Smooth transition? From what? [LWN.net]

Smooth transition? From what?

Posted Nov 9, 2010 15:23 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: LPC: Life after X by dskoll
Parent article: LPC: Life after X

But that's a much easier problem to solve and a much smoother transition to the future than throwing out X completely.

How come? You seem to assume that developers are using X and the only problem here is some shortcomings. Well, newsflash: no, they don't! Most applications today are written for Windows, PS3, Wii, iOS or Android. Not for X. Developers know toolkits (mostly GDI, but sometimes WPF or even Qt) and DirectX/OpenGL. They don't know X and then don't want to know X. This is fact of life. That's why all these band-aids are doomed: they impose burden on developers for megligible benefit.

X is this thing down there which only exist to make our life misarable - this is POV of many (most?) developers. That's why it must be removed.

Eventually, the best way to do things would be to have toolkits like Qt and Gtk be loadable modules that get installed in the X server rather than in client applications.

But why introduce this stupid layer at all? Give the developers the means to run client app which talks with GPU and server - and he'll decide how to split the work. This is how it works on Windows, XBox360 and PS3 - and it certainly attracted significantly more developers then X redesigns ever could.

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Smooth transition? From what?

Posted Nov 17, 2010 7:11 UTC (Wed) by mcrbids (guest, #6453) [Link]

<QUOTE>Most applications today are written for Windows, PS3, Wii, iOS or Android. Not for X. Developers know toolkits (mostly GDI, but sometimes WPF or even Qt) and DirectX/OpenGL. They don't know X and then don't want to know X.</quote>

As an application developer with over 10 years of experience, I can say with certainty that this is not true, at least, not for me.

I don't write applications for Windows, PS3, Linux, Android, or *any* of the platforms listed. I write for the web browser! I write complex, data-driven applications and it's been a very, very long time since I wrote anything that wouldn't easily work on Win/Mac/Lin/Android/Iphone/Xbox and anything else with a reasonable browser.

The browser I most target is Firefox since it seems to be the most "Cross platform" although Chrome is close. I develop on Linux, it runs FF well, I don't worry about viruses and stuff like that, and can offer excellent compatibility with all my clients.

I don't want to replace X - I get the best of all possible worlds by making the specific rendering requirements of my applications something handled by the context of the user. And I use network transparency all the time - I can run several Firefox instances concurrently, on the desktop, as different users, without any danger of cookie or session interaction between browsers. As a web-based, network application developer, this is so incredibly useful!