undefined | Better HN

0 pointsPaulDavisThe1st3y ago0 comments

> Mostly from X drawing commands being a shit way to represent modern UI's and toolkits.

This is really fundamentally wrong. X drawing commands are still just fine for representing modern within-app UIs and toolkits.

The two things that have changed are the underlying GPU technology, which has shifted towards abstractions and APIs mostly targetting gaming and video, and desktop level UI stuff, which is expected to include compositing these days.

However, it's not as if the other remote desktop systems have really changed much to reflect these developments either.

0 comments

3 comments · 1 top-level

kllrnohj3y ago· 2 in thread

> This is really fundamentally wrong. X drawing commands are still just fine for representing modern within-app UIs and toolkits.

This is really fundamentally wrong. Nobody has been updating X commands for modern effects (eg, blurs, advanced blend modes, etc..). Heck you can't even do round-rect clipping. You have to generate a clip mask pixmap instead. At which point I might as well just generate the final pixmap and forget about X anything. Especially since xlib doesn't even do anti aliasing. Like come the fuck on, it's friggin useless. Can't even handle text adequately!

There's a reason Wayland dumped it all entirely. If it had been maintained and updated sure maybe. But it wasn't. It's a drawing library straight out of the 90s, absolute abandonware

PaulDavisThe1stOP3y ago

Well, on the one hand, you're right. But on the other hand, X is still being used to do all that stuff (not necessarily using the body of its drawing command set). So even if X's drawing commands themselves are less relevant than they once were, X itself is still entirely capable of presenting GUIs with blurs, anti-aliased text etc. etc.

kllrnohj3y ago

Well sure but it's just compositing pixmaps from somewhere else. It's just a bad compositor at this point

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse