I’ve often thought that the architecture for X11 was, by design, inefficient. I mean, great for networked desktops, but for the 90% who don’t need that, unnecessarily slow. I’ve read a lot of posts from X11 evangelists that claim there is nothing wrong with X11. I agree–for what its designed to do, its outstanding. But I can “feel” the difference in fidelity between my Windows desktop and my Linux desktop. Not all the time, but enough that I notice–and I know I’m not alone. There has to be a penalty to pay for protocol handling, socket communication and context switching.
Well, I stumbled across an X11 XLib replacement library that moves the code into the kernel space. These performance results are impressive and seem to confirm that the X11 “skeptics” like myself are not crazy.
I personally would love to take it for a test drive. More than that, I’d like to see this taken more seriously by the Linux/X community.
You are not alone, however there will always be these fashion-follower hot-shot guys who try to prove they’re right while wasting lots of resources (including memory, CPU, etc.). I’m eager to try MicroXwin out and I’m hoping there will be a distribution based on it light on system resources.