Just passed my 100th post today :) I’ve been posting on and off since sometime last year. First, with my blog on the engineering webspace and now here. I didn’t expect to hold out this long – but I’ve got to say that I’ve enjoyed it immensely.
Looking at the proposed changes to Longhorn I see that Linux has much catching up to do in a number of areas. Just about the only thing on our side is the fact that Longhorn is two years away. I don’t know what’ll happen over the next two years – but if some fundamental things don’t change – there will be issues.
Another one bites the dust… Ah – XFree86 – the project I can’t live without, the project I’d _rather_ live without. Yesterday quite the commotion about the Cygwin maintainer leaving XFree86 because he was denied CVS access. XFree86 has ben accused numerous times in the past of being insensitive to developers. Frankly, I think its a dinosaur and the only reason its around is
- All the GL drivers are written for it
- All the toolkits work on it
Which boils down to – “We’re established and entrenched so fuck off”. The more I read, the more I’m convinced that a better window server can and should be written. Unfortunately – when one starts looking at graphics on Linux, an interesting thought comes to mind:
Wouldn’t it be nice to have the same accelerated drivers for _both_ the console and your window server?
Yes…but now you’re stuck with the dual problem of writing a window server _and_ a graphics driver platform. Fat chance of that happening in any _reasonable_ amount of time. End result? No one writes an alternative to X ;)