X.Org

[Jon Noack]

On 06/25/04 21:53, Beecher Rintoul wrote:
> I have been using XFree86 for some time now, and it's time to do some 
> upgrades. I have heard that the new X.Org might be a better choice. Does 
> anyone have an opinion on it? With the time involved to compile on a 400 MHz 
> box, I thought I would ask before I just dove in.

The x11@ list has in-depth discussion on this topic:
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-x11/2004-June/thread.html

I made the switch to xorg and things were pretty smooth for the most 
part.  To be honest I haven't really noticed any difference between 
xfree86 4.3 and xorg.  Both run well and are stable for me.

Be aware that although the xorg ports have been committed (except for 
xorg-documents) and there is a meta port, there is not any bsd.port.mk 
foo to use xorg instead of xfree86.  As a result, many ports still 
depend on xfree86 after you install or upgrade them 
(http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-x11/2004-June/000516.html). 
  I've taken to manually running 'pkgdb -F' after I install or upgrade 
anything to ensure the dependencies are correct.  You may want to wait 
until this situation is taken care of before switching to xorg. 
Alternatively, you could wait for xfree86 4.4 to be committed (Real Soon 
Now (tm)) and then you wouldn't have to worry about the dependency mess.

At this point I don't think you're going to see much of a difference (if 
any) between xfree86 4.4 and xorg.  I switched to xorg because most 
Linux distros did.  Linux drives *nix desktop development (sadly) so I 
think the future is with xorg.  I may as well change now while the 
differences are minor.  The whole situation is rather petty (in my 
opinion), but it's been a long time coming...

Oh, and don't compile (xfree86|xorg)-libraries with -Os.  The gcc in 
tree mucks it up.

Jon Noack