Ubuntu moving away from X

[Mark J Dulcey]

On 11/5/2010 12:40 PM, Gordon Marx wrote:

> My guess is that there'll be some really cool things coming out of Ubuntu,
> and the fact that they're not just throwing out X means that they're
> interested in actually advancing the state of the art in open-source
> graphical display environments...which is cool. And about which we should
> all be excited.

I suspect that a big driver here is lightweight computing environments 
where the overhead and memory consumption of X is an issue. An 
environment with a GUI built natively in OpenGL could provide a better 
experience on netbooks and tablets (and perhaps other mobile devices -- 
might Ubuntu Phone be in our future?) where the existing display 
solutions tend to be sluggish.

I expect X to continue to be supported for a long time, and it will be 
the environment of choice for servers (where, just as now, you'll 
typically only install the "client" part, i.e. the server in the 
backwards terminology that X uses) and power desktop users because of 
its remote capabilities. But the ability to separate the client and 
server aren't so important for everyone, and cutting the display 
overhead is.