Y: A Successor to the X Window System 666
impto writes "Whenever someone brings up the topic of replacing X, everyone always says that's nice, but where's the code? Well, Mark Thomas put his money where his mouth is and produced a replacement that maintains network transparency while adding many of the features that people desire from X such as alpha blending and a built-in toolkit. It still needs a bit of work to be as featureful as X but it's a fresh start that takes advantage of current technology and ideas. Read the paper here in PDF (1.7MB) or PS or grab the source and start hacking."
more info please (Score:2, Insightful)
Also, it should be noted development has stalled on this project. He says it should start up again in November.
Re:more info please (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:more info please (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:more info please (Score:2)
Next time TRY READING the paper (Score:2)
Re:more info please (Score:5, Informative)
And development has stalled until November because he's just finished his 4-yr Masters degree and is taking a well-deserved holiday before starting his new job.
Cheers,
David
Re:more info please (Score:5, Interesting)
BSD was originally developed at Berkeley - ie college students, gov't funding.
XWindows was originally developed at MIT - ie college students, gov't funding
GNU was originally developd at MIT - ie tenured college professors stealing BSD code and relicensing it.
Linux was originally developed by a college student in Finland.
See a pattern yet?
Perl is actually an exception in that it was originally developed to scan HTTP logs to see who was downloading porn at the NSA, and Larry Wall is now employed by O'Reilly which is the number 1 publisher of perl books, does a lot of perl training, etc. so there is a business model behind it.
Built in toolkit (Score:5, Interesting)
This leads to toolkit darwinism, which has left us with essentially GTK and QT as the two dominant toolkits. Imagine if X had been shipped with Motif as its native toolkit? Who the hell would use that in 2003?
Re:Built in toolkit (Score:3, Interesting)
The arguement here seems to be not that the inconsistency between who puts what tools onto a given system puts off the casual users, which tbh is a fair point. Use the custom tools for those that need them, but a generic interface makes the norms happy, which is what breaks market share monopolies
Re:Built in toolkit (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Built in toolkit (Score:3, Interesting)
The fallacy is to assume that it is indeed a simple marketshare vs flexibility tradeoff. It is not.
The problem with flexibility is always a question of 'how much'. It is not a case of more=better (for then surely a simple framebuffer in which every application can write at will is the best option, allowing every possible graphical behaviour.) On the other hand, not flexibility is another losing hand. The problem as I see it with X is: too much flexibility in
Re:Built in toolkit (Score:3, Insightful)
Frankly, OSS is generally not about making Joe Sixpack happy. Most OSS software is far better than the closed-source equivalent...for techies.
I'm not really broken-hearted about the state of affairs, either.
Re:Up to a point... (Score:5, Insightful)
E.g.: My wife has, after years of sporadic effort, finally learned that files are not stored inside of the programs that create them. I think. But she can pick up a new musical instrument and with a couple of hours practice play reasonably advance music on it. Not just scales, and not just strings. She specializes in ethno-musicology. Some things she handles well in an hour would take me years to do as well.
But with a bit of guidance she is able to handle ordinary WordProcessing, Graphics, and Music Composition programs. (The only problem is that she tends to save files in random places, and not understand why. Or where. I'm still working on trying to get her to understand disk folders.)
People have radically different skills. Learn to enjoy this. Or at least accept it without shouting. Its the people with different skill sets that have the most to offer each other.
Re:Built in toolkit (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree to some extent.
However, the state of toolkits under X is now quite a mess. How many of them are there again? 15? 20? All with their own look and feel, and all with their own pain in the ass dependencies. It's not enough that GTK and QT is somewhat of a standard. That's still one toolkit too many.
Ideally, there should be one standard toolkit api that is easily extensible by developers (ie a very flexible widget system), easily reconfigurable by the users (one standard look and feel, that "power users" can change).
Re:Built in toolkit (Score:5, Insightful)
Come now. Windows has shipped with a standard widget toolkit since its very first version, yet it has definately evolved since then.
Don't assume that had X got a built in toolkit, it would never have evolved. Given the extensibility of X it probably would have evolved nicely, in fact.
