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I'll never understand why everyone went this way instead of extending the X11 draw pimitives to something that can actually be used by modern UI toolkit, like s
by rnhmjoj 5y ago
I'll never understand why everyone went this way instead of extending the X11 draw pimitives to something that can actually be used by modern UI toolkit, like svg. People always claim that pixel buffers are more efficient, even bandwidth-wise, but I've yet to see a proof that "here's a bunch of pixels" is more efficient that "draw a gray rectangle (x0,y0,x1,y1)".
- eternityforest 5y agoIn a way they did. HTML/HTTP is exactly what you get if you extend it to cover all the modern stuff, and it's great. I think the real question is why can't the display manager just be a browser, plus some backwards compatibility for "here's a bunch of pixels".. All the RAM use issues of Electron go away if the whole desktop is a single shared browser, plus you can do client side JS work and not need to send any data at all for a lot of things, AND you can cache things, plus you can decompress video client side, play sound on the client... Just do HTTP over UNIX domain sockets with some signalling to tell the server to open a window.
- sprash 5y agoThe X11 drawing primitives have already been extended with the Xrender extension. It allows to draw textured, anti aliased trapezoids, color gradients and many composition/transparency/mask modes. If GLAMOR is enabled it is even hardware accelerated. It is of course much more efficient over the wire than periodically dumping a bunch of bitmaps. The Cairo X11 backend uses Xrender by default. Also many GTK 2.x rendering backends used Xrender. All of this functionality was dropped with GTK 3+.
- lamp987 5y ago