On Wed, 2003-06-25 at 10:09, Bailo, John wrote: > With all the alternatives in Linux, are there alternatives to X itself? > > Shouldn't there be more than one graphics servers available to Linux?
None as far as I know. But in thinking about the question I have two responses. 1) Writing a full scale graphical environment is time consuming, difficult, and requires a lot of skill. There are not that many around. The Mac interface, Windows, Sun's SunView, X and X based derivatives (CDE, Gnome, KDE, etc.). Probably a couple of others, certainly the Star interface was used by Apple and MS for ideas, etc. X started as an academic project and then was adopted by the *NIX world as the basis for a lot of variants, but the hard work was all done at MIT and everyone leveraged off that investment. The basic point is that a full blown interface is something that will probably be done only as an academic project or if there is substantial value for selling the interface. Hence the OpenSource world has moved towards the end of leveraging off the X stuff as the basis for GUI's and trying to lay stuff on top of that to enhance the user experience. This has the side-effect of making it easy for programmers to write applications for the interface; any Xlib application can be ported to any X environment; it looks better if some higher level widgets are used, but it makes the application level much more enticing to developers. Cost of a non-X interface and the problem of getting apps for it both argue against such a beast. 2) X in and of itself has a number of advantages (some of which are are also disadvantages). It is designed to run on a network with distributed clients, there are low level API's that developers can use, the core of the interface is freely available, etc. The issue is performance, but that can be dealt with as a separate issue. There are three main sources of performance issues. First, the WM and other stuff overlying X can be bloated and non-optimized. KDE and Gnome are both fighting with this, there are alternatives that are lighter weight and better as others have noted. Second, video drivers are a problem. There needs to be incentives for manufacturers to either provide good drivers for Linux, or provide info to programmers that will do the drivers. In the early days of Linux, there was a boycott against Diamond and their cards as they would not provide data to driver writers. Diamond changed their minds and a lot of folks then bought Diamond cards as the accelerated drivers became some of the best around. Too many cards these days run with non-accelerated drivers due to 'secrecy' of the card makers. Good drivers on good cards do make a difference - a big one. Third, the fact that X handles everything via the network stack can drag down performance. The proper way to handle this is to optimize and compress the stream. Low bandwidth X stuff is around, and there have been proprietary solutions that solve this problem. I'd rather see more effort put in this area than folks trying to re-invent the wheel. In the end, my take is we do not need to replace X, just optimize what is there. - rick warner -- redhat-list mailing list unsubscribe mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/redhat-list