However, likewise you shouldn't assume that if X had a built in toolkit everything would use it. Of course, this would not be the case. Mozilla would still use XUL. OpenOffice would still use the VCL. Wine would still use its clone of win32 widgets. Some apps would still reinvent widgets for whatever reason (just as they do on Windows and MacOS X).
Toolkit compatability is best dealt with by standards, IMHO, rather than just moving them around....
Re:Built in toolkit (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, though enhancements show up much more slowly in Windows. Except for the icon and interface whitewash with XP, it's not much different from what was shipping with Windows 3x.
To drive this point home: I've been showing off Linux at work using Knoppix and a USB pen and have had people astounded...to the point I'm starting to temper thier expectations. Simple things like tabs, and complex things such as ioslaves (with a real world example) leave them saying Microsoft doesn't stand a chance against Linux. Well, that's too much enthusiasm but I hope this gets the point across;
Windows itself has improved the base widget set, though most Windows apps still look like they were designed for Windows 95 and very few of these new widgets are used there.
Re:Built in toolkit (Score:5, Informative)
I disagree. VNC could reasonably be called a network-aware framebuffer. X, however, provides drawing primitives, color management, font rendering, windowing...
Re:Built in toolkit (Score:3, Interesting)
Absolutely everybody, that's who.
The only reason that GTK and Qt exist is that Motif was expensive, and therefore not widely available on free Unixen. Lesstif was not usable until several years too late.
It remains one of the classic, tragic, colossal wastes of time that so many people put so much work into building GTK and Qt from scratch, instead of sinking that same amount of effort into fixing L
Object Oriented (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Built in toolkit (Score:3, Informative)
Well what can I say in response to your unsubstantiated claim, other than "you don't know what you're talking about."
GTK exists because Motif was not widely available to the potential users of GIMP. GIMP had originally been written using Motif, and then GTK was written to replace Motif so that GIMP would not have a dependency on non-free software.
And also because (by their own admission) the GIMP authors didn't know Motif that well, and thought it would be easier to just write their own toolkit that
Re:Built in toolkit (Score:3, Informative)
All I can say is that I am personally quite relieved and happy that Motif is gone.
Re:Built in toolkit (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm not really sure, in truth,how your post is relevent to what's going on, and i'm a bit put off by your sarcastic whine about gamers etc.
All to be followed by a (rather poor) backhanded attack on windows. Except this isn't about Windows with a capital w.
In short, what are you talking about, and who on earth modded you up?
Re:Built in toolkit (Score:3, Interesting)
Even if it doesn't replace X, it's still a project worth persuing. Y is, if nothing else, an opportunity to try a different approach to a UNIX windowing system. There's no reason it's best ideas couldn't be re-absorbed back into X, if they're successful at solving real problems. For example, Linux, KDE and Gnome have been influenced by ideas from such sources as Windows, Plan 9, Mac OS and UNIX. It's unlikely Linux
Tsk, tsk, tsk... (Score:2)
As I write this, I am logged on a Linux box, accessing either a Windows Server or Windows XP box using "terminal services".
In the "ol" days this might have been the case, but these days it definitely is not the case. For example when I run across the Internet using Terminal Services, my devices ACTUALLY respond. Eg, try to develop with pop cont
Re:Tsk, tsk, tsk... (Score:2)
Yeah but... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Yeah but... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Yeah but... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Yeah but... (Score:2)
Depends. (Score:4, Interesting)
Y depends on:
* libSDL 1.2 (available at www.libsdl.org)
Now, doesn't libSDL again depend on X?
Re:Depends. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Depends. (Score:5, Informative)
Now, doesn't libSDL again depend on X? ;-)
No, it doesn't. There is an X backend to SDL, but it can also do the fun stuff on its own, as well, and runs on many platforms. From the FAQ [libsdl.org]:
And from the website:
Thus, not only can his example be made to work under X (theoretically), but it will also work on pretty much every other OS you'd want to use it on, and some you wouldn't. Also, in addition to being runnable anywhere, it can also run directly on the Linux framebuffer, which means that all that needs doing is hardware acceleration for the framebuffer, and then Y, as well as many other SDL apps (perhaps with slight modification), will run quite well without having to have X loaded. That, to me, sounds like a good thing.
