Con Kolivas gives up.

[David Gerard]

On 08/08/2007, Francois-Denis Gonthier <neumann at lostwebsite.net> wrote:
> On August 7, 2007 05:36:37 pm Scott (angrykeyboarder) wrote:

> > X-Window has been pretty much been in the same boat (and still is). It's
> > a GUI slapped on top of an OS. That has to be a major contributer to the
> > problems with desktop Linux as well.

> X-Window is low-level GUI in userspace.  Software design-wise, this is
> arguably the best.  We don't want lousy graphic driver constantly freezing
> the system like happened in the early days of Windows 9x.  Yeah, it will be
> faster, but that is likely to open so many stability and security problems
> that I can't imagine any Linux kernel developers considering doing that.


Bits are being shifted back into the kernel, e.g. DRI/DRM (the other
"DRM"!) to provide a kernel interface for video - which is arguably
where it should be, rather than having X do hardware-twiddling itself.

Note also that Windows and Mac OS X have an OS/video subsystem
separation similar to X now, because it's really the sensible way to
do a maintainable system. And computers are a thousand times faster
with a thousand times the memory they had in 1988. So now it's more a
matter of approach than deeper differences.


- d.