Using OpenGL as a window manager

[Franco Catrin L.]

El mar, 27-04-2004 a las 08:45, Gian Filippo Pinzari escribió:
> Martijn Sipkema wrote:
> > The X server should do no more than to allow multiple clients to
> > use the graphics hardware simultaneously. Higher level abstraction
> > can be done on the client side.
> 
> This is an interesting point of view and I would like to hear
> the opinion of the other readers of this list.

Ok, you asked for it

I'm not an X-Protocol expert, I just have an application developer point
of view of a desired architecture.

I think that clients should not be aware of what is happening on the
screen unless required.  Things like transparency or compositing should
be done by the server and not the applications.

If one applications want to do some operation with the current frame
buffer it should ask the server to do it, and should not request a
frambuffer bitmap to do it by itself.

Clients should be worried about how to behave, and the X server should
be worried about how to display and interact with the application.

Benfits:

- Low bandwidth : bitmaps are expensive. Small commands are not

- client simplicity : having such things as transparent windows
(tooltips/menus), fading, shadows and so on,  will be already done in
the X server. The same way fd.o xserver does now with
shadows/transparency

- better hardware use : the server will do as better as it can with the
hardware.  Some users will loose some eye candy features but will have
an usable display device.  Users with high end card will get the best
from its hardware (look at newer machines with OSX phanter)

In some cases the server just can ignore some operations.  So the same
client application can run on a high end computer as well as a small
device.  It will look different, but it will be the same application. 
The web broser example by Gian is a very good one.

Without knowing the X-Protocol, I think that new functionality can be
added without breaking current implementations.  Why restrict to
X-Protocol limitations while Apple and Microsoft are taking big steps
ahead in this matter.

The amount of Linux users is increasing dramatically.  The Open Source
community is in a safe position to change things, even to impose them if
we want.

-- 
Franco Catrin L.
TUXPAN http://www.tuxpan.com/fcatrin