On Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 8:46 AM, Nick Copeland
<nickycopeland(a)hotmail.com> wrote:
To come back to the original thread, X11 is very old
in the tooth. It is
based on
assumptions that are not longer valid and the result is a pretty cumbersome
solution. It was written before reasonable foundations for distributed
computing
were really put in place. People have been whitening its teeth and giving it
a shave
here and there to try and make it appear spruce but that does not detract
from the
fact that it is an ever older horse that at some point has to go to the
knackers yard.
actually, the person most responsible for all that stuff (keith
packard) has a somewhat more nuanced view of it. his talk on 25 years
of X Window at the linux plumbers conf in 2009 was really an
astoundingly good mixture of an awareness of the shortcomings of X
when paired with modern graphics and input h/w but also the importance
and subtleties of moving on from X without losing its many strengths.
wayland is really an astonishing piece of work, if only because of the
way it manages to reuse almost all the low level driver code from X
without using the upper layers or even the basic concepts of X.
--p