--Dan
So... (Score:5, Funny)
So what do we do to solve this mess of user interfaces? Let's create yet another one! I love the way that geeks think
Wasn't there a text editor called y? (Score:2)
Re:So... (Score:2)
The thing about OSS is choice, of course, but it's also innovation as well. Yeah, X/*nix may suffer from TOO many clocks, but how many times have you seen a really cool clock that's implemented on X vs windows? I'm not talking about the importance of "the clock" but the cool factor and the possibilities.
Inovations in unix? Well.. lesse.. kerberos, window transparancy in X, themes.. all ideas that have been porte
Re:So... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is the strength of the Open Source model. The source is out there for everyone to see; think you can do it better? Step up to the plate and take a swing!
Re:So... (Score:2)
Just say your piece. You don't need to prepend it with some chest-beating about your amazing powers of precognition.
Re:So... (Score:2)
Y, eh? (Score:4, Insightful)
And anyway, alpha blending and an official toolkit? No. The unofficial X toolkits work well enough, and alpha blending is not very hard to hack in - it's also quite useless for anything other than eyecandy.
I doubt this project will get much highlight after this initial slashdotting.
Y window system is fine, but... (Score:5, Funny)
'X#' (Score:2)
Re:Y window system is fine, but... (Score:2)
Re:Y window system is fine, but... (Score:2)
See the original announcement a little down the page at this [rahul.net] link.
Re:Y window system is fine, but... (Score:5, Funny)
Instead of X-Plus-Plus, lets just shorten it to XP!
License? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:License? (Score:2)
oh no, not another one :( (Score:5, Insightful)
I think X is like Unix : it was inadequate and bloated but computers have caught up with their demands, in terms of power and disk capacity.
Computers get more and more powerful, networks are faster and faster, and X is more and more lightweight comparatively. Combine that with decades of testing and millions of developers who have experience with it, and I can guarantee X is there to stay and evolve.
Re:oh no, not another one :( (Score:2, Informative)
Re:oh no, not another one :( (Score:2)
Re:oh no, not another one :( (Score:4, Insightful)
Could you please stop these inadequate comparisons that are totally false? When Unix was developed, it was a lightweight and powerful operating system. Regarding lightweightness, some derivations and incarnations of Unix still are.
Re:oh no, not another one :( (Score:5, Insightful)
Today X still compares favorably to Mac OS and Windows in terms of functionality and even in terms of things like 3D game frame rate. I don't think X has ever been slow and bloated compared to simultaneous "alternative" technologies like Mac OS or Windows.
I think the new rush of Linux users in the late '90s and early '00s just happened to get a bum driver or two thanks to the "newness" of X to commodity PC hardware and the longtime lack of manufacturer support for X on such hardware. No matter how many times I read it, I just don't buy the notion that X is slow and bloated in comparison to the alternatives.
Re:oh no, not another one :( (Score:2, Informative)
I first ran Windows 3.1 on an XT. It was a 10MHz 8088 with a Hercules card. It was responsive enough to be useful. I upgraded to a 286 after awhile (I think it was a 12 MHz.) Eventually I upgraded to a 386, because then I could (cooperatively) multitask.
I still have Windows 3.1 on an old laptop (a 386SX with 4 megs of RAM). Believe me, Linux and X run far more bloated on such hardware. I have NetBSD and X
Re:oh no, not another one :( (Score:5, Informative)
I first ran X on a 386-25 with 8mb ram too. I agree with almost everything you said. People that think X is slow are trying to run GNOME, KDE, or maybe E with a bloated configuration, a crappy video driver, and quite probably all their libraries compiled with debugging on. X is a wonderful thing, lightweight, fast, powerful, and it runs fine on hardware that any recent version of Windows (or Mac OSX) wouldn't even attempt to run on.
