Why is Qtopia much faster?

[Tilman Baumann]

Shawn Rutledge wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 21, 2008 at 4:38 PM, Tilman Baumann <tilman at baumann.name> wrote:
>> I might do qtopia more wrong than is fair. But they modelling just a
>> regular smart phone like you can get from most vendors.
>> With a very closed (but opensource) framework wich you can develop for.
>>
>> You can not port your garden variety x11 app to qtopia. Which you can
>> (almost) do with the other frameworks.

> But what does "closed" mean?  
Boundaries, limitations.
> It's been getting more and more open for
> years now.  Finally even QTopia is GPL... I think that's the last
> piece isn't it? 
I'm not talking about the license. Qtopia is propper opensource. (as i 
pointed out)
Maybe not everyone's most famous flavour, but i don't care for that.

> Is it because it already emerged fully-formed, and
> was not depending on community help for its very existence, that you
> think it's more closed?
Closed means in this case. Most decisions already made, forced to use a 
certain set of languages, toolkits, technologies...

And i don't say that is bad.
Qtopia is a very nice complete and well designed and holistic bottom up 
system.
A complete package. Take it, use it, be happy.

But i prefer to go the top down approach because i think it will lead 
(at least for me) to better and funnier innovations and changes.
Opensource thrives on diversification.

> What does "garden variety" mean?  I don't think there's any such thing
> as a "garden variety X11 app" unless you are using xlib itself, which
> very few people bother with.  Or maybe you are thinking about older
> toolkits like Motif and Athena Widgets?

xlib is the most common denominator of all x11 apps. Sure, nobody uses 
it directly. But as easy as you can port a xlib based app could you port 
a xlib based toolkit.
If you are not happy with what we already have on toolist, port it. (I 
know at least qt, gtk and efl to be available on openmoko already)

> With QT, apps tend to be smaller because the toolkit is so complete,
> that you have less code to write.  You pay a cost in having a larger
> library to load, but then all the apps benefit from it.  So having a
> simpler, more spartan toolkit can cut both ways.

I'm not saying qt is bad. And you are (willingly) mixing up qt as a api 
and qt-embedded/qtopia as a framework.

> But whatever, it's just Gnome/KDE all over again, I shouldn't expect a
> logical argument I guess.

Depends on what you meant. Gnome or KDE is a bullshit discussion.
The answer is just BOTH.

>> And of course the fact that it does not use x11, i expected you to
>> know that. ;-)
> 
> But the plan is that it will, right? 
No and yes.
The original poster referred to the non x11 version.
And that is where the performance boost comes from.

> And then we will see, which is
> really faster. 
Does not matter, i can't see a clear winner there.
As soon as you throw away the non-x11 bonus for Qt it will come down to 
marginal differences.
> It would be an option in either case to do some
> optimization: kdrive could accelerate some graphics operations, and
> QTopia-on-framebuffer could do the same.  All else being equal, the
> one with fewer layers ought to be faster.  But kdrive is likely to get
> more community attention, so maybe we will realistically see some
> hardware acceleration eventually.

Any optimisation on x11 would benefit all toolkits the same.

>> It really depends, many people like the simple qtopia stack. But i did
>> not buy my Neo to have a phone that does essentially what any better
>> Motorola or Nokia could do too.
> 
> Anyone can write new QT apps.  It's even fun, and fairly rapid
> development compared to typical C/C++.  
Agree, but i o also want to port code.

>> It would look great on a motorla razr (or however these things are
>> called today)
>> But i did not find it to fit very well on the extremely large screen
>> resolution and touchpad only input.
> 
> The RAZR used a completely proprietary OS and toolkit.  The high-end
> touchscreen phones are exactly the ones that are mostly running QT or
> Symbian, in the commercial world.

Some motorolas are in fact using linux and if i'm not mistaken qtopia.
But not as a open system.
But i was not comparing technologies but user experiences.


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