it's got to go (but we could keep toolkit compatibility for the transition, breaking very little...) [LWN.net]

it's got to go (but we could keep toolkit compatibility for the transition, breaking very little...)

Posted Nov 18, 2003 3:38 UTC (Tue) by meep (guest, #16938)
Parent article: The X Window System, past and future

I wouldn't say Fresco is the main one.

Possibly the most promising
http://picogui.org

Aimed at embedded only?
http://www.microwindows.org

Y: A Successor to the X Window System - not sure about that, but the pdf certainly analyses the problem and points out a lot more of what is wrong with X than above artcile.
http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~mbt99/Y/

another
http://www.tutok.sk/fastgl/

what Linus had to say. (although old still valid)
http://www.ggi-project.org/mailinglist/may99/320.html

more
http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-discuss/2000-March/000552.html

I've experienced X for myself on older systems and I've got to say it's not a fun experience. Win is much faster. I think this is a very sad thing - the whole underlying OS is about efficiency and freedom, not being locked into paying for fast(er) hardware/software to keep up.
To put a slow GUI on top of this (and the GUI *is* the OS for many people; after all, it's the final layer between them and computer) is like throwing that all away.

Linux is proven in the server market and we're now seeing its huge potential in the embedded world. The only way to maintain sanity here would be a GUI flexible enough to suite either (just like Linux itself can scale to such extremes). We're currently seeing projects like www.directfb.org aimed for individual needs, and it's really fragmenting things, making stuff less flexible, less portable.. which is really what our OS is all about.
A standard and scalable GUI could also help out the desktop world which is moving very slowly due to reasons outlined in the "Y window system" PDF.

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