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."
Linux without X11... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Linux without X11... (Score:3, Funny)
And the .iso mirrors are ? (Score:2, Funny)
--
Re:And the .iso mirrors are ? (Score:3, Insightful)
Having said that, I agree that the base expectation of things being free is somewhat overused. And, if it's a good implementation (I can't tell a thing, 'cause the site's slashdotted), I wouldn't mind paying $40 for it.
just got back.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:And the .iso mirrors are ? (Score:4, Funny)
# Free for Non-Commercial (Home) Use.
# Source Code is Publicly Available.
And I have never paid for sex in my life. You must be one ugly bastard.
Actually... (Score:3, Informative)
From the faq: -jussi
Re:And the .iso mirrors are ? (Score:3, Funny)
did anyone else get this error:
Runtime error (func=(main), adr=7): Divide by zero
Re:And the .iso mirrors are ? (Score:2)
I don't see anyone whining about it not being free. Just up for some free stuff, as opposed to paying for it. How crazy is that?
Maybe you've just been taught to be a good consumer too well? Fruit grows on trees, and is ostensibly free. Hurrah to free (you miserable git!) :)
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 ev
Re:And the .iso mirrors are ? (Score:3, Funny)
If you lower your standards enough, everything is free. Sex? Find someone ugly enough. Food? Go dumpster diving. Clothing? Bin diving at the Salvation Army. OS? Fortunately, Linux doesn't require settling for less, and much less offensive than the gap-toothed gal with a peg l
Not only can, it does. (obligatory) (Score:5, Funny)
At least that's what the server seems to be running from.
Re:Not only can, it does. (obligatory) (Score:2)
Woooooooooo! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Woooooooooo! (Score:2)
Re:Woooooooooo! (Score:5, Funny)
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:XFree86 good, not bad (Score:5, Insightful)
Drivers which have been provided by the actual manufacturers of the graphics hardware (as is the case in the Windows world) fare much better.
A perfect example is NVidia hardware, because both free and manufacturer provided solutions exist. The nv driver included with XFree86 is fairly slow in 2d and provides no 3d support. On the other hand, if you download NVidia's Linux drivers for XFree86, you get mind-numbing 2D acceleration and blazing fast 3D acceleration at the same speeds as the Windows drivers, with full OpenGL support.
Unfortunately, because the NVidia drivers aren't OSS, most distributions don't install them. Users install Linux, get sub-par graphics performance, and decide that "1) Linux graphics are slow, 2) X provides Linux graphics, 3) ergo, X is slow" and never even realize that they could increase the throughput of their graphics subsystem manyfold simply by downloading a better driver.
It's really an issue all across the Linux world -- poor driver support because of uncooperative manufacturers... it's just than in X, a poor hack of a driver is much more obvious because the user interacts with it directly.
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 hap
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 Flu
Re:XFree86 good, not bad (Score:3, Interesting)
Source tarball here, download ASAP (Score:3, Informative)
There's also a perl script in there (which I didn't write, just found somewhere else) which does more nice analysis of X memory usage.
Grab it ASAP, as the server is going down permanently within a couple of days. Matter of fact, if you want to make it available yourself for anyone interested, I'd appreciate it.
I use the XRes extension, which is relatively new...you can't be using an ancient copy of XFree86.
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. Overal
Re:Woooooooooo! (Score:3)
Of course, you could be just talking shit.
(Looking forward to your patches though
When is X12 coming out? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:When is X12 coming out? (Score:5, Funny)
Soko
Re:When is X12 coming out? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:When is X12 coming out? (Score:3, Funny)
Duh! Everyone knows X11 should be followed by X001. :P
Re:When is X12 coming out? (Score:5, Funny)
X10 is critical technology! (Score:5, Funny)
Thanks to the miracle of X10 security technology, I no longer have to worry about that. THANKS X10!
Re:When is X12 coming out? (Score:3, Informative)
Geeks around the world are still expecting XXX :)
nope [thehun.com], they [autopr0n.com] aren't [thumbzilla.com].
Themes schemes (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Right. Because themes are the most important thing, ever. This isn't an media player, it's a GUI.
Re:Themes schemes (Score:2)
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: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 enti
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?
fvwm2 (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Themes schemes (Score:3, Insightful)
Themes are the UI. When you customize your theme to put buttons where you need them, then you're making your UI more useful to you. I thought customization was a big whoop-dee-doo feature of Linux. Now it's being poo-poo'd?