This whole story is a waste of time (Score:5, Informative)
For some reason, people (generally folks new to X) consistently manage to completely misunderstand how X works, and happily rant about it. Among the issues:
Problem: X has bad 3d support.
Answer: No, it doesn't. Manufacturers have just barely put out drivers, and still don't have great install procedures. Starting with a new system would make this problem orders of magnitude worse.
Problem: X uses lots of memory.
Answer: No, it doesn't. Try running pixmap_mem (and the analyze script that comes in the same package) on your system. Unlike Windows apps, X11 apps store pixmaps in the server. X11 newbies frequently confuse this with X using a lot of memory. Combine this with the fact that Unix memory utils multiple-report memory usage of shared libraries, and report device mapping as memory usage, and people look at X and say ("Oh, it's blowing 30MB of memory in overhead."). No, it isn't. Trust me.
Problem: X11 is inefficient.
Answer: No, it isn't. X11 is pretty damned efficient. Today's pixmap-laden interfaces can run much more slowly over a network than the original interfaces, whicch were mostly big, flat-color rectangles, but the same is true of VNC and similar.
Problem: X's multiple-widget set system is a bad idea.
Answer: No, it isn't. People look at X and think "Gosh, I don't want to use Athena apps." The thing is, the widget-independent design of X has been a huge boon. X11 dates to 1987. If we had been unable to advance through widget sets, we'd still be using ugly, grotty Athena. But, you say, this ignores the fact that Windows and Mac OS have advanced through the years! Nope. First, Windows widget sets *have* broken user-level compatibility on a regular basis. Menus in Office XP now work a lot differently than menus in 1987 did. Second, some widget sets are hamstrung by initial design flaws. The classic MacOS widget set does not include a slider widget, for example. As a result, years of application developers misued the scrollbar widget, made up their own widget (which led to even worse user interface problems), or just went without. The ability of X11 to evolve has let things like KDE's tearable panes come to the fore. Also, when it comes to APIs...the modern, easy-to-use APIs of GTK and Qt blow away the horrific Macintosh Toolbox API (note: I am not a Cocoa developer, so things may have improved) or the almost-as-grotty Win32.
Problem: X11 is hard to use.
Answer: No, it really isn't. Occasionally, piss-poor setup on the part of distro makers has made things more of a pain than it should be. If a user isn't interested in remote windowing, he shouldn't have to worry about xauth or xhost. This is largely a problem of the past.
The main "problem" with X11 is actually newbies to it making a bunch of claims about software that they haven't used and don't understand. They've frequently just come off of a decade of Windows use, and expect things to work in precisely the same way, and are horrified when there are differences.
The majority of people I've seen complaining about X11 are Johnny-come-lately types. Most of the older folks who have been using it for a while just don't care enough to respond to the complaints, which they see as pretty uninformed.
Now, there are things about X11 that aren't that great. X11 supports an *extremely* rich color model. If you're using Xlib (which you shouldn't be doing unless you're writing a widget set), it is a royal pain in the butt to support every color model available. This was done to handle the vast array of hardware that X11 has been run on.
X11 doesn't support a great way to share identical pixmaps from different apps. This is really hard to do in a secure way.
Basically, I'm reminded of the SSL discussion that came up recently. Everyone wants to run out and rewrite SSL to be simpler, faster, easier. They don't understand that the stuff in SSL is there because it *needs*
Re:This whole story is a waste of time (Score:3, Interesting)
>
>Answer: No, it isn't. X11 is pretty damned
>efficient. Today's pixmap-laden interfaces can
>run much more slowly over a network than the
>original interfaces, whicch were mostly big,
>flat-color rectangles, but the same is true of
>VNC and similar.
Do you mean that X is efficient for flat-color rectangles but inefficient for pixmap-laden interfaces?
If so, the definition of efficiency needs to be updated. Today, efficiency means efficiency dealing with pixm
pointless and hopeless (Score:5, Insightful)
There is no way to get consistency in a window system. People will port their favorite window managers and toolkits to whatever window system you create. MS Windows runs many of the same toolkits that X11 does. Apple is even worse, officially supporting OS 9, Carbon, Swing, and Cocoa-based applications on the same desktop, and now also X11; and in addition to all that, toolkits like Gtk+, FLTK, Swing are also being ported to native Quartz backends.
