X11 is okay, but it's not good for desktop use. It does its job, but it doesn't do it that well. I am just noticing how other OSes have improved, they now have great compositing integrated, cool GUI and they are quite fast and eye candy at the same time. Client-server mechanism is just lolz on desktop. Yeah, it's really cool for opening remote applications, but there could be other methods, so that the whole client-server method is not necessary when a program gets executed on a machine. X11 is what is making every unix-like desktop enviroment SUCK. GNOME is great, but it could be much better, same for KDE, but X11 gets in the way. It's just innefficient. Having a separate window manager and decorator also takes away lots of really nice stuff you could do. Unix-like OSes can exist, just look at OS X, it's BSD, with some other way of showing graphics.(Plus its application bundles etc) And the fear of every newbie... xorg.conf; something every linux/bsd/whatever has to front at least one time. Using a command line for getting the graphics system fixed.. sucks. I personally now have no problem with it, but for newbies it's gotta suck being thrown at a terminal and not knowing a single command. VGA-mode, please. A great way of making a new desktop experience would be making a whole new window system, with integrated window managing, decorating and maybe even compositing. But keeping a Xlib implementation so that old apps could still be used. Something like what OS X does.. nice, fast, still reliable. And yeah, let the people who like X11 keep using X11. X11 is cool, reliable, powerful and flexible, but I'm surprised with the fact that it's still widely used. It's 2010 and no alternative has showed up, this actually makes me sad, and I feel so incapable because I can't help with the development of a new window system... Tell me your thoughts
I think that "desktop linux" has always been a bad hack and that eventually Haiku or AROS is going to take over that space. Or at least they ought to.
Every time I ran a program that needs X11 on my Mac, I couldn't help but notice how archaic the windows were, like some kind of windows 95 job.
I considered Haiku.. but it seems it needs time yet, plus I like unix-like OSes.. except for the X11 part. :P I can't find technical info about Haiku.. is it multi-user? PS: death to gtk as well.
I would agree that X11 isn't necessary for desktop use, but to say that it's killing everything is quite an overstatement. It doesn't matter as nearly as much as people being able to run the apps they want to run, or things being responsive and not crashing. Much of this has nothing to do with X11 itself. In any case, in my experience I've actually had much of this eye candy and compositing and junk run a little better than Win7 here. It's mostly because my hardware is just aging, but it shows that X11 doesn't have as nearly as much overhead as people like to think. It also depends heavily on which desktop environment you use; GNOME and KDE both lean a bit toward the heavyweight side. If you use something like Xfce or LXDE or similar, things are much more snappy especially on older hardware. OS X's version of X11 is kind of a different story. It's a windowing system kludged on top of another windowing system and is just a way to get Xlib apps to run; it's not a way to properly build GUI applications on a Mac at least.
Yeah, I was kinda exagerating, it's not all X11's fault, but it's a weird and too flexible(more than it should be) window system. And the application quality, I am just saying apps could be better (mostly in eye-candyness) if we had a window system which could also work as a window manager, and maybe even better, have it running out of the user space. But yeah,it's not just X11, I also would like to say that I'm starting to dislike Gtk+, it is ugly, just that, not very important.. Qt FTW! I would move to a completely Qt-based DE, but KDE is too weighty. So I stay here in GNOME. On the other side, there's something I don't get, how Mac OS X's Quartz Extreme running on this PC performs MUCH better than compiz? I still don't get it :/
You also forget that a lot of the current "desktop linux"es use X11R6, and it's actually been updated to R7 by this point, lot's of code changes in major revisions like that usually. Maybe things are a bit better. Edit: Also, xorg.conf is pretty simple if you know your monitor's accepted frequencies and the standard format for the file. If all else fails then lets hope you aren't a retard and made a backup. Linux never was deemed idiot proof. In fact it is quite the opposite. :P
Well, it is not me who has had serious trouble with xorg.conf, only when dealing with drivers, especially when blacklisting that lolnvdriver and installing the propietary ones. But apparently other people, especially people just come from Winblows, find it awful. Anyway, this whole anti-X11-ity came to me when thinking of eye-candy.
It's Mac OS X :P Nah, but it's probably the way the stuff is handled internally. The entire windowing system was written from scratch for 10.0, if I remember, so there is a lot of performance since the beginning.
I've rarely had any issues with xorg.conf on my laptop running Arch Linux, although I'd like it if my external monitor was plugged in and it would be recognised automatically rather than having to dick around with the configuration file. Not sure if that is available in other DEs, I use Xfce and might install KDE some time. GNOME is getting bad though.
Probably not AROS unless they put in memory protection, a better desktop, and stop trying so hard to be an Amiga nostalgia OS. I'm pretty sure none of those will happen for a long time, especially not the last one. Haiku looks like it could have a pretty good chance, though. But they will need to step up security quite a bit.
Their main goal right now is to become a feature complete replacement for BeOS R5. While they have added a LOT of new technology that wasn't present in BeOS such as Wifi support and the freetype font system, they're not going to add multiuser support until the first stable release is done. As on BeOS, Haiku supports multiuser permissions on files but doesn't actually have a multi user mode (yet). Therefore all your files belong to "byron"
I found a thing :B <a href="http://www.std.org/~msm/common/protocol.pdf" target="_blank">http://www.std.org/~msm/common/protocol.pdf</a> Seems screwed. O.o
No, it won't die. Not anytime soon. Too many enterprise/business, among other, applications are dependent on it. So, unless a new replacement comes that offers something vastly superior (probably with X11 compatibility), it would probably never die. IMO, X11, among other things, is one of the reasons that "desktop Linux" will never catch up to real desktop operating systems like Windows, OS X or Haiku. But then again, X11's goal wasn't to be a desktop oriented window system.
Gradually, the duties given to the X server are being moved away to other parts of the system. For example, the kernel has directly handled 3D rendering in the form of DRI since 2006, and we're now moving portions of display management out of the X server into the kernel, hence Kernel Mode Switching. I expect that soon enough, the only part of the X server to remain would be a shell with xlib that forwards to the appropriate components in a Linux system. With Gallium3D, there are plans to write a 2D-on-top-of-3D driver that would remove the X server's need to render 2D stuff as well. Non-Gallium drivers will probably fall back to the old user mode rendering from the X server.
So, I just gave Haiku a try. I couldn't even get to the desktop. I booted up the CD, but it would fail to recognize my usb mouse and keyboard, so then I tried on my laptop, same problem. I couldn't get past through the language prompt D=
You shouldn't be expecting good hardware support in Haiku just yet. You should try it in VMWare or VirtualBox.