Re:Themes schemes-"G" Rated. (Score:3, Funny)
something i always wondered about (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:something i always wondered about (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:something i always wondered about (Score:5, Informative)
In fact some X servers for Linux are FASTER than Windows.
Check out the benchmarks [xig.com]
Re:something i always wondered about (Score:5, Informative)
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:something i always wondered about (Score:5, Informative)
That shouldn't be too surprising, since Win98 is 3-4 years older than Red Hat 8. Gnome (and KDE) has added *a lot* of stuff since then that'll make your system crawl. But to get an idea of how fast X11 itself is, try making a dummy account with a .xsession (or .xinitrc on occasion) file containing the lines:
.xsession file executable and then login to the dummy account. (The account will log-out when you exit the xterm) I think you'll find the speed faster than Win98, and I hope it'll demonstrate exactly where Linux's desktop slowness comes from.
#!/bin/sh
twm &
xterm
Make the
Re:something i always wondered about (Score:3, Informative)
Don't take the full memory usage of X into account, because it uses AGP memory also in that listing.
Here's mine:
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ Command
Re:something i always wondered about (Score:2)
Sad part is MS's prior experience with unix, they would be marketing "Windows for Linux" before too long. "All the widgets, none of the security!" It would be consistant with 'embrace, extend, extinguish', after all.
Who would *want* Aqua on Linux? (Score:2, Troll)
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 por
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: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
One comment: (Score:2, Interesting)
Old sztuff repackaged (Score:5, Informative)
it's called picogui [picogui.org]
Plus you dont have to buy it, and it's much smaller.
Competition... (Score:5, Insightful)
Really? (Score:5, Informative)
When Rob Short, the vice-president of Windows Core Technology, was asked [zdnet.co.uk], "How many applications will transfer over from [Windows] NT4 or 2000 [to Windows Server 2003]?" he answered: "I'm not sure what the exact number is for taking an NT4 application and running it -- it's in the high 60 percent. It's not 90... Most of the time, if the application is following the [security] rules then it will run. But I must admit the rules haven't been well publicised."
Full Windows backward compatibility is a myth.
Longhorn (Score:2)
Longhorn should change all of that- and I cannot wait to see Microsoft's attempt at a solution to the problem!
...."The application you are trying to access was made nearly one year ago, please enter your credit card number and place your thumb on the scanning pad and the longhorn compatible application will be downloaded immediately"
On alternate graphics layers. (Score:5, Insightful)
So far the only one which has really gained prominence is the frame buffer device that most modern Linux distributions use when booting. There is even a port of QT to that, and it is sometimes used as the only graphics device in embedded platforms. It has the great advantage of being really lightweight, but it is probably even slower and much less featureful than X11.
Another one is the Y server, which was used in some PDA's until public outcry over lack of source compatibility forced the manufacturer to put in X11 instead (remember that, Slashdot?). Before that there was also svgalib. I don't think anyone cried over that going away.
The issue is support--there are tons of toolkits and applications available for X11, and the networking features are neat and useful once in a while (very often for some people, including myself). Others start with a base of pretty much nothing. That means that it is really hard for them to gain acceptance, even if they are superior from viewpoints such as being smaller, faster, and easier to program.
I personally think that we are going to be stuck with all the cruft and slowness of X11 for a very long time.
Re:On alternate graphics layers. (Score:3, Insightful)
It plays my OpenGL games just fine. Plays my movies and TV shows just fine. Flips between virtual desks faster than I can blink. What's this slowness everyone keeps talking about?
Maybe everyone buys the same video cards or something, I don't know. I don't have any complaints.
Re:On alternate graphics layers. (Score:3, Insightful)
Server Question (Score:2)
Re:Server Question (Score:2)
Try Netcraft [netcraft.com]:
No telling what flovor of Linux, though...
Google cach available (Score:3, Informative)
Looks like a fun toy to play with while I wait (Score:5, Funny)
...any day now...
X11 alternatives (Score:5, Informative)
Linux without X11 ?? (Score:5, Funny)
I have my doubts.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I have my doubts.... (Score:2)
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
Re:Always Wanted This (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Always Wanted This (Score:2)
Check out knoppix [knopper.net] or GoboLinux [gobolinux.org] which was just talked about on
This gets modded up? (Score:5, Funny)
You must be hiding out with Bin Laden in a cave then, because there are many out there.
Knoppix is just one of them. While other posters have suggested this, I would like to add that you can customize a Knoppix bootable distro to have what you want on it. There are howto's out there, and even a modularized version called Morphix.