If you want consistency on your desktop, just choose to use a consistent set of applications. Most non-computer experts can't even tell the difference between an MFC, Gnome, KDE, and wxWindows application: they all look equally flaky and confusing to them. And most people incorrectly think that something is an OS X native application if it has shiny gumdrop buttons. In short, most people neither know nor care.
Re:pointless and hopeless (Score:2)
Re:pointless and hopeless (Score:4, Informative)
If you put anything "pluggable" into the server, you need an architecture-independent runtime for it and you end up with DisplayPostscript, NeWS, or Java. Is that what you want? Then go right ahead and use them: that's what they are there for.
Bad assumption (Score:3, Insightful)
Read the paper. (Score:5, Insightful)
Read the paper. It is of shockingly good quality, both in the writing and the completeness of ideas. The writer is a college senior!
Re:Read the paper. (Score:2, Interesting)
Are the problems unfixable? (Score:2)
I don't know much about the subject. I only know that something should be done. Are the problems unfixable? Can these features be added: "subpixel cursor positioning, anti-aliasing, and 3d"?
The name.. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:The name.. (Score:3, Informative)
'X Windows' is what illiterate journalists call it, and the people whose main experience with X is reading their inaccurate prose.
Not your standard 'YaXFree-replacement'. (Score:5, Insightful)
I wouldn't be to fast at hand with bashing this guy - he lists all the other XFree replacements and for some like Berlin/Fresco he can clearly state why they failed and what you have to aviod to not fail the same way. And he also acknowleges XFrees benefits and sees no point in overthrowing them.
Keep an eye on this project, this could be something really interessting.
Oh Dear! (Score:2)
I was planning to do something very similar for my final year project this year. I think I'll have to stay well away from his source in case I get "inspired" by any of it and get in trouble for plagarism...
What does X need? (Score:2)
When you lay it all out, it's not all the BIG stuff that needs to be rewritten for X. The network code? Yeah, it slows things down in some cases.
But all I want is:
1.) Alpha blending
2.) A standardized menu system for applications.
3.) The ability to cut and paste between applications.
That's it.
~Will
To All the X Lovers (Score:2)
But X is not XFree86 (Score:2)
The XFree86 server [xfree86.org] is (mainly) a set of drivers for various graphics hardware. It is possible XFree86 may not support your particular 5-button mouse. Without further information it's not possible to know. Please give the exact model name of your 5-bu
No, everyone does NOT say 'thats nice' (Score:2)
If you want to extend X, sure..thats nice... wheres the code.. but replace? No thanks.
X isnt a GUI (Score:2)
Perhaps some reading is in store for you instead?
Ill give you that I've not read about Y, as I've not real interested in another 'we are better then X' project.
Instead of tossing out the wheel, we just need to improve it..
I don't understand the general mentality in OSS, always re-inventing what is already there. If you doubt me, how many text editors do we have?.. Mail clients?.. if we would all work together on one t
compare with plan9? (Score:2)
I think choice is nice.... (Score:2)
Having the choice of running different widget
Y code makes use of GCC C extensions (Score:3, Interesting)
static struct WidgetTable buttonTable =
{
c: &buttonClass,
reconfigure: buttonReconfigure,
paint: buttonPaint,
pointerButton: buttonPointerButton,
pointerMotion: buttonPointerMotion,
pointerEnter: buttonPointerEnter,
pointerLeave: buttonPointerLeave
};
That's not necessarily a bad thing - I think GCC is one of the best compilers around. The only issue here is that that particular named struct member syntax construct [gnu.org] has been deprecated since GCC 2.5 and may be dropped in the future. If I understand the GCC docs correctly I think the alternate C99 syntax would be:
static struct WidgetTable buttonTable =
{
};
But I could be mistaken.
Thomas' critique of X (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, I've only gotten as far as the critique of X at the start of Thomas' paper. This critique is a classic /. "X sucks" troll in academically semi-polished form.
