Re: wayland-1.0 released

[Mouse <mouse%Rodents-Montreal.ORG@localhost>]

> If you use TrueType fonts in your terminal emulator or editor then
> you will be rendering stuff locally rather than in the X server.

I wouldn't go that far; I'm reasonably sure I've seen server and/or xfs
implementations with TrueType support.

If you want antialiasing or flatscreen subpixel rendering, you'll need
either client-side rendering or a server extension, because core X
fonts are defined in a 1bpp way.  My impression is that no such
extension exists, but I'm hardly au courant with the latest ways people
mangle X.

> Modern GPUs don't accelerate any of the traditional 2D graphics
> operations anyway so there isn't any advantage of the old X11 model
> other than to minimise network traffic.

That can be substantial.  It wasn't more than a year or so ago I tried
to run then-modern firefox X-forwarded over an long-haul ssh tunnel.
It took something like ten minutes to start, painful minutes watching
it draw a little something every 30 seconds or so.  Move the mouse and
press a button, and fifteen seconds later the dropdown outline appears,
a minute and a half later the items are there....

> I do feel that all these changes have crept in by stealth.

They're not the only ones.  I've seen at least one program (an Android
phone emulator) that displays with blue and red swapped on some
displays, because whoever wrote it either didn't understand the X model
or couldn't be bothered to follow it and blindly assumed the RGB masks
are in a particular order.  I would expect it to explode even worse on
something like 8bpp PseudoColor.  "It works fine on my Linux box with a
gamer-spec graphics card" seems to be enough for way way too many
client authors, even supposedly professional ones like Google (I'm
assuming the Android emulator was Google's work; I'm pretty sure it was
in the Android build tree).

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