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

[Lars Knoll <lars trolltech com>]

Hi,

> I just stomped against the Berlin project
> (http://www.berlin-consortium.org/), an ambitious project for replacing X11
> with a new and better graphical system in the medium-far future.
>
> I would like to know what the GTK+/GTKmm, Qt and the TrollTech programmers
> think of such a project.
>
> 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...).
>
> Does anybody knew Berlin already? What's your feeling about it? Does
> anybody know of any other project for replacing the X11?
>
> Does TrollTech knew of Berlin? Is TrollTech looking at this kind of
> technology as a commercial opportunity? Does trollTech plan to port Qt to
> Berlin (or something like that)?

We know about Berlin. The project is around for quite a long time. But it 
doesn't seem to gain any significant support in the community, and IMO it 
won't if it doesn't support some sort of X11 compatibility layer. 

IMO they are doing something that is not really needed. X11 has it's 
shortcomings (believe me I know about the problems... don't ask how many 
hacks we have in Qt to get around the worst of them), but this could aswell 
be solved by providing extensions to X11. 

The render extension and Xft in XFree 4.x are one of them and a big step in 
the right direction. These do provide antialiased fonts and semitransparency 
on an XServer level and fix some of the worst shortcomings of X11.

I personally still miss quite a few things in X11, mainly support for paths 
and server side transformations, but I think these could aswell be solved 
with some XServer extension and don't need a whole new project that aims at 
replacing X11.

Cheers,
Lars