[pilif]

This goes to show that it's practically impossible to do it right. At one point there are the purists who complain about bloat. At the other point, there are the purists complaining about NIH when you try to remove the bloat.

You can't have it both in this case it seems.

As a user I know one thing: X11 is huge and while it has all the nice features, it's also still a slow and laggy beast. This might be caused by bad drivers, or it might be caused by a bad architecture (or bad drivers caused by bad architecture making it impossibly hard to write good drivers).

As such, I'm curious to see whether a restart based on technology newer than the 80ies might solve the two big issues I'm having with Unix GUI at this point.

If it does, I'm happy.

If it doesn't, I'll be on the lookout for a better solution.

But I know one thing: If a long-year X11 developer (Kristian Høgsberg is working on the xorg x server) tells us that our issues are practically impossible to fix without a rewrite using a different architecture, then I believe them. Why?

Because for them it would likely be much less work to fix the existing thing (especially if it is nearly 30 years old and as such should be very mature and bug-free), so if they prefer a rewrite, there must be some truth to that.

Personally, I don't care about either bloat (unless said bloat leads to other issues than me having to buy a bit more RAM and diskspace) or NIH, but I still to this day haven't found a Linux distribution that has a GUI which works as-well as OSX or Windows (window drawing issues, multi monitor support - heck - just changing resolutions at times), so I'm certainly open to see other paths explored.

[rwmj]

I simply don't have this problem of X being slow or laggy, so I cannot comment on the rest.

(Edit: I use XFCE, not GNOME)

[microtonal]

I use both OS X and Ubuntu. In comparison, Ubuntu is terribly slow, even on basic things such as dragging and resizing windows, let alone graphically-intense applications. This is both with ATI's proprietary drivers and the opensource radeon driver. Things are a bit better if I don't use a compositing window manager.

I am not sure who is to blame, X or the drivers. But most users won't care. They'll see that GNU/Linux has a bad desktop experience, and revert to whatever they were using.

[rwmj]

I'm using Intel hardware on a large display, and of course Intel makes all the information available to driver writers and the X drivers are open source and very high quality. And there is no lag. I used to use Mac OS X before and there's no difference.

So this sample of two users seems to indicate that your problem is with drivers. Wayland will make no difference to your experience of Ubuntu.

[billiob]

Please try bodhilinux with enlightenment as window manager and you'll see that gnome/unity are slow, not X.