I've always been fond of X, at least from a design perspective.. the ability to have a portable and network-aware windowing environment.
Over the years I've seen some pretty exotic hardware with X available, a common complaint these days is that it's bloated or adds too much protocol overhead, but really that's hard to back up considering how exponentially faster modern computers are compared to the systems X was designed to run on.
I agree that some parts of the X graphics stack probably should be managed securely in the kernel, like modesetting.. and memory managers like GEM, but the more stuff in the kernel the less that's part of the platform independent driver and means that some systems are going to be left out unless someone steps up to do the work.
Most of this very "experimental" stuff goes on in the Linux kernel, and very little can be copied as-is into other OS's due to licensing/technical issues.. often this means developers needs to adapt the idea to their respected kernels.
Personally, I don't see X going anywhere.. but this might simply be because I really don't want it to, we grew up together.
|