X-window System

As most of you all know, the X-Window System is the graphics subsystem of POSIX-based operating systems such as *nix.

Most people have been making many claims of which this technology is showing it's age and is becoming obsolete, slow, bloated, bugged, conflicting and many other claims, while others are providing defensive responses to these claims.

I'd like to hear the Aquasoft Community members' opinions on the X-Window System as you all mostly theme your *nix boxes to look like OS X and or equivalent, and as doing such, drive or almost drive and utilize the power of the X-Window System to or close to it's limits.

So, what are your opinions on this?, and please keep the discussion clean and civil, thank you.

--Vector

#192626

X-Windows is extremely stable and has excellent performance even on slower processors such as PowerPC G3s. The good thing about it is that its very customizable and expandable in a number of ways but the interface has room for improvement as you said it is becoming rather obsolete. New graphics subsystems could be developed and provide more features, and better appearance aside with more advanced and up to date technology such as live effects such as ones seen in OS X (genie and scale effects).

#193114

It doesn't like my video card <_<

I'll never be able to use GNOME...

#193123

CON:

The main problem I have with X is one of its most outstanding benefits:

It does not put any limits on its users. Apple and Wintel users

encounter a culture shock when they first see that almost any (older) application

comes with different widgets, user interface styles, depending on which

GUI toolkit it was compiled against.

The window manager only renders the window decorations (= min/max

buttons) but even a scroll bar on a window won't follow a consistent look

and feel. Having seen the fifth variety of a check box or a radio button in the

same session I start confusing which image depicts 'checked' or 'selected' and

guess what happens.

PRO:

However, KDE & Gnome have forced on their users a consistent look and feel

and have really done wonders in point of skinning. Given a little patience,

these 'decorators' still run on 100 MHz Pentiums, and if you have a 94 model

66 MHz 486 with 16 MB RAM, you can run a decent window manager called

WindowMaker on top of it, which consumes as less as TWM (about 1979?) and still

have a cute looking desktop, a dock, slates and widgets and stuff.

SUMMARY:

*nix is immortal; it will grow, it already gave birth to Mac OS X and its

descendants will still be around when Windows is catching dust in a museum...

#193132

Originally posted by herd@Jul 23 2004, 06:40 PM
CON:
The main problem I have with X is one of its most outstanding benefits:
It does not put any limits on its users. Apple and Wintel users
encounter a culture shock when they first see that almost any (older) application
comes with different widgets, user interface styles, depending on which
GUI toolkit it was compiled against.
The window manager only renders the window decorations (= min/max
buttons) but even a scroll bar on a window won't follow a consistent look
and feel. Having seen the fifth variety of a check box or a radio button in the
same session I start confusing which image depicts 'checked' or 'selected' and
guess what happens.
PRO:
However, KDE & Gnome have forced on their users a consistent look and feel
and have really done wonders in point of skinning. Given a little patience,
these 'decorators' still run on 100 MHz Pentiums, and if you have a 94 model
66 MHz 486 with 16 MB RAM, you can run a decent window manager called
WindowMaker on top of it, which consumes as less as TWM (about 1979?) and still
have a cute looking desktop, a dock, slates and widgets and stuff.
SUMMARY:
*nix is immortal; it will grow, it already gave birth to Mac OS X and its
descendants will still be around when Windows is catching dust in a museum...
<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

So, if someone created a quartz equivalent for *nix systems, would you and/or anyone in the aquasoft community use it?.

--Vector

#193183

Originally posted by herd@Jul 23 2004, 11:40 PM
CON:
The main problem I have with X is one of its most outstanding benefits:
It does not put any limits on its users. Apple and Wintel users
encounter a culture shock when they first see that almost any (older) application
comes with different widgets, user interface styles, depending on which
GUI toolkit it was compiled against.
The window manager only renders the window decorations (= min/max
buttons) but even a scroll bar on a window won't follow a consistent look
and feel. Having seen the fifth variety of a check box or a radio button in the
same session I start confusing which image depicts 'checked' or 'selected' and
guess what happens.

The problem of mismatching themes isn't anything to do with X. If you're using a kde application (uses QT libraries and KDE window manager), a gnome application (using GTK+ and metacity) and say some tcl/tk applications, you could have 6 or so themes running on your desktop. This isn't anything to do with X, its just that linux applications are written in a variety of languages. X can't really be themed, its a network protocol.

