Ubuntu moving away from X

[Matthew Gillen]

On 11/07/2010 07:53 AM, Mark Woodward wrote:
> On 11/06/2010 08:07 AM, discuss-request-mNDKBlG2WHs at public.gmane.org wrote:
>> This is not because XQuartz is terrible.  This is because the X applications are terrible.  I say that as a daily user of exactly this combination.  It's how I get my Xterms and my occasional Guild Wars fix, among many other things including remote X clients.
>>    
> "X Applications are terrible?" Really? OpenOffice, Firefox, Gimp, 
> Thunderbird, etc. are terrible applications? I have to disagree.

The point was that those are all GTK apps, and if GTK supported whatever X
replacement transparently to GTK's API layer, then OO, Firefox, Gimp, etc
would never notice.  None of those apps use X directly AFAIK; they only use
it through their toolkit (in this case, GTK).

So there is a real possibility that 98% of the applications you use could
actually natively support something other than X fairly easily, if only GTK
and QT support it on their backend (wouldn't even necessarily require a
re-compile of the apps, only a drop-in replacement of the GTK/Qt
implementation).

There are a couple 'real' X applications that I use every now and then (xfig
anyone?), but a slight performance hit on those wouldn't bother me.  Think
of it this way: if it's old enough to use raw X, than modern computers are
almost certainly hefty enough to virtualize it several times over before
you'd notice.

I agree that the X-forwarding functionality is a core feature, and it kicks
VNC-like (i.e. bitmap-based) solutions in the pants.  I'm not convinced that
they couldn't come up with something comparable that worked for Wayland.
The trouble would be backwards compatibility: I want my shiny new desktop
with Wayland to display X apps from my 5-year-old server.  That's a place
where emulation or adding layers might start to hurt.

Matt