If Or When Will X12 Actually Materialize?

[Akdor 1154]

EDIT: it seems I wasn't clear enough but I implied that there would be a single toolkit, "the X toolkit". Even a drawing library like Cairo, from what I understand of it, should be run on the server with calls to it coming from over the client-server boundary. I'm not saying "integrate Cairo into X11", I'm saying "what Cairo does should clearly be part of the graphics server". Different toolkits would not need to do silly things like upload themselves as, like in Windows, OS X, current embedded systems, there would be only one toolkit to use! Apps could of course push custom bitmaps and video to the server as need be, much like current stupid Windows shareware apps and manufacturer branded tools insist on abusing to implement their own silly UI styles.

[Akdor 1154]

Better would be to just leave it as it is and have the toolkits be done client-side and the rendering server-side. Then you wouldn't have to jump through hoops and have parts of the system on the wrong side of the client/server boundary.

I see server-side toolkit ideas pop up from time to time when people talk about X. First of all, no other OS uses server-side toolkits, so that should say something right there. Secondly, server-side toolkits introduce policy and application-level details into the server in a non-generic way. Server is supposed to just render and demultiplex input (and interface with hardware to do all that). Now it has to deal with things like buttons, accessibility, colors and themes, etc. Now, instead of being able to just update the Qt libraries, you also have to update the X server. And while you can have side-by-side installations of toolkit libraries, you can't have two instances of the X server running to support old and new apps. No more Qt3 apps alongside Qt4 apps. Either the toolkit API must remain extremely stable and backwards compatible over time, or you just lose the apps that run on the older version of the toolkit. Some people propose some way where toolkit code is uploaded into the server. It's obvious that this is a ridiculous solution and not worth trying.

So once again, we are left with the reality that X really is okay in its fundamental architecture. Tweaking and upgrading, rather than a wholesale rewrite or reworking is the way to go.

No other OS has the problem of whether a toolkit should be server- or client- side as no other windowing system has X's network transparency. I agree with you however in saying that twisting the current X11 and toolkits towards this would be absolutely stupid.

The basic design I propose though, to me at least, seems solid and logical. With a good design, I see no reason why a toolkit API could not be stable, or at least backwards compatible, for a long period of time - we have twenty years of successes and mistakes to look back on.

Thinking further, this is quite comparable to an analogue of HTML code (= the UI) being pushed from the client (the web server running the app) to the server (the browser running on the user's machine). Data transferred between the client and server is minimal, and UI look is largely in the hands of the server. Clearly I'm not proposing we write all our apps in HTML, but simply that this concept of the toolkit doing everything at the server end is quite feasible.

Discussions on whether the toolkit would use xlib etc are meaningless as again, bending X11 as it is now towards this goal is a waste of effort. I simply state that the toolkit should handle rendering directly to the output buffer/screen using whatever hardware/acceleration is available to it.

[leidola]

[...] Network support through plain X is not used anymore [...]

Hmmm... I used it yesterday. Working from at home and logging in to your number cruncher at university via SSH and plotting data via gnuplot's X11 terminal works fine here.

[curaga]

xpra, that was the name.

[Chewi]

You probably mean xmove but it's really ancient. There does seem to be a new app called xpra that does the same thing though.

[curaga]

There's an app for that; can't remember the name right now, but its tagline was something like "screen for X".

[V!NCENT]

My biggest annoyance with X is that my browser dies if X crashes.

Yeah that stuff is so freaking annoying! Whenever my CPU dies for example, my session is lost

[Remco]

My biggest annoyance with X is that my browser dies if X crashes.

That is a problem of your browser. It decides to kill itself when its X connection closes.

[hakl]

My biggest annoyance with X is that my browser dies if X crashes.

[val-gaav]

QT is commercial software,

It is and it stands for Quick Time ...


*unless you were speaking about Qt ...
then again Qt is open source and has paid developers working on it with corporate interest to produce the best toolkit. Linux is also open source but the paid devs that work on it are more interested in server features.

So which project is more desktop focused ?