Some of are asking often the “W” questions about Linux Desktop. What, Why, Where, When the Linux Desktop “is like that”, “evolved like that”, “is the future” etc.
Still bit bothered that the Linux phone project, reincarnated last time in the Neo Freerunner device, did not manage to provide a faster phone. There were hardware decisions that cannot be fixed in the already sold devices, however the software can still change. One of the questionable decisions was to use the Xwindows infrastructure for the GUI. The most important argument was the existing collection of X software. This is in contradiction however with the fact that most of the phone applications were written from scratch. There are several other distros that do not have GUI relying on X windows, like QtMoko or Android. QtMoko (on top of QT libraries) seems to be fast, but still, applications are loading slow, as the Qt c++ libraries are fat and the bandwith from SD card to internal memory is very narrow (1MB/sec !).
If you have high bandwith, you do not bother, but when still on small phones, you come to the conclusion that it is rather funny that just showing 1/2/3/4 screens, for phone, for an agenda, for configuration etc. with some buttons it takes seconds. It was much faster on a 66Mhz computer ages ago…
I was looking for alternatives like directfb (http://directfb.org), dinX (http://dinx.sourceforge.net/), fbui (http://fbui.tk/), microwindows (http://www.microwindows.org), ggi (http://www.ggi-project.org/). It seems that all these projects started with lot of enthusiasm, but unfortunatelly due to lack of marketing power, they faild to come into the mainstream.
One of the problems to have different gui stacks is that they try to access the graphics hardware to do their job. This means that others will not have tha chance to output.
Furtunatelly, it seems that there are projects that try to solve this sharing problem: