Does anyone know of an aternative to X11? I don't really like X11... or atleast XFree86 or Xorg. They both seem to kinda suck, they're slow, jumpy on redraw, etc... I was wondering if there was an alternative to X11, like something brand new. Maybe even a port of Apple's X11 to x86 that I could use (I think it's suppost to be alot smoother and faster and more usable then XFree86 or Xorg), or a whole different windowing system? I mean, it just seems funny to me... X11 in my opinion is linux's biggest drawback. The only reason it's even usably fast is because the stuff it's ontop of is really fast and that compensates for it. But say, take Windows XP... windows never flicker on redraw for me, I can move them smoothly without tearing, and it just seems to run faster to me, same with Apple's Aqua. It seems that by now somebody should have realized this and started developing a whole other windowing system for linux/unix computers, open source, that worked fast and nice like other operating systems have. I think if there is something like this, it would be a BIG help to linux. Hopefully if there is another windowing system out there, it would be compatable with X11 applications, but I dont suppose it would HAVE to be... I'd just still like to be able to use my other apps that I'm accostmed to in X11 in a better environment. Does anybody know of an alternative (preferably one thats not so early in development that it's hardly usable and has a very small userbase and almost no applications compatable with it)?

Thanks,
Marshall

To asses what your actual problem with X is it would help to
know your hardware (CPU and Graphics card) and the knowledge
which driver you choose to run X with.

As far as alternatives go: there's for instance the Athene
project, a commercial X-Server replacement that's said to be
very snappy, or Accelerated-X (references to both can be found
on our wiki http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/X_Window_System





Cheers,
Tink

that would be X11R6.6

the myth of x continues (placebo factor)
not that placebo response isn't interesting, it's what marketing people give you all the time when they tell you something is "new" and "different".
it's fascinating.

there are some, like Y server, but guess what, they had made no help at all; they just can use vesa driver because it one of the few things that are open standard.

the solutions are:

- make all video hardware makers to make drivers for you, like what Microsoft got after 20 years.

- only support selective hardware, like Apple (it's easy to make cool things when you don't have to worry about hardware)

- fight for open hardware specification, that is what is going on currently.

Finally, another project is useless in short sight because no program will run on it.

Did you actually look at Athene?

No, I'm NOT fond of commercial products, but your statements
as such are just wrong.

Yes, open hardware specs, or maybe even FOSS drivers from
hardware vendors would be nice, but the reality is different.
And no, I'm not happy with that reality, and I keep asking
vendors to contribute to Linux (as I did back in the day
when I was using OS/2).


Cheers,
Tink

Thanks for the responses. As for Mac's X11 being faster, I had just read somewhere that it was... or maybe that was Aqua, they may be different implimentations, or ones ontop of the other... I forget, I dont use Macs often and dont know much about them, sorry for the mistake. I believe I only used it a couple times at friend's houses and once at school, and I didn't really have a good basis to determine how fast it really is because I didn't know the hardware specs and how that compared to if linux's xorg or xfree86 was running on it, etc. Anyhow, Windows XP's windowing system does still seem nicer to me... alot smoother. I do like how configurable linux's X11 is, being able to use any number of different window managers including KDE, Gnome, XFCE, and Fluxbox (my personal favorite), and Window's XP's GUI doesn't seem near as configuable as X11 is, but they're sort of two different things. I suppose you could rip the start bar and everything off WinXP and it'd be just as good, although not designed the same... all apps would have to be totally redesigned for the new envionment, or emulated (which would likly make them even slower). As for hardware, I'm running a Pentium II @ 300, 128 SDRAM, 40 Gig eide hard drive, and an ATI Rage 128 Pro 32MB graphics card. I'm on Slackware 10.1 and have Xorg 6.8.1, and run it with the r128 graphics driver. I know my 3D accelleartion works in Xorg because when I turned on dri and such my glxgears readings jumped from like 75 to over 400, and glxgears now reads that direct rendering is active, and games run well (well, as well as they can run, its not a very fast machine), so I think the driver is working fine.

from http://www.rocklyte.com/athene/:

"
...Feature Summary
Optimised for Intel Pentium and compatible processors...."

this falls in the second point.

i didn't say that things can be better, only that without HW makers cooperation, progress is very slow. And Open Source changes too fast for closed sources HW companies.