rootninja

It’s hard to believe X has been around since 1985.

When most people (including me) think of X, they think of Xorg, the open source implementation of the X Window System. The latest features to be incorporated into X are multipointer and a minimal DRI module to offload more functions from X. But where is it all heading?

From Life after X

Over time, the window system has been split apart into multiple pieces – the X server, the window manager, the compositing manager, etc. All of these pieces are linked by complex, asynchronous protocols.
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Most people expect all applications to use X, and modern Linux operating systems seem to be reimplementing all kinds of applications to incorporate some sort of graphical interface.

The combination of layers available when developing an application that uses X is staggering. Do you use gtk or qt? Pango, Fontconfig, FreeType or something else entirely for font rasterization? And what about graphics rendering and taking advantage of modern GPU processors…

For better or for worse, there is currently a wide variety of rendering APIs to choose from when writing graphical libraries. According to Keith, only two of them are interesting. For video rendering, there’s the VDPAU/VAAPI pair; for everything else, there’s OpenGL. Nothing else really matters going forward.