Re: My project wish-list for the next 12 months

From: Miguel Mendez <flynn_at_energyhq.es.eu.org>
Date: Thu, 2 Dec 2004 07:55:30 +0100
On Thu, 02 Dec 2004 10:44:32 +0530
"Kamal R. Prasad" <kamalp_at_acm.org> wrote:

[Please don't top-post]

> I find X windows to be a bit too compute intensive. Maybe something
> like apple's interface would be a good alternative [for those who
> don't need X-windows' powerful graphic features].

What makes you think so? X was originally desgined for systems with
little memory and processing power, certainly a lot less than today's
AMD and Intel space heaters. There are some features that do indeed
require more CPU, like antialiasing. That's the price to pay for eye
candy. Things like the composite and damage extensions do wonders to
help in those areas and make things like true transparency and alpha
blending possible. So, in time, X won't be that different from Aqua in
its use of hardware.

The lack of speed in some apps can be blamed mostly on the toolkits.
GTK+ 1.2 was a speed demon, GTK+ 2.x is a lot slower. There are some
people working on a fast Pango code path that could make english text
rendering fast again.

X gives you network transparency out of the box. I used an old SGI Indy
as an X term to connect to my FreeBSD box for years, and it worked like
a charm over a 10Mbit connection.

Replacing X means writing something that's API compatible, or writing an
X server on top of your new display system, so that you don't have to
throw the thousands of X apps into the trashcan.

About some of the other comments in the thread. IMHO using bsdinstaller
as a base could be beneficial for both groups and save duplicated work.
I'm sure they'll be glad to get internacionalization patches.

I agree that a journaled filesystem is really needed if you want to
manage multi TiB partitions. As rock solid and tested softupdates is,
fsck is not an acceptable solution in this case. Some people were
working on a port of XFS, has any progress been made? I tried contacting
them some time ago, but never got an answer. Sounds like a very
interesting, though.

Cheers,
-- 
Miguel Mendez <flynn_at_energyhq.es.eu.org> | lea     gfx_lib(pc),a1
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Received on Thu Dec 02 2004 - 05:55:43 UTC

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