Does no one else ever use X applications over an SSH tunnel? It's an easy way to, for example, control the music playing on my Linux box hooked up to my stereo system.<p>In all the blog posts about replacing X, I don't see anyone even mentioning this feature of X. Or if they do, they say that its an irrelevant feature.
<i>how many of these applications care about network transparency, which was one of the original headline features of X? How many of them care about ICCCM compliance? How many of them care about X at all? The answer to all of those questions, of course, is "very few"</i><p>What an odd, contrived, series of questions. With X anybody can use pretty much any app over the network by default. This one in particular is very odd:<p><i>how many of these applications care about network transparency</i><p>How many _applications_ care? Who knows! <i>I</i> care about network transparency. I want to run my app where my data is. That's pretty much the killer feature of X.
Apart from jokes about the "X is dead" (where X is a variable) reports, I think the principles on which X stands are very much alive in the webM.N space - web apps treating the browser as their display. When looked at that way, "X has won".
Probably way to late for anyone to read this comment, but I used to think X11 was dead for remoting since VNC was faster over high-latency high-bandwidth connections (which describes most of the internet today). Then I discovered nomachine NX; it is way better than VNC or native X for remoting. A bunch of linux distros even have the GPL version available in the package management system. It is as much faster than VNC than VNC is over native X11. Also, it doesn't try to jpeg compress my syntax-highlighted text.
Core Graphics, Quartz, and Core Animation are essentially the same across Mac OS X and iOS. OS X supports OpenGL; iOS supports OpenGL ES. OS X has AppKit; iOS has UIKit. OS X also has Core Image.<p>The balkanization of desktop Linux and Android makes no sense to me. The Surface Graphics Library and Surface Manager on Android needs to converge with desktop Linux.
<a href="http://developer.android.com/guide/basics/what-is-android.html" rel="nofollow">http://developer.android.com/guide/basics/what-is-android.ht...</a>
An alternative to X would be great.<p>The Linux windowing system is currently a gawd-awful mix of poorly mixed layers.<p>The problem is that any replacement might follow the dynamics that generated the present arrangement...
I would love to see X die. Over the years it has become a very complex beast. But I don't think X will die anytime soon: Replacing it with something better is a daunting task, but it's kind of trivial compared to rewriting all the applications that use X.<p>Of course we can run X on top of something like Wayland, but we'll just have added another layer, and X will still sit on top for another 10 years.