Orlando Andico wrote:
> lots of people deride X for being bloaty, but having a > network-transparent rendering system is pretty useful.
You know what's shitty? The fact that no one out there seems to be interested in providing a freely available reference for the low level X protocol!!
The only source is probably the (long out-of-print I believe) Volume 0 book from O'Reilly. Can you imagine a so-called "free, open standard" without a freely available reference for the core protocol?!? These people promoting X ought to think about this important fact.
> i think X will always have a place, and i cast an evil > eye on initiatives like GGI and berlin. :D
The quote below is worth noting though... from http://xfree86.org/pipermail/forum/2003-March/002017.html
"...given the fact that more and more people are using the two leading desktop environment GNOME and KDE, there will be no need for a so-complex system like X. *** GNOME and KDE are encapsulating almost everything. ***"
Re GGI, berlin, etc... ======================
Is GGI still alive? I think it's long stuck and DirectFB is what's moving today. They have Gtk running on DirectFB. Berlin (now called Fresco) seems to be regretting their choice of using CORBA (a lot of people might be wanting to say 'Told ya!').
Graphics on Linux is a very uncoordinated, fragmented affair. I think it all stems from the fact that there is no 'blessed' kernel architecture for video drivers. Everyone is reinventing the wheel. (SDL is the one saving grace if you ask me...)
They really should decouple DRI (or something sitting at roughly the same level, like KGI) from X and use that as the kernel video driver architecture for hardware vendors to use.
Keith Packard has talked about writing X to work on top of OpenGL which I am wondering if feasible, although work described in Glitz and KeithP's paper "Getting X Off the Hardware" ( http://keithp.com/~keithp/talks/xserver_ols2004/xserver-ols2004-html/ ) seems to indicate that there is merit to the idea...
For 3D, hardware vendors are concentrating all their efforts on writing OpenGL drivers for their cards and you really want to leverage off of that.
Right now card makers are probably writing two kinds of drivers for Windows: GDI/GDI+ and DirectX. Avalon sounds like it will unify the two. Thing is, Avalon is written from the ground up, whereas OpenGL was NEVER intended to be a 2D API and might be klunky for such.
A long shot would be if someone can convince the OpenGL ARB to add a few new extensions (you shouldn't need much for 2D) to OpenGL to make it a 3D+2D API so it can be properly used as an all purpose driver Hardware Abstraction Layer / API substrate (in conjunction with something like DRI).
Such a move might save OpenGL from being becoming redundant in the face of very stiff DirectX competition by offering itself as a unifying fundamental graphics API under all the *nixes. (This would be incredibly ironic though as OpenGL was always intended to work with / sit on top of some 2D API...)
On a sidenote, has anyone noticed if the Linux build of Mozilla 1.8a2 or later is snappier than 1.6 or 1.7? In Windoze, there was a very noticeable up such that it is now only just a teeny bit slower than native widget UIs...! at least on an Athlon 2400XP with a Radeon 9600XT... :-P
Also, much as I feel SVG is a gratuitous use of XML, it is oober-kewl seeing it strut its stuff on this SVG/GDI+ enabled Mozilla 1.8a2 build (phenomenally bugfree for regular mail and news usage, btw).
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