rationale for ASU (and change from GTK to Qt)

Neil Brown neilb at suse.de
Sat Jun 28 12:27:12 CEST 2008


On Saturday June 28, linux.luser at myrealbox.com wrote:
> 
> I have to say that I find it a bit odd running X11 on a mobile phone  
> - a WM wouldn't be required without it - when an alternative is  
> possible. In fact, as far as I can ascertain an alternative already  
> exists. X11 seems logical to me for desktop computers, but not for a  
> device which will only ever have one main window on the screen at a  
> time. I had mistakenly understood earlier Openmoko builds to be non- 
> X11 (i.e. qtopia-ish?)

Saying "we don't need X11 because we only have one window" is a bit
like "we don't need a multitasking operating system, because we only
have one user".  It just isn't that simple.

If all that X11 does for us is to allow switching between concurrently
running programs, written against different toolkits, then that is a
very useful thing.
I would hate for someone to be turned of writing an app for Openmoko
because the toolkit they liked wasn't supported, so I think it is very
important to support qt and gtk (and tk and ...).  The only way to
support multiple toolkits today is with an X11 server.

X11 allows freedom of toolkit choice, and freedom is what we are all
about.

NeilBrown




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