Chromium OS source released [LWN.net]

Chromium OS source released

Posted Nov 20, 2009 21:11 UTC (Fri) by adamgundy (subscriber, #5418)
In reply to: Chromium OS source released by ariveira
Parent article: Chromium OS source released

I'm reasonably surprised they didn't drop X from the stack completely - for example, chrome->cairo->glitz->OpenGL (all that code exists today). there are a grand total of three X clients that I saw on a quick trawl through the code - xscreensaver, chrome (browser) and the login dialog... and they're talking about replacing the login dialog with chrome too.

instead, they've written (or more likely, hacked something else into shape) their own X11 window manager, and have GTK etc in the mix.

there's nothing to say they couldn't drop X at some future point, of course. end users wouldn't notice (except maybe things are a little faster).

I like X11.. but it seems a little overkill for a one-trick GUI! I guess time to market trumps a small increase in performance...

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Chromium OS source released

Posted Nov 20, 2009 22:13 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (1 responses)

simple, they don't want to loose compatibility with anything else they may want to put on there, and with all the different hardware that X supports.

if they were only looking at one product with a fixed list of software, what you are suggesting _may_ work, but if you are wanting to support more software, or more hardware, and support new versions of everything for years you don't want to lock yourself down like that

Chromium OS source released

Posted Nov 26, 2009 12:01 UTC (Thu) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link]

Indeed, X11 is a bit more that screen output, namely keyboard and mouse input, application interaction (clipboard), and maybe something else that I can't remember right now.