Point by point:
- X has too much latency: See Packard's paper [keithp.com] in Freenix 2003: high latency is not an inherent X attribute, even over high-latency connections.
- X requires a toolkit for ease of programming: Duh. As opposed to what, exactly?
- X needs standardized UI semantics: This is moot. You may use X+Gnome or X+KDE if this is what you desire. Either is a fairly good and fairly complete system with standard UI semantics. The existence of two such systems is no more troublesome than the simultaneous coexistence of Windows and MacOS.
- X is "an incoherent mess": When making this argument, it is always useful to confuse the protocol with the implementation. The existence of Kdrive is a nice example of how much the latter can be cleaned up. The protocol hasn't changed in 20 years except for extensions: the argument that the extensions don't work together is supremely unconvincing, supported by one lame example. freedesktop.org [freedesktop.org] has made a lot of progress in a short time in refactoring and standardizing X.
- X is complex: It is. Unfortunately, it is a response to complex application requirements. Again, one lame example involving perhaps the most demanding application running is cited. And again, freedesktop.org is standardizing mechanism for dealing with the cited problems.
All of this would have been easy to avoid. Just talk to an X developer before publishing the paper. Many are quite accessible, and would undoubtedly have been happy to correct the critique.It's perfectly valid to want to write a new window system. I can think of a variety of justifications, starting with "it's nice to try something different" and "I wanted to learn some things". Trolling is hardly necessary, and hardly welcome.
Some flaws in the paper (Score:5, Insightful)
I love research, and more than anything I love the people involved in doing research: those who create, explore and can give us future direction. But I also believe that the research must be truthful if we want to build on it.
The Y presentation paper is interesting on the ideas it introduced (we could argue whether they are new or not, since NeWS did did before, in fact, with a more extensible system) but it fails on presenting X correctly.
The document goes on to show that the X-based approach has lead to major GUI fragmentation, and how the MacOS and Windows do not have this problem.
On the screenshots where X looks bad, the author shows some old graphics program running together:, xpdf and two modern apps: mozilla/xul and gnome calculator. All of those programs have Gtk-based or Qt-based equivalents that would have made the whole experience consistent.
The screenshot should instead be presented as a proof that X can still run applications that were developed 12 years ago.
Then he shows the Mac and Windows. Again, not really honest screenshots, because even Apple is shipping two different GUI views: the brushed metal theme and the aqua theme (this combination kills me) and Microsoft is not exactly known for keeping their GUI look consistent across their product line: Office, MSN and the rest of the desktop use different styles and widgets.
So summing it up: the screenshots are presented to prove a point which happens to not be there.
Now, to make things even more interesting, here is a little bit that the author of Y might not be aware of: widget rendering on MacOS X happens on the client side, and the operation that the server supports is basically "uptade-rectangle-with-this-RGB-buffer", there is no magic of server-side widget rendering on MacOS X.
Also, doing an X protocol translator is not an easy job, but I wish them good luck pursuing this new adventure, it defintely sounds interesting.
Miguel.
Re:A pointless endeavour... (Score:2)
If it doesn't run windows applications it's useless.
Give it some time. All these people who are writing the other 10 million extra window managers can help this guy out and do something more useful.
GTK and Qt both have framebuffer targets... (Score:2)
Re:GTK and Qt both have framebuffer targets... (Score:2)
Re:A pointless endeavour... (Score:5, Informative)
The document covers this with the obvious solution:
Re:A pointless endeavour... (Score:2)
Re:A pointless endeavour... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:A pointless endeavour... (Score:5, Informative)
I was under the impression Linus started work on Linux while an undergraduate student?
Re: Linux comparison (Score:4, Insightful)
True, but Linus didn't plan it as the next big thing that replaces Unix and Windows. It turned out quite well after years of work by many contributors, and the same thing might as well happen to Y. It's too early to predict anything, so in the meantime it's probably best to do as Linus says: forget about competition and just focus on writing good software.
Re:A pointless endeavour... (Score:2)
1. If it can't run existing X windows applications it's useless. Additionally if it can't run anywhere it's useless.
"If it can't run existing MS-Windows applications it is useless." Do you use linux also?
