On Sat, Nov 08, 2003 at 05:12:06PM -0800, Jacob Meuser wrote: > On Sat, Nov 08, 2003 at 08:51:45AM -0800, john fleming wrote: > > I was talking to Joseph Carter about Linux and OSX and the idea of > > needing an alternative to x11 came up are there any viable altternatives > > being worked on? > > You mean like directfb, libgii, libggi, svgalib or something like that?
I would hardly call these alternatives to X11. GGI has little to no future. SVGAlib doesn't even have much of a past at this point, let alone a future. DirectFB is useful, but mostly for game programming at this stage. John and I were discussing the limitations of X11: no matter what they do to it or how they extend it (read: make it more difficult to code for while simultaneously increasing both overhead and resource demands), X11 still can't correctly do a great many things that its competition has been doing for the past decade now. - X font rendering still sucks - Even with the render extension, alpha support is a complete hack - The resources to make KDE work reasonably well are equivalent to those needed to make all of the eye candy in MacOS X work without Quartz Extreme support. (With it and Panther, KDE's performance is even more dismal since Quartz Extreme offloads most of the eyecandy to the graphics hardware in Panther..) The KDE people admit they are trying to work around archetectural limitations. Those cute animated cursors have each frame drawn over the network protocol, for example. - X11 lacks the ability to support an accessibility interface. It knows what text is, but has no idea of what a text cursor is, for example. And because the font rendering is so damned terrible, even with Xft, a number of projects use their own font rendering code. This means accessibility features such as a spoken UI or system services. - Since each program is responsible for processing raw mouse events, look at the mess that has been made of wheel support in X11. It was done the only manner X11 could do it: translate the from a movement delta to am on-off button event. - X does not store one copy of, eg, a pixmap. It has at least one copy in client memory, another in server memory, and probably two more in video memory. Depending on things like transparency (as described as limited above), there may be even more copies ofthe same pixmap flowing around your sysem memory. This is all without even considering the non-archetectural concerns such as StarOffice still lacking essential features found in Appleworks, which is taken as a joke by most users or that Havoc's grand feature removal spree in Gnome can only end with Gnome 2.6 wherein all user controls shall be replaced by a single button labelled "Do stuff". _______________________________________________ EuG-LUG mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mailman.efn.org/cgi-bin/listinfo/eug-lug