Its also far from obsolete, its architecture means any number of extensions can be added to provide visual effects etc.

Have a look at 'Xserver'

#193300

Check out an alpha version of a native KDE for OSX, screenshot.

#193379

IMO, X is not showing its age at all. Some of the new extensions provide a Quartz like system (PDF rendering through hardware w/ Cairo + Glitz), while STILL keeping backwards compatibility with apps 20 years old (OSX can't do that).

X was designed to be very basic, but extensible, and that feature is really starting to pay off. Lots of cool extensions are being added without having to change the X protocol one bit.

So X right now is taking on Quartz, and is getting ready for Longhorn (w/ all Vectors + complete OpenGL).

Some of these new extensions are going to be ready in August with the new Xorg release. GTK and QT are both starting to adopt these extensions, so the majority of the *nix desktop should be all shiny and eye-candyish real soon.

Of course, I don't know if the usability will be as good as OSX, but that's not an X thing.

And like someone else said, the widgets have nothing to do with X, OR with Windows' (or OSX's) graphics protocol. You can have any number of widgets in Windows. MS uses 3 different toolkits for it's apps, and OSX uses two. So neither of them are any more consistent (actually, I use only one toolkit on my desktop, which is very complete, so guess who is in the lead there).

#193523

@vector:

I wouldn't ask for Quartz on X - the most recent translucency additions allow for all OS X user interface enhancements like transparent menus, nonrectangular window decorations etc - I recently managed to aquaify my Suse 9.0 to some extent and was quite happy with it. Quartz seems already there.

@fissy:

Skinning under Windows is a different piece of cake since it has "3 toolkits" that you can hook into, alter their behaviour and mod to your desire. Under Linux, correct me if I'm wrong, you can't replace the dated Athena Widgets with overrides of your own, since they are compiled into the application. The same applies (to my mediocre knowledge) to the TCL/TK apps- you can't force a consistent UI on them, say the behaviour of its menus: KDE/Gnome will open a menu with the default cursor and open submenus on mouseover, while TCL/TK will display a rotated arrow at menus and force you to klick open submenus. I hope that TCL/TK will some day be KDE/Gnome aware and get its widgets and behaviour from there, or the fantastic community will find a way to hook into TCL/TK apps and apply themes to them.

To make my statement clear:

I know X enough to see that its a network protocol and that even rising a window on top of another one is triggered elsewhere, namely in the Window Manager. Only from the aspect of skinning, it seems to me a design flaw that X does not have a common controls toolkit that you can override easily.

Athena Widgets were state of the art in the 80es and still are around. They were small, fast and efficiently coded to match the limited performance of the graphic terminals these days while the X-Server was running on the mainframe; nowadays with each PC having more power than an 80es mainframe, the question arises if running a local X server is needed at all.

I have seen a WindowMaker run on top of the framebuffer project and was delighted. However the project seems to be stalled because of hardware driver problems, I expect any local AGP desktop streamer to be orders of magnitudes faster than any network based UI server, even if it runs through the local loopback adapter, nevertheless I think there is no way around X at the moment.

X is cool, X rocks, and yes there's still room for improvement.

#194064

my desktop has only one toolkit (gtk+), needing only one theme, which will be common to all applications on my screen.

In windows, you'll have more than one toolkit, if only because you're using firefox and thunderbird.

Also, KDE's bits of transparency are not at all like quartz. Make a window transparent and drag it around your screen to see the difference.

#194776

I read somewhere that Windows uses It's own version of the X Window System.

#196184

Originally posted by InuYasha@Jul 30 2004, 05:04 PM
I read somewhere that Windows uses It's own version of the X Window System.
<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Then you read wrong - whilst X may have inspired certain areas of Windows' development, it does not, at any point use X.

#197302

Originally posted by Stevie BM@Aug 2 2004, 03:53 AM
Then you read wrong - whilst X may have inspired certain areas of Windows' development, it does not, at any point use X.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Well, there are X servers for Windows, even an official one by Microsoft (SFU). I don't think that's what InuYasha meant though.

#197398

yeah, that what I meant.

#205400