Re:FW: XFree86 future

> Don't worry, we're not planning on getting rid of the client-server
>model any time soon.  David Wexelblat is correct in the sense that 
>the majority of people do not need it, but it's definitely the case 
>that some people find it essential.  Not only that, I disagree with him.
>I think direct rendered 2D has little to no benefit.
>
>
>                        Mark.

If direct rendered 2D would bring little to no benefit why then is the 
performance of direct rendered 3D under XFree so much better than the 2D 
performance. Many people argued that the device drivers are to blame for the 
bad 2D performance but I would think that it is a much harder problem to get 
the 3D part of the graphics driver right than it is to get the 2D part right. 
I'm certain that network transparency together with the ancient X11 API's are 
a large part of the problem of the XFree project. I've worked on several 
projects where network transparency was involved and it allways made the 
projects much more complex and made it almost impossible to get a satifactory 
realtime performance.     
You seem to agree that most people don't need network transparency and I'm 
sure that is the case since at least 95% of the (Windows) desktop users seem 
to be happy without this feature. For the rest of the people who really need 
it there is VNC. The biggest advantage of VNC is that it doesn't add any 
additional complexity to the core graphics system. It's also integrated in 
the KDE desktop, its available for GNOME and Windows. VNC's perfomance is 
also ok. I think that it solves at least 90% of the problem that the minority 
of users have who need to work remote on computers. 
There was often the argument that X11's API would never have to be rewritten 
since you can just add another extension if you need a new feature. I think 
this is a big mistake in the long term. It leads to dublicate and 
inconsistent API's. It makes it more difficult for the developer who wants to 
use these API's to find the right way to use them. Which then leads to hacks 
and bugs. It's also very difficult to optimize such an API for more 
perfomance. 
All these problems make XFree a very complex project. It's very hard for a new 
contributor to dig through the XFree sources and to understand them to a 
degree where he can make a meaningful contribution. I think that this 
unecessary complexity is the most important reason as to why there are so few 
contributors for such an important project. I think that David Wexelblat is 
absolutely right and that Linux desperately needs a direct-rendering model if 
it wants to be successful on the desktop.

Cheers
Lukas