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AFAIK "X in general" don't give you gui. Without desktop environment you'll get empty desktop and cursor. And that is it. You should be more specific about which gui you are talking about. GUI is program-specific thing, not OS-specific. Program might have better or worse GUI. But OS has little to do with it. So I think words "GUI in Linux" are meaningless. There can be GUI of KDE, GUI of specific program, etc., but not "GUI in Linux".
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Originally Posted by Mega Man X
I think "GUI" in Linux, still has a long way to go.
GUI stands for "Graphical user interface". Interface of something. So "GUI in linux" is Graphical user interface of what?
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Originally Posted by Mega Man X
From a developer point of view, supporting several "GUI's" is not an option.
Why should developer support "several \"GUI's\""? You pick one library to use. The rest is not your problem. I think you should separate "GUI" from "Desktop environment" and "X server" - it's not the same thing.
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Originally Posted by Mega Man X
There is also lots of problems with fullscreen applications.
Use SDL and your problem will disappear.
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Originally Posted by Mega Man X
If I run a game with wine in say, 800x600, when I leave the game, most likely my desktop resolution will be set to 800x600 and there is not way to fix that except by restarting X. That happens all the time to the point of being annoying.
This is might be either game or wine bug, it's not X problem. I haven't experienced this problem with native Linux games. By the way this thing sometimes happens on windows (rare, but it exists).
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Originally Posted by Mega Man X
And indeed, running something on the top of X instead of being inbuilt with the kernel like (probably) Windows does, is slower.
Windows GUI isn't built into kernel. It is placed into separate library. AFAIK it's gdi32.dll.
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Originally Posted by Mega Man X
However, I have not had a Windows crash in years
You are lucky. I had at least 8 windows system hangups during last week (I.e. hung to death, can be resurrected only by reset).
AFAIK "X in general" don't give you gui. Without desktop environment you'll get empty desktop and cursor.
And that's one of the biggest problems. The early X implementers made a fatal decision that X was to dictate mechanism but not policy. Instead of policy, we got the ICCCM, which makes the USA Patriot Act look succinct and clear.
At its core, all X can do is draw lines and handle mouse events (very primitively)... if you want to do something fancier, you have to write an X extension, which is like putting your genitals through a meat grinder.
The GUI is good for some things, terrible for others. And that goes for other OSes, too.
I prefer a healthy mix. A spartan window manger by itself, possibly tiling, with only a few add-ons. Minimalism is smart, low-cost, and sexy I even log in at the command line, with a little bash that puts me into X if I log in on a specific virtual console.
The early X implementers made a fatal decision that X was to dictate mechanism but not policy.
Exactly why was that fatal in itself?
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Instead of policy, we got the ICCCM, which [is bad]
If the ICCCM is as bad as you make it out to be, the problem isn't that X doesn't specify policy but that the ICCCM specifies a bad or insufficient policy?
I'd think that what bugs most people is that they buy into one set of policies (GNOME or KDE, mostly) specifying uniformity of appearance, placement of buttons in dialog boxes, how drag-and-drop happens, the lot [HIG, ICCC, ...]. Then they also want to run applications that don't act according to those policies.
I think the problem isn't bad policy. It's that not all clients obey them.
Quote:
At its core, all X can do is draw lines and handle mouse events (very primitively)... if you want to do something fancier, you have to write an X extension, which is like putting your genitals through a meat grinder.
Really? Tell us about the experience, I'd like to know more.
What makes it a bad experience? Is it poor documentation, bad architecture, excessive complexity, or something nth?
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I even log in at the command line, with a little bash that puts me into X if I log in on a specific virtual console.
