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Comparing X11 to Win32 is just laughable. X11 is ANCIENT. It also provides no widgets or anything other than windows and drawing primitives (which are ancient).
by anon4 11y ago
Comparing X11 to Win32 is just laughable. X11 is ANCIENT. It also provides no widgets or anything other than windows and drawing primitives (which are ancient). You can't do anti-aliased fonts for example, you have to render then with freetype2 into a pixmap buffer and put that in your window. Practically every GUI toolkit does it that way - allocate window, do the drawing yourself, present final pixmap.
Win32 is more like Qt and if we could just fucking standardise Qt as THE API to target, everyone would be much happier. But of course then the Gnome devs won't be happy. The Linux desktop would be in a much better place if Gnome was dead.
- swiley 11y agoOr you could just not slap a fucking GUI on everything since most Linux users probably don't care.
- vetinari 11y agoWin32 is also ancient. It is the model of programming with handles and window message loops, that was inspired by MacOS (Classic) and that the OSX abandoned 15 years ago. To consider you example with text, in Windows, you also have to use GDI+ or Uniscribe to have at least passable text (without shaping, that is). Or use DirectWrite, which is about as old as Pango. Even OSX went through changes, AAT/OpenType wasn't available when QuickDraw GX was all the rage.