I could give you a bunch of links, but you should be able to find them by using Google. Oh, there is this new website called google.com, which is a search engine on the information superhighway. You type in criteria of what you want to find, and it will find it for you.
A major step forward (Score:2, Flamebait)
I've long believed it needs to be removed from the nuts-n-bolts for something smaller and faster. Let X11 support be a strap-on application for those who need it, like it is for OSX.
Linux users like strap ons almost as much as Apple fanatics.
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. P
Milestone (Score:3, Insightful)
We have multiple distributions (SUSE, RH, MDK), multiple WM (Gnome, KDE, E), multiple Office Suites (KOffice, OpenOffice, AbiWord), imaging software, network tools
I know there has been a lot of advancemente in the FB handling, but officially, if you want to have some windows you need X.
Personally, I love X, but I for one can see (and have seen a lot of) people complaining about X; and from efforts like this one only good things can happen.
Re:Milestone (Score:5, Funny)
Personally, I love X,
Otherwise known as the Stockholm syndrome.
Virus Proof? (Score:2, Funny)
How long before someone writes a successful virus for the runs-from-CD implementation?
Never say "never"Archive of Screenshots (Score:5, Informative)
KDE for framebuffer (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Myabe X11 just needs another revision (Score:3, Funny)
Don't forget that because of an idiosyncrasy in the way X client/server communications are conceptualized, the X SERVER is the thing with a display and input devices, and the CLIENTS are the machines running applications (which may or may not be remote to the X console) that request I/O services from the server.
So you've got it backwards, unless you think X has it backwards, in which case you've got it forwards.
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.
what's the value proposition (Score:3, Insightful)
There are several free, reasonably mature windowing environments available for linux already, many featuring hardware acceleration. Several are suitable for embedded use. Why do I want to spend $40 for this? (I'm not being rhetorical - the site isn't accessable). There are innumerable linux distributions, several of which boot straight from CD without install.
Frankly, the speed differentials Scitech quotes (over Xfree) aren't really all that impressive for most graphics adaptors. Sure, there's a big difference between unaccelerated (e.g. vesa) access and accelerated, but a 20% differential between the 2D performance of one accelerated solution and another just isn't that compelling. Now many applications are _that_ dependant on 2D performance? If I'm that 2D bound I can spend that $40 and get vastly better graphics performance by buying a better card.
The "foo is old fashioned", "foo is too complicated", "foo is SO last century" claims that some make (I dunno if these guys do, as their site is still down) aren't value propositions. Is something significantly faster? Significantly smaller? Significantly more useful features? Significantly cheaper? Those are.
Parenthetically, note that I don't apply this standard to free projects. Someone can go code a new OS just for their own pleasure, and doesn't have to pass a customer-value-proposition test. Why? Cos they don't have customers, and so they're not obligated to provide value to anyone.
NOT FREE (Score:3, Informative)
running Athene in a commercial environment.
Baudtender
why use this over X? (Score:3, Insightful)
For any opposing GUI to make ground I'd say it'll need all the features of X and a compatibility layer to let X apps run on them. At the minimum they'd need to make something like a wxWindows port for their gui.
Replacing X is worse than pointless (Score:4, Insightful)
X is many times better than anything else in the marketplace; X is many years ahead of anything that Microsoft offers; it may be old, but so what? The Internet is old. Is that a reason to ditch the internet?
There is value in having alternatives. For mobile phones, the power of X is not needed and something lighter might be appropriate. But to all those who persist in bad-mouthing X, I say: look beyond what 's good enough for the PC in your bedroom right now. Find out what X is really about. It's still leading-edge and is one of the advantages Linux has over its competitors. Does it need improvement? Of course, like pretty much everything that's used. But it's the best base we've got for building on. Discarding it and going back to a Microsoft-like GUI would be a giant leap backwards.
Re:Replacing X is worse than pointless (Score:3, Insightful)
This is certainly not a worst case scenario, and you know it. That you adress the problem in this way furthermore attests that you don't know how X works. The answer isn't "blah! You don't need that RAM anyway" but "it doesn't use more RAM!" The reason it appears as if that's the case is that much of the memory it consumes is actually used by applications running on it, since
I've been waiting for this day... (Score:5, Interesting)
This may be the one.
The Flying Circus That Is X (Score:3, Informative)
The UNIX-HATERS Handbook [art.net] has a chapter called The X-Windows Disaster [art.net]. Near the end, there is a hilarious bit about colours. The durned lameness filter prevents me from posting it.
Search for the word "circus" in that chapter, and you'll find it.
Non-X GUIs: What's Really Needed (Score:3, Insightful)
What's really needed in a non-X GUI (in fact, all GUIs) is support for higher level APIs so we don't have to care about the underlying GUI. That begs the question, what do developers use most often?
I'd be willing to wager that there is a large percentage of Windows software that uses the GUI's APIs directly--Win32 or one of the popular wrappers like MFC or OWL. On *NIX, GTK is probably the most popular.
There are high-level wrappers that will allow you to target Win32 and *NIX with just a recompile. wxWindows leaps to mind. However, I wager that the percentage of people using them is small, although the following is growing (doesn't AbiWord use wxWindows?).
Given that, I'd probably want to see GTK and wxWindows apps running on top of a non-X GUI before I'd use it. A Win32 subset would be sweet. No, not Wine. I don't want to swallow an elephant just to get a peanut. Full Windows emulation is overkill. I would just like to have Win32 API functions so I could recompile apps that use the APIs directly. I (and thousands of others) have written our own Win32 wrappers. For alternatives to succeed, they need to be able to pull in as much software as possible.
Oh crap... I can't even check the website to see what higher level APIs it supports. D#$% /.
$40 for this? (Score:3, Insightful)
There is no reason.
As for performance, the $40 you spend on this crap could be spent getting a better graphics card. I believe you can get a GeForce 2's now for $30-$50 [pricewatch.com]. That's what I use on my current Gentoo GNU/Linux system (with WindowMaker). Guess what, no performance problems -- at all [qualifications: 1GHz CPU, 256MB SDRAM, 7200rpm ATA-100 HD].
People are really stupid when it comes to buying the latest greatest whatever. Here are the specs on my current PC:
1.1GHz AMD T-Bird CPU
256MB SDRAM
60GB 7200rpm ATA-100 hard drive
64MB GeForce2 GTS
19" Monitor
Guess what? It was fast when I bought it (a year ago). And guess what? It's still fast. It has not magically been transformed into a lumbering beast. For the home user, there is really no reason at all to buy anything other than that which sits at the best performance/price ratio. You can get an excellent system today for under $1000 that will be able to do anything you want as far as productivity goes, and will play most all games just fine.
My general plan -- and I think it's a good one -- is to upgrade once something 10 times better than what I have is available at an optimal price/performance ratio. And that's only if I have some need.
It's amazing to me how many home users are tricked into believing that a 2GHz CPU is somehow going to make their internet browsing experience any better, or make programs load faster and make Word work better. For almost all typical uses of a computer, you will *never* need to ugrade. You will only need to upgrade if you want to keep up to date with the latest games or if you want to do computationally intense computational work. Even then, you can still do so at the best price to performance ratio.
"aging X11" ??? (Score:5, Insightful)
So few people truely understand what makes X tick is why so many people bash it..
X is wonderful, its the crap that runs on top X that tends to suck and give X a bad name.
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:Isn't linux monolithic? (Score:3, Informative)
Certainly the lowest level of the X server, namely the framebuffer, can be put into the kernel, and a number of X implementations have done just that.
Full Mirror w/Picts (Archive.org) (Score:3, Informative)
MS Pict [archive.org]
Omega Pict [archive.org]
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.
Problems with X (Score:5, Insightful)
- X is not slow
- Some X video drivers are slow.
- The slowdown caused by Network transparency is negligible.
- KDE and GNOME are piggishly slow. I use both because I'm willing to sacrifice speed for functionality.
Facts about X usability:- Configuration is difficult, even for experienced users.
- Cut-and-paste style should be configurable.
What X needs:- A way to send less data over the wire for toolkits such as QT / GTK+.
- Easier configuration and setup.
- Pluggable cut-and-paste architecture that can be more easily used by the other toolkits.
- Better video drivers*.
* I knowthat's progress for you (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Microsoft Athens (Score:2)
Re:famous AmigaOS GUI? (Score:4, Insightful)
No, it really didn't.
The AmigaOS GUI was one of the most fluid, easy to understand GUI's I've ever used - it encouraged multitasking, instead of (seemingly) being designed to prevent it (quick - load two Mac/Windows/X word processors, make them full-screen, send one to the back and try to continue using it. Trivial on the Amiga.)
It's one of the things I miss most about it.
Re:famous AmigaOS GUI? (Score:3, Informative)
Don't forget it could do all this off one disk too. No hard disk install required for a complete 32-bit (ok, bits of it 24) multi-tasking operating system with a pretty good, and very usable GUI.
Workbench is a damn good example of usability in GUIs.