2. If you can't use existing XFree accelerated drivers it's useless because you're not going to make gfx card companies produce new drivers for another environment. Asking them to pr
Re:A pointless endeavour... (Score:3, Insightful)
While people usually talk about X compatibility- that's not usually what they want. They want application compatibility. They want Mozilla, GNOME, Emacs to work on their computer *usually*.
Look at Opie and you realize that, given sufficient numbers of apps, you don't care as much about the libraries.
So what's important would be to port things like GTK and QT to the new target (however you choose to do that, be it at the X toolkit layer or the GDK layer, or whatever).
An e
An insightful answer (was Re:A pointless endeavour (Score:3, Informative)
1. There is an explanantion of how X compatibility can be achieved, and it is pointed out that such a compatibility is required for Y to become widespread,
2. Under the requirements, he lists the kernel 2.4 ATI driver, so he is using existing XFree drivers.
3. see other posts in this thread
4. It's a framework, with a working base implementation. The paper is well written, and allows for the real work on Y to comme
Rebuttal (Score:5, Informative)
2. Wrong. Hardware interfaces for new drivers can always be derived from the X source code (where available); if it becomes big enough, then the companies may well be willing to describe their specs for a Y developer, too.
3. The KDE and GNOME desktop projects have a lot of code which is no-longer needed if adapted to run under Y. The applications could probably be adapted to Y with relatively little effort.
(I'm not an X/GNOME/KDE coder; the above may be an exaggeration one way or the other.)
4. ``this guy`` is a friend of mine. I know him, he's smart. He aced a first at one of best university's in the UK and got a prize for this project.
You are clearly only questioning the fact that an undergrad could develop something worthwhile when nobody else did. I'd much rather you'd debate the quality of the work rather than baselessly disparaging the person who created it.
Oh, and it wasn't a year of work, it was 9 months, tops. And he still had 8 other courses to do at the same time along with a break to do the requisite 8 final exams.
Cheers,
David
Re:Rebuttal (Score:4, Interesting)
Hopefully, when Mark gets back from holiday and gets settled at his new job, we'll be able to get going again.
Cheers,
David
Re:overloards (Score:2)
Re:This is a misguided invention. (Score:2)
7. No smooth integration of the window managers.
Granted, im not well versed in the x system, but I would of thought the 2 points there are merely side-effects of having the choice of open-source. Or in my blissful ignorance, is there something I have missed, either agreed on standards or something else which would explain the above 2 points in more detail?
Re:This is a misguided invention. (Score:2)
Am I the only one who thinks that anything more than 2D on the plain desktop is overkill? I for one do not want to be required to install the latest super high end 3D graphics card just to read my email and edit my Perl programs.
As for support for 3D in general, why do we need it in X? Isn't this what things like OpenGL are for? I would much rather keep the low-level X interface as simple as possible and just build atop it whatever we need.
I agreed with most
Probably was a troll (Score:3, Informative)
To say the security of X is horrible because silly people have done "xhost +" is ridiculous! Doing "xhost +" should make absolutely no difference to your computer's security with respect to network attacks because your computer should have a firewall which (at least) blocks incoming and outgoing X11 connections. Anyway, if you want to run X applications on remote computers, the best way to do so is to use ssh [openssh.com] for securely forwarding the X11 connections to/from the remote computers., e.g.
ssh -X -l login_
new name (Score:4, Funny)
Re:new name (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Good, but one crevat (Score:2)
Re:Slashdot Prediction! (Score:2)
And of these jokes, the breakdown will be:
20% ??? Profit jokes
15% All Your X Are Belong To Us
15% I, for one, welcome our new Y overlords
10% It's GNU/Y
10% Something with the phrase "you insensitive clod" or "CowboyNeal" in it
15% Beowulf clusers of X/Y
10% Anything that mentions SCO
5% Lists like this engineered to garner a cheap laugh
Re:Slashdot Prediction! (Score:2)
Re:Slashdot Prediction! (Score:2)