Re: [gtkmm] Qt, GTKmm and the next X11 (Berlin)?

[Paul Davis <pbd op net>]

>Does anybody feel the need of a better X 11? I'm thinking in particular to 
>the DTP developers who are fighting all the time with the font management 
>system of X11 (no font smoothing, no anti-alias, etc...).

this has already been replaced. XFree86 supports anti-aliasing for
fonts, along with many other things. Its not widespread yet because it
started in 4.X, and because it requires GUI toolkits to use it (both
Qt and GTK+2 do so). It is, however, vastly more widespread than
Berlin :)

>Does anybody knew Berlin already? What's your feeling about it? Does anybody 
>know of any other project for replacing the X11?

this has been discussed over and over on slashdot. 

most people who criticize X Window don't understand it. they don't
understand its design goals, they don't understand how to read the
output of ps(1), they don't understand what affects X Window
performance, they don't understand the role of the window manager,
etc. etc.

they also generally don't care about the power of running X over a network.

the people working on Berlin do understand most of this, but they have
decided that they want to proceed anyway. there do not seem to be that
many people at this time who agree with their conclusion *and* who
have a decent understanding of how X Window works.

>PS: Berlin lies on the concept of "Kits". As long as I can understand from 
>the executive overview of Berlin, Kits are objects very similar to the 
>"Programming Frameworks" that we are used to see on X11, like Qt, GTK and so 
>on. A few kits exist already and try to replicate the existing Qt and GTK 
>functionalities. Most likely, Qt and GTK could take this "kit personality" on 
>Berlin.

thereby continuing to propagate the pathetic and frustrating situation
on Linux where there are many incompatible and non-integratable GUI
toolkits. a huge step forward, for sure.

--p