Linux Desktop Without X11 547
A writes "Rocklyte systems have announced the first version of their Athene Operating System. It is a desktop and embedded operating system built on the Linux kernel, but without the "aging X11". Instead, it uses the SciTech SNAP graphics system with which it is possible to completely re-theme the desktop to look like the famous AmigaOS GUI or another famous UI. For backwards compatibility, an X11 server is also available in the system. The system can run completely off the CD, without needing to be installed on the harddrive."
Woooooooooo! (Score:3, Interesting)
something i always wondered about (Score:5, Interesting)
One comment: (Score:2, Interesting)
Always Wanted This (Score:2, Interesting)
I've always wanted a CD or disk I could carry around and use to turn a public computer temporarily into my own little net workstation
Yes, they are important. (Score:5, Interesting)
However, with 'true' theming, the internal function of the GUI (and OS) is loosely tied with the graphical layout and function of the GUI. What does this means? It means that a single system, properly configured, can handle many different interface styles. You could simultaneously offer transition interfaces to users from different GUI camps - Windows, MacOS, NeXT, etc.
This is an immensely important feature for this reason. While many see theming as eyecandy, properly implemented it can serve a very useful purpose; fit the GUI to the user, not the user to the GUI. It should also allow new interface styles to be prototyped - what better way to develop usability than to look at what people with the skillset to change the interface think works best?
KDE for framebuffer (Score:3, Interesting)
XFree86 good, not bad (Score:5, Interesting)
My favorite complaint is that it's bloated or eats too much memory. It's bogus -- X uses relatively little memory itself, but pixmaps are stored in X instead of in apps. So Linux GUI apps tend to use less memory than they would with a Windows-like environment, but X's memory usage go up.
I actually sat down and modified some code to query X how much memory is being used by each program in pixmap memory. This is memory that would have to be used under Windows. Little things -- gkrellm, a simple dock program that I have running, caches about 2.7MB of pixmaps in X all by itself. This doesn't show up as gkrellm memory usage in top, but it *is* being consumed by gkrellm.
X11 allows network transparency, 3d support, hardware scaling of video, support for more font formats than Windows does, zooming in and out. When combined with a window manager, the X11 architecture is incredibly powerful and flexible.
I wish people would stop complaining about and learn to use X's features.
Re:A major step forward (Score:3, Interesting)
Please make up your minds, people. X11 was certainly fast enough on this [majix.org] speedy beast, and hasn't inherently gotten slower since. If you want something *smaller* than X11 to drive graphics, you'd better be prepared to write lots of code to handle niggling details like window displaying - in the graphics libraries. Ick. Projects like Berlin try to add *more* features to the windowing system that X11 doesn't have, which isn't necessarily bad. But it's not going to be *less* bloated than X11 is now.
But "old" and "bloated" is going to be a contradiction when one considers the advances in hardware over the 10+ years I've been using X11.
Myabe X11 just needs another revision (Score:4, Interesting)
The way I see X being slow is that widgets need to be on server-side instead of client-side. Right now the client Draws everything useing X primitives, sending the raw data (pixmaps, whatnot) to the server over the network. Now if the server had the widgets on its side the client would just have to tell the server the type, size, position of the widget, Instead of sending a pixmap.
This would help things such as less bandwidth, less cpu overhead for eash client.
Maybe this could even be implimented in a X-
extentsion
Maybe I am just showing my ignorance here, But an idea is an idea.
I'm happy with XFree (Score:5, Interesting)
Anyway, now that I've got RH installed (w/XFree 4.3.x) I am very happy to say that X seems just as responsive as Windows, even when I am doing something heavy duty, and I'm using KDE as well. This was the first time in about five years I've used any kind of Windows, it was a nice validation of X as far as I am concerned.
XFree, at least without propriatary drivers, might not be great for games, but it makes my development life a lot more joyful than other non-networked windowing environments would, and that includes the kludgy windows terminal services crapola.
Re:Themes schemes (Score:5, Interesting)
You can re-theme it. Check out this thread here [scifi-meshes.com].
Here's what my [scifi-meshes.com] desktop looks like. It's customized with my own (in progress) artwork on it. And yes, those are buttons and multiple desktops there. Some of the stuff there is default, and some of it I added on my own.
So yes, you can modify your 'hard-coded' theme. Somebody's already gone through all the work to do it.
Re:something i always wondered about (Score:2, Interesting)
Well, yeah, there's this thing called the GNU manifesto, maybe you should read it. It says things like, we should have a completely free OS, and that open standards should be used where possible. X11 is open. Aqua/Quartz is not. Nuff said.
Anyway, it's far from obvious to those in the display design system community that DPS is a superior system. In particular, the team working on adding it to Xfree stopped when RENDER was designed - they claim it's a far better solution to the problem than DPS ever was, and that it recognises real world needs more.
I've been waiting for this day... (Score:5, Interesting)
This may be the one.
Re:XFree86 good, not bad (Score:3, Interesting)
I think I do and I still don't like it.
> My favorite complaint is that it's bloated
> or eats too much memory. It's bogus -- X uses
> relatively little memory itself, but pixmaps are
> stored in X instead of in apps. So Linux GUI apps
> tend to use less memory than they would with a
> Windows-like environment, but X's memory usage go up.
Heh, that might be true when you're using a simple windowing toolkit such as Xlib but what happens when you start using GTK or KDE? Things get a LOT more complicated.
If you really want to understand why some of us dislike X11, take a look here: X-Windows Disaster [idge.net].
Also, one of the people who has been vocal in X11 criticism is no one else than David Wexelblat [xfree86.org].
CD based (Score:2, Interesting)
Our IT people would love to have a graphical rudimentary cd bootable stripped down linux package to which a few open source applicatios could be easily added.
This is the other way round instead of Knoppix adding in as much as possible.
Re:Replacing X is worse than pointless (Score:2, Interesting)
What exactly is your point?
X running on RedHat 8.1 with my Athlon XP 1800+ is slow when compared to the WinXP UI. And I don't play games on Linux - that's what Windows is for - I code.
Admittedly, some features a novel - such as the whole UI-over-TCP thing. Great. It would be nice in some situations, I'm sure. But I'm not going to 'look beyond what's good enough for the PC in my bedroom right now'. Why the hell should I? After all, I'm using my computer now and I want it to work to the best of its ability.
Now, I've had my little rant, don't take it to heart - my point is, make a point. What do you feel is so great about X that we should simply forego the PCs in our bedrooms because of some greater, only-known-by-you good?
The Internet is old. Is that a reason to ditch the internet? - I hear stirrings of people looking into it. SMTP is old too, everyone uses it whether they like it or not, and look how fucked up it is.
just got back.... (Score:3, Interesting)
yada yada, he sounds enthused already,he's heard of it, I'm the first person he's ever met weho's used it,he asks how much it is. I sez, "well, 30-40 clams from the vendors with manuals and stuff low end, or you can.." I only got that far he goes FOURTY DOLLARS FOR AN OPERATING SYSTEM?? WHERE CAN I GET IT????
No lie. Then I drop the next one, "well, you can download and burn it for free,too, or clone companies will sell it to you for like 5-10 bux whatever, oh ya, comes with one zillion programs, too"
He's floored, gonna try it.
One person at a time
(hey spider tools, you might have an incoming)
People bad-mouth morons as well. (Score:1, Interesting)
X11 is still in the marketplace because it is standard; on technical merit it is a clear loser. As a comparison, look at the Microsoft graphics layer. It is much faster for local programs because it doesn't insist on shoving everything through sockets. It is also faster for remote display because Microsoft controls the toolkit and has higher level primitives that allow more to be drawn based on a single message.
X is powerful, sure, but face it: any Turing machine is powerful. X is an inefficient nuisance that gets in the way of doing things well. The only advantage that X provides to Linux is that it is a standard that makes porting applications easier. Discarding Linux and moving to Windows would be a giant leap forward for lots of people, but not all. For those of us who prefer Linux, a higher level graphics layer could be much faster, allow for a tighter network protocol, and promote consistency in Linux user interfaces.
Wow, until I put it that way, I never knew how hard X sucks!
Re:XFree86 good, not bad (Score:3, Interesting)
In all the implementations I've used, however, it's been a poor hodgepodge of unstable apps, laggy display rendering (on a Voodoo Banshee, which has dandy 2D capability), and butt-ugly interfaces. I never got a chance to try 3D.
Now, I haven't used XFree extensively in RH9, I hear it's quite nice in fact - the last time I used it was on Debian Woody (XFree86 4.2, i think). As always, I couldn't stand the Gnome and KDE interfaces - they always irritate me.
XFree86 running Fluxbox wasn't so bad, but
When I'm using a GUI, I demand consistency - if not in layout, then at least in appearance. Mozilla is the lone exception (I can understand why they deviated and created their own layout library).
That's why I use command-line unix (FreeBSD), and some Windows variant as a desktop GUI (on a different machine, of course).
Eventually I might give RH9 and KDE3 a try, but not right now.
Re:Who would *want* Aqua on Linux? (Score:3, Interesting)
I was a NeXTStep user in the early 90s and loved it. Fast forward to 2003. I recently got fully OSX'ed and think this new NeXTStep is a severly dumbed down and spray-painted and obfuscated Frankenstein.
I suppose Carbon was needed because none of the corporate commercial software houses would port anything to Cocoa, but the result is shameful.
TROLL! Mommy, mommy!!!! Master Bait said something bad about OSX!!!
Re:Actually... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:something i always wondered about (Score:5, Interesting)
One of the big advantages to DPS and DPDF is the device independence in rendering text and other objects. That is, it's truly WYSIWYG - what's rendered on the screen is exactly what will be rendered to print (or any other device). For DPS you also have the option of writing applet procedures which run on the display server, similar to the old Sun NEWS system. So, for example, one could write a terminal emulator in postscript and have it run in the display server, thus reducing network load by cutting out most of the transmission of event processing between client and server during a remote display session. This solves the biggest complaint about network transparent X sessions, that being it's a network hog and has terrible latency.
X is fine for what it does - especially given the price - but it saddens me to no end to see the DGS render extension die because no one seems to care, while at the same time everyone bitches about slow old X. GnuStep with Display Ghostscript would certainly have been a better solution than completely rewriting a new display server and the rewriting the windowing environment all over yet again.
So now someone is selling cool new desktop that will never cross the threshold of users necessary to replace X, while others keep dumping more intellectual energy in bogus free X desktops that 'kindof' work. How many times have we done this? How many widget toolkits does X really need? Athena, Motif, TK, QT, GTK... on and on and on. None of them work well together, everyone needs applications that cross toolkit boundaries, and users are left completely in the dark on how to do the simplest thing like cut and paste non-text between applications. Wasn't Simpson Garfinkle bitching about just this in the UNIX Haters Handbook ten years ago?!?!? And everyone laughed because it was true while nothing changed. Feh.
We're long past the point where the history of X, and ridiculous backward compatibility, is impeding growth toward something new and better. Gnome and/or KDE ain't the solution. Nor is GnuStep rendering through xlib. Feh, what a mess.
JMO,
--Maynard
Re:And the .iso mirrors are ? (Score:3, Interesting)
I think his analogy is more inherently flawed due to the fact that if you buy a mushroom from a shop and it turns out to be poisonous, you can sue them, and they can't turn around and say "well, you shoulda read the fineprint that came with the mushroom. it states that the mushrooms are not sold with any expectation of being eaten and if the purchasers chooses to consue the mushroom then he must take responsibility thereof. indeed the mushroom is in no way certified to even be a mushroom, it may very well be a diving mask. no recourse is available against the mushroom vendor or mushroom supplier. this mushroom is not to be used in mission critical or life affecting situations. you are not allowed to make any duplicate of this mushroom, this includes taking a photo of it or even drawing it with a crayon. the physical characteristics of this mushroom are trademarked, copyrighted and patented. if you are unhappy with the conditions attached to this mushroom then you may return it to the vender who supplied it to you (with the purchase of a shopping trolley) and ask for a refund on your mushroom. he will likely inform you that he is unable to do this but you can certainly ask.
etc, ad nauseam
dave
Isn't linux monolithic? (Score:3, Interesting)
It certainly could be done without breaking compatibility with current console applications. After all, linux IS a monolithic kernel. I'd go as far as reccomending that some sort of graphical interface be intergrated into the POSIX standard. Limiting unix to a 640x480 console is ridiculous. Apple's been doing this since 1984 - long before X11 was drafted or Linux was created.
X has so much potential to be great, but after 11 years, it has failed to show it. To me, that is a flawed system.
Re:something i always wondered about (Score:3, Interesting)
Because writing directly to the canvas implies you're writing to the local framebuffer, which tosses the whole point behind network transparency. Device independent rendering and display side server applets are the two things that DPS does really well. Of course, that doesn't mean that a toolkit will necessarily use those features, but it's a cool thing to have available. X is FUBAR'd at the protocol level because of how it handles event processing (just one of many reasons), so no matter what one does above at the toolkit level it will always be a network hog. There were more elegant solutions before Project Athena released X fifteen years back. Adding a new toolkit layer simply won't resolve this fundamental brokenness - even if it has access to all the cool framebuffer features through RENDER. Though I agree that DPS is a somewhat overly complex protocol, it can do stuff simply and elegantly that X can't even come close to doing even after jumping through multiple layers of rendering and toolkit libs hoops. JMO.
Cheers,
--Maynard
Re:Old sztuff repackaged (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:XFree86 good, not bad (Score:5, Interesting)
X is responsible for actually rasterizing and displaying every pixel that you see on the screen. It renders fonts, yes, and very nice antialiased ones. It handles network code, yes. It (well, it and Mesa) do 3d hardware rendering -- in Windows user terms, all of the video card drivers in Windows combined with DirectX. It does hardware scaling -- if you play a movie, Xv is used to display the thing. It handles combining multiple monitors via Xinerama. It acts as the intermediary in copying and pasting data between apps. X deals with tablets, joysticks, mice, keyboards and handing off data from them to apps. X provides framebuffer access to memory. Unlike Windows, X lets you fine-tune precisely what timings are used on your monitor, if you want to squeeze the last little bit of performance possible out of your monitor.
if you want to do anything usefull you have to add a window manager
Sure. X could have included a window manager, but the folks that write it realize that different folks prefer different types of window managers. Some prefer really simple WMs like twm, metacity, or kwm. Others prefer glitz and don't care about plenty of overhead, and use enlightenment. Others like poking at and customizing their window manager, recoding bits of it while it's running (a la emacs), and use sawfish. The list goes on and on. Most *ix folks tend to feel a bit irritated when being forced to use the Windows environment -- there's no possibility of choice, and relatively little of customization.
a cut & paste manager
Well, you *can* use a multi-clipboard program, (of which there are a collection to choose from) but Windows doesn't provide this functionality natively either. Just as with window managers, this modularity is done deliberately. Distributions can prepackage a multi-clipboard program if they like -- so the end user experience can be "there's one, it's preinstalled, and I don't have to worry about it" -- but you aren't *forced* to use any single one.
a toolkit of somesort (gtk for example)
Again, Windows happens to force people to use a single widget set. I'm not a tremendous fan of chunks of the Windows set (anyone that's done gtk programming and Win32 programming knows that layout in gtk is *much* better than the forced pixel-level layout used in Win32 and the Macintosh Toolbox), but it can't really be changed for backwards compatibility reasons.
X is modular. If a widget set falls behind the times, a new one can be produced. I'm not sure if you've ever seen Athena, but it was one of the earlier widget sets available for X. I suspect that most desktop users would not like the way it operates. With Windows, you'd be stuck lugging around Athena forever. With X, you can simply move to something newer, like gtk.
hell even windows 3.1 does far more then X and can be cut down under a meg and still be 100% usefull, not to mention that adds a multitasking ( a bad one but still) to the OS (dos)
Win 3.1 and X are completely different beasts. They don't do even remotely the same task.
Win 3.1 is marketed differently. X *has* a partial equivalent in Windows, but you cannot obtain it separately from the rest of Windows. However, it's really irrelevant. You'd never use X without a kernel, so the fact that Windows 3.1 does scheduling isn't really useful.
(i.e. drag and drop doesnt work 80% of the time unless all you use is kde apps)
Drag and drop cooperation between gnome and kde is relatively new. Yes, it was added recently, and it takes a while to get in. I used Mac OS in the 7.x days, when drag and drop support was added...and the same thing happened -- actually, it was even worse, if anything.
I'm not saying that X is unilaterally more featureful than Mac OS or Windows. Drag and Drop is a particular weak point that's being added to a lot of apps right now. Overall, I find it much better.
Im sick of hearing the pro-X argument "IF X doesnt do what you want just add to it" the problem is you shoodnt have to add to it just to do basic stuff
But most of the users that want this *get* it. They buy or download a distribution and use that. Every distribution comes with a kernel. KDE or GNOME or both are available in every general purpose desktop distribution. (KDE, IIRC, ships with a multiple clipboard program...I don't know, because I don't use KDE, and despite trying to get used to multiple clipboard programs, never liked them enough to use 'em).
My point is that it's not a *problem* that X doesn't do a particular thing, because the sort of end user that would complain about that is already being supplied with software that *does* do that. Simply wrapping more functionality into X would just produce a bigger, harder-to-debug project with fewer releases that's harder for people to drop into and write code for.
Remember NeWS Window System? (Score:4, Interesting)
NeXT also did some Display Postscript things that weren't as cool as NeWS, but still were good display environments.
Re:something i always wondered about (Score:2, Interesting)
Seriously, I'm not trolling here. What you seem to be saying is that X is inherently slow because it scales poorly. Or are you blaming GNOME and KDE for the slowness?
I think they [xwin.org] really need to get on with it and fork, already.
Great, another step toward (Score:3, Interesting)
The X window system is what makes a Linux machine multi-user. It also makes it useful as a multi-user machine at the same time.
The core of UNIX power comes from the multi-user philosophy. X was crafted with the same goals in mind. That is why they both have been around for such a long time.
Both of these things come at a small price; namely, a requirement for some basic literacy with regard to the system and how it works.
YOU CANNOT HAVE THE POWER WITHOUT PAYING THAT PRICE.
I did not spend the last 7 years learning these things only to have my environment dumbed down for the sake of those not willing to step up and actually learn something about the machines they say they need.
All of those folks wanting a frame-buffer only system really don't want multi-user systems --or at least don't want useful ones. Or, more likely, just flat don't know better.
As for those folks asking for X emulation, I ask this?
If the X window emulation does what X is supposed to wouldn't you have what you have with X right now plus added overhead? Why not consider using a toolkit to make the X development easier while not ruining the multi-user nature of Linux?
Win32 machines are multi-tasking machines. Sure, you can run processes as more than one user, even run applications on your machine as more than one user, but in the end, you still have only one desktop.
Many of the problems come from that one desktop and its close intergration with the rest of the OS. This is the same shit that Microsoft and Apple to a degree have been pushing all along. We don't need this.
For those that think we do, read again. WE DON'T.
Common arguments:
- The network display capability makes X slow.
Bullshit. The fastest graphics systems around have always used X. Want to see a sweet X server that does the network display thing nicely. Get any SGI IRIX machine and examine the X environment. 3D capable display, both in a window and full screen, on screen video in real time with sizeable windows, network applications, speed. All have been present for longer than the more capable win32 environments have existed. Local display requests do not go through the entire network stack. This combined with the excellence of UNIX and Linux network stacks make this a moot point anyway.
X is hard to configure.
Each year this is much less so. Soon it will also be a non issue. We have gone from hand tweaking our display to spin the CD and choose the type of display. Give it a bit more time and you will soon get all the little features you think you need as well. All without any sacrifice of the multi-user values that make Linux and X what they are; namely, better than everyone else.
Nobody needs all that extra capability.
Well, that is because most of them do not know what they are missing. We need to keep the power in the box by default; otherwise, we will end up running the same way others on more limited systems do now. Is that worth it?
X is old.
Well so is UNIX. Does that make it bad? No, if it were, it would be dead long before now.
This is long enough. If you actually want to see more take a look at my journal, there is plenty more in there for the reading.
To sum this up:
If you really don't understand what X and UNIX is about, just spare yourself and get a nice wintel PC and get it over with. Maybe split the middle and get an Apple. (I *like* Apple BTW, that's not the whole point here...)
If you want to actually take some control over your computing environment and have the ability to exercise choices, step up and shut up and start using X.
It will be worth your time in the end.
Re:Themes schemes (Score:3, Interesting)
> You can re-theme it.
I disagree. Your screenshot shows that you can change the bitmaps. And that you can replace the shell. But that's not what I consider true theming.
First of all, theming should at least be able to change the size of widgets. In Windows, that's impossible. All the software is designed with absolute positioning of widgets, so changing the sizes of widgets would make the entire scheme fall apart. Java supports this - it has good layout managers, and they are commonly used. You can resize controls without making everything look horrible. There are other advantages to layout managers, also - fonts can change size (accessibility!) with less impact, there's better window resize behavior, etc. (Incidentally, I was really disappointed to see that OS X uses absolute positioning extensively. It has a really good UI, but there are low points.)
Second, themes should be able to change the look and the feel. You've changed the look. The feel of programs is the same. I really like to see a one-to-one correspondence to looks and feels. Ideally, all of the software on my computer would have the same, customizable, look and feel. But failing that, I hate it when things look different but behave the same, or look the same but behave differently.
I particularly hate the "native" themes that Mozilla, Java, gtk/Win32, etc. have. I see the mostly-native look and expect native behavior, but there are subtle differences that bother me all the time. Things like wheel button behavior not matching up.
I also dislike single application that goes against the grain with UI conventions. I let a few get away with it - cross-platform applications, mostly, especially ones with a relatively-common framework such as Java's Swing), but Winamp in particular bothers me. It looks horrible, its scrollbars are broken, etc. If they had just used the native widgets, they would have expended much less effort for a better result.
Re:XFree86 good, not bad (Score:3, Interesting)