It's been round for ages, although I've never gotten it working. X.org has mitigated the need for it somewhat, although it'll be interesting to see what they come up with.

Well, what's happened with the fork of XFree isn't ideal but certainly X.org looks like a better structure for the X server project. Hopefully lots of good work will be put into X to make it more sophisticated in the era of 3D graphics cards. The Y Windows project however is very different from X. One of the fundamental ideas behind X was that it was very light weight when it came to widgets. X historically has only provided basic window management and pixel pushing. Everything else was the responsibility of the widget library. Which made sense when all there was in the way of toolkits was Xt and Athena (now Xaw3d). There is lots of logic in GTK and Qt to draw and manage widgets. All of which has to travel over the X socket. This isn't very efficient. Which is why X is slower than most other GUI systems. There are lots of hacks in the X server to make it faster and to support nice rendering (AA etc). But they are still all hacks. A lot of these hacks are replacing a lot of the old ways of doing things in X. Y takes a different approach. It puts more logic in the server end. Instead of applications having separate widget libs they all talk to the server using the same API and the server has a plugin API that allows you to change the widget LnF so that every app looks the same. If I remember rightly the GUI is also driven by OpenGL. Y is very promising. It will need X11 compatibility though to bridge the gap or it will stay a very niche project. People have tried this before (anyone remember Berlin) and failed. I would also be very disappointed to loose the networking features of X. It can be so damn handy at times. I think what will happen in the log run will be the adoption of ideas from projects like Berlin and Y into the X.org servers. Regards -- Oliver Jones » Director » oliver(a)deeperdesign.com » +64 (21) 41 2238 Deeper Design Limited » +64 (7) 377 3328 » www.deeperdesign.com