll their own. Heh. -- Translucent windows are more useful than I would have thought. Stewart Stremler -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
