Centralization of graphical awesomeness

[Petr Vanek]

>As an important but overlooked side effect, the more capable the
>graphics toolkit is and the more bloated and unfriendly the resulting
>end user interface will be. While we were at replacing the original
>gnome mobile desktop, I would have liked to start from a minimalist
>but inovative toolkit more adapted to limited hardware like the
>freerunner or the many other gadget with only a small touchscreen that
>will keep getting out, instead of having one more toolkit for the same
>device range for which we already have dozens.

my 2 cents:

we can have lighter themes in E (as for example gry is, thanks the
author for that!), but then need to have the X11-16 working - at
this point, it has been recommended by Raster not to use it and even
the new SHR phoneui apps cannot work with X11-16. So we are going back
to the even slower engine.

Could this be looked at and revised? We need X11-16 for the Freerunner,
the 32bit rendering is way too slow on Freerunner.


Illume is absolutely unmaintained - as Raster pointed, it hasn't been
actively touched for a long time. Please see list of Illume immediate
issues [1].

Raster, are you using Illume yourself somewhere? Could Illume get some
attention? Otherwise it's going to die with the Freerunner users
getting another phones (Pré etc).


As i see it, if the above will not happen, users will slowly drift
away to solution perhaps "not so optimized" but feeling lighter and
maintained. So the wish for E being THE toolkit for mobile devices will
disappear. And we can see this already. SHR has been asked several times
for more options in window managers. And as SHR has no manpower to
provide this, Debian might start gaining attention, proper deb
packaging of FSO will help this a lot.

Petr

[1] http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Illume#Issues