Re: [TCLUG:3372] We're stuck with X

["Shawn T . Amundson" <amundson@gimp.org>]

On Fri, Jan 15, 1999 at 10:48:49AM -0600, Christopher Palmer wrote:
> On Fri, 15 Jan 1999, Vince Platt wrote:
> 
> > Another alternative would be to simply modify X so it fixes some of the
> > problems you referenced.  *nyah*  That makes sense.  :+)
> 
> It can probably be tuned for performance and display quality, but
> integrating the toolkit and UI elements into the server would involve a
> major re-thinking of the design and a major re-write of all existing X
> software.
> 

Integrating those components would also be a mistake.

All existing X software will be rewritten or replaced by superiour
GTK+ equivalents by people writing for the GNOME project.  And since
GTK+ is already somewhat recognized as becoming the Linux standard
toolkit, your UI inconsistancy arguments are indeed aging.

If the toolkit was integrated into X, we would be stuck with Motif,
or Athena or something equally horrible.  The fact that they are seperate
means that something better can replace that which sucks.  These things
suck not only because they look bad and are inflexible, but because 
they are hard to use and require a lot of work and knowledge from the 
programmer to do even simple interfaces.

Font-rendering, aliasing, etc., are a entirely different story.  Those
need to be in the X server and if there is a reason to abandon X it is
display quality.  Unfortunately, to correct only these difficiencies 
in X would require a huge amount of changes.  Thus, at least for now,
Netscape on Windows looks 100x times better than on Linux.

--
Shawn T. Amundson               
amundson@gimp.org               http://www.gimp.org/~amundson

"The assumption that the universe looks the same in every
 direction is clearly not true in reality." - Stephen Hawking