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Old 26th May 2009
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IdOp IdOp is offline
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Join Date: May 2008
Location: twisting on the daemon's fork(2)
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A couple of orthogonal (but not new) thoughts for the conversation.

A) The complaints related to Xorg in this thread seem to be symptomatic of difficulties BSD has in general. Viz, not enough manpower to truly "roll your own," inability to induce desired support/"mindspace" from outside software/hardware developers, etc. ISTM one of the root causes of this is fragmentation of the BSD family, resulting in resources wasted on duplicate effort and lack of critical mass for each project. And why are the BSD's fragmented? Well, I guess a variety of reasons, but Linux hippies / fanboys / crowds / -isms aren't one of them .

B) Regarding X, what about the console framebuffer (my fave topic ), couldn't better use be made of that? This is one area where Linux is ahead of BSD, but how hard would it really be to catch up or better? That is, create butt-kick graphic-mode virtual consoles that are robust, flexible, easy to configure and support acceleration. This would have many benefits:

- much better console;

- encourage development of apps that can run on framebuffer -- some are already there: mplayer, links, picture viewers, etc., but it's still too rudimentary.

- makes X less essential (but not entirely so for most users);

- when X is needed, simply run it on framebuffer on another VC. This is already possible (with fbdev) but needs better seamlessness and acceleration for example. You might not be able to switch modes, but we lost that with Xorg already (and I don't miss it much).
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