A new acceleration architecture is being ported from kdrive by some QT developers, which will make composition managers like xcompmgr really fast and able to do some of the “display tricks” MacOS X has been doing for awhile.
A new acceleration architecture is being ported from kdrive by some QT developers, which will make composition managers like xcompmgr really fast and able to do some of the “display tricks” MacOS X has been doing for awhile.
again: zack rocks!
and thanks your generous employer (trolltech.com)!
x.org code really makes your fingers dirty…
keep up the good work zack
cies breijs.
When can we expect a new release of X.org?
Where can I download rpms for fedora core 4? 🙂 Yes I am a lazy n00b with a sad addiction to eye candy.
This is really great news! Thank you very much, Zack. I especially like the the fact that this also works with older hardware. I have a ATI Radeon 9600 which should handle OpenGL just fine, but unfortunately the propritary ATI drivers just suck and I rather prefer to have something that also works with the open source drivers that do not offer hardware accelerated OpenGL.
Where can i download a tar.gz of my i810 driver with this technology included
http://lists.freedesktop.org/pipermail/xorg/2005-June/008325.html
I can’t stand hearing about this “cool” stuff and never being able to use it. I want this and I want it now! (anyone know whatever happened to the Gecko/Qt port?)
QT is QuickTime
You’ll get it by upgrading your distribution, which will include an updated X server, a compositing manager, and the necessary magic to enable it by default. This will happen once it works well enough that it can be switched on for everbody.
QuickTime is QuickTime, Qt is Qt.
Stupid acronyms blow. Qt is not an acronym, or its meaning has never been revealed.
I think the “acronym” of Qt is cutie
http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/view/976
IT seems maybe for kde4
Heh… this thread is turning into an ‘acronym trivia’
It really seems, from an end user perspective, like the xorg guys are much worse than XFree every was about keeping a well maintained and up to date site with organized links to docs, mailing lists, releases, drivers, news, etc. Oh well, I guess 90% good is pretty good and better than nothing but it would be really nice if they put together a nice site. Hell, they could have just “forked” the XFree site when they forked XFree and they’d be doing a lot better than they are now.
Heh… this thread is turning into an ‘acronym trivia’
BASH == acronym
IT == initialism
Soooo, which release will this be in? 7.0 or 7.1? I’d expect such a new thing would need to be tested first…
From wikipedia:
Haavard Nord and Eirik Chambe-Eng (the original developers of Qt and the CEO and President of Trolltech respectively) began development of “Qt” in 1991, three years before the company was incorporated as Quasar Technologies, then changed the name to Troll Tech, and then to Trolltech.
The toolkit was called Qt because the letter Q looked beautiful in Haavard’s Emacs font, and T was inspired by Xt, the X toolkit.
> anyone know whatever happened to the Gecko/Qt port?
It’s being worked on. You likely will hear about it later this year.
It really seems, from an end user perspective, like the xorg guys are much worse than XFree every was about keeping a well maintained and up to date site with organized links to docs, mailing lists, releases, drivers, news, etc.
This is simply not a fair comment.
http://wiki.x.org/wiki/
I don’t get it, can someone explain it what is it and what will it replace ?
How is that related to , say, X.org, Xrender, Cairo or all of these technologies ?
Is it a new Xserver with all of these included replacing X.org ?
Will it really change soon anything in eye candy ?
Does it use OpenGL, hw accelerated or software only (Will it run with my laptop’s video card which has no hw accelerated driver) ?
Is it specific to qt ?
Sorry and thanks a lot, I am completely lost and not very familiar with all of this.
Here is what I have understood for now:
X.org replacement based on tinyX specific to qt for now.
Work with non accelerated video card and drivers are easy to modify.
Transition between X.org and Xgl.
Should bring nice eye candy right now.
So is it really great news or do I miss the point ?
As far as I can see, XAA is a part of the x.org X server. It is responsible for some accelerated rendering. However, apparently it doesn’t work that well any more with modern desktops – it accelerates the wrong things. So this guy has implemented a new accelerated renderer that replaces XAA – he’s used something from an experimental X implimentation called kDrive.
It would appear that this makes the composite extensions in x.org useable on lower end hardware (ie without 3D acceleration). It would appear that it doesn’t use GL to do this.
All this information is in the article – just a matter of reading it.
Whether it’s great news – who knows until we see it working?
Matt
QT developers, i bet KDE gets some groovy new eye candy soon too. :^)
Kudos to those to TrollTech developers.
Gnome developers. I bet Gnome gets some groovy new eye candy soon.
From the email:
“The two main goals of our new acceleration architecture were:
1) properly accelerating XRender,
2) being as simple as possible.
The first one is aimed at making sure that people can run composite manager on very low end hardware for as long as Xgl isn’t ready to go mainstream. The second was set to make the transition as simple as possible for driver developers.”
So it seems as if this is more of a stop-gap solution.
I’ve always been wondering though, when will all these nice new visual effects become a standard option in Linux distributions? As it is right now current releases of Linux don’t have these visual effects enabled, and I haven’t yet stumbled upon any instructions on how to enable them.
I would like to be able to get real transparency as is supposed to be possible with Xorg in the next wave of major Linux distribution releases. Although I have hear that many of the visual effects will require substantial system resources until they can be optimized.
Anyone have more current information than I do?
If you really want to enable all the experimental eye-candy, you should look for intructions on the Gentoo forums. The transparent windows effect is very slow unless you have a nvidia card.
There are instructions to build and run the Xgl experimental server too, but i don’t think it’s worth the trouble. I’ll wait until all this technologies mature and come by default on my distro.
Ok so I now have an okay-ish handle on what all these new components are supposed to do. People care about this, and people care about when it will be ready for them to use.
Xgl: Accelerates X through GL. Basically, if GL supports your vid card, you get liquid smooth eye candy effects
Cairo: Provides screen antialiasing. If you take a linux desktop now and look at any rounded corner, you’ll see it’s very jagged and pixelly (for a prime example, see rounded corners in metacity themes). Cairo fixes this kind of thing, making everything smooth and sexy.
KAA: First I’ve heard of this. It seems that it permits you to do some of the stuff that Xgl does but instead of using GL it uses…something else. Works on more hardware and makes composite managers fast, essentially bringing drop shadows and transparency effects to everyone who couldn’t use them up until now because their video cards had poor linux support.
Does that sound about right?
Now what I’m interested in is timelines. I know that Cairo will be in GTK 2.8. The Gnome guys are very hesitantly suggesting its inclusion for Gnome 2.12…so hesitantly that it makes me think it might be pushed back to Gnome 2.14. But either way, within a year Linux will have OSX-like smooth graphics.
What about Xgl/KAA? The fact that KAA is a solution until Xgl is stable makes me think that KAA will be available soon, and Xgl in the distant future. Am I right?
Cairo is a drawing library. it draws to multiple backends.. screen.. printer.. pdf.. postscript etc.
I talked to the lead developer on Xgl and the initial development is almost complete. Novell has stated that their next SUSE desktop will include an opengl xserver. so..
Short version: we may have eye candy in X.org sooner than we thought.
Long version:
Two X extensions called XRender and Composite, combined with a compositing manager (like xcompmgr), allow for the alpha transparency, the transparent windows, all that good eye candy stuff you want.
But XRender/Composite really needs acceleration to be worth a damn. The best solution to this problem is to use hardware acceleration. This is what Xgl is all about, it moves the entire X server onto OpenGL. But it’s less than a year old, quite new. Right now they’re developing it inside KDrive, which is Keith Packard’s experimental X server – a kind of proving ground for new technologies, unlike the stable X.org. Like XRender and Composite before it, it will probably go through a maturation stage and eventually get ported over to X.org. So despite what someone said earlier in this thread, Xgl is probably still very far away from mainstream use!
The other option is software acceleration, using the traditional X infrastructure. But the existing software acceleration in X.org, XAA, doesn’t work with XRender/Composite. KAA is a much improved version of XAA from KDrive. What Zack has done is port KAA to X.org, calling it Exa. If Zack can convince the X.org developers to tweak all their video drivers, Exa will allow us all to enjoy XRender/Composite relatively soonish, instead of waiting for Xgl.
So there’s still quite a bit of work to do (I’m told Composite isn’t quite stable itself yet), but if the X.org developers buy into this, this development could mean we’ll see fancy eye-candy in mainstream X within months rather than years.
>As it is right now current releases of Linux don’t have these visual effects enabled, and I haven’t yet stumbled upon any instructions on how to enable them.
Section “Extensions”
In SUSE 9.3 you can have
Section “Extensions”
Option “Composite” “Enable”
EndSection
in xorg.conf and configure things by rightclicking window borders.
Looks fantastic but painfully slow even on a high-end system. Hopefully this project will speed up things.
“I talked to the lead developer on Xgl and the initial development is almost complete. Novell has stated that their next SUSE desktop will include an opengl xserver. so..”
Correction: their next _Novell_ Desktop will include an OpenGL XServer. AFAIK they never talked anything about SuSE. And Novell Desktop Linux has far longer release cycles than SuSE.
Maybe you should add these too:
Section: “Device”
Option “RenderAccel” “true”
Option “AllowGLXWithComposite” “true” (only with nVidia)
EndSection
Section: “Extensions”
Option “RENDER” “Enable”
EndSection
With OS X appearing on X86 PC starting next year, this is just the kind of news KDE and Linux needs in preparation for the upcoming eye candy wars of 2006. XGL may be the final answer, but a quick fix at this point is a major shot in the arm for the OS that was supposedly soon to be on a respirator because of apple’s big news. Now the only thing that’s really needed are some step by step instructions of how to add this hack for non developers. Good thing I don’t have that problem, because I’m a developer. This hack is sweet and fast.
>Section: “Device”
>Option “RenderAccel” “true”
>Option “AllowGLXWithComposite” “true” (only with nVidia)
>EndSection
>Section: “Extensions”
>Option “RENDER” “Enable”
>EndSection
Sorry Joini,
The system “can not parse” xorg.conf with these values. I have to go down to the pub and do something about my headache. I’ll try again later.
Maybe I’ll get Eye diebetes this year. Good to see creativity and innovation, keep up the work everybody.
Don’t really care for eye candy, but if this makes Linux desktop feel less sluggish, I’ll be happy
A little correction on acceleration: XAA and KAA both do _hardware_ acceleration – but only of 2D operations. 2D acceleration is several orders of magnitude simpler than 3D acceleration, which is why it is supported much better by the X.org drivers. KAA was necessary because XAA doesn’t support all the 2D operations we want nowadays (most of all: allow XRender, which is used for anti-aliased fonts and curves, and Composite to be done hardware-accelerated).
Xgl is an X server which does _all_ the rendering using OpenGL, so it’s only an option if you have a driver for your graphics card that does OpenGL (3D) acceleration fast and stable. These drivers are the main stumbling block for Xgl, and since the X.org developers cannot do much about the bad situation here (crappy proprietary drivers from the graphics card vendors and too little documentation for their hardware so that the X.org people have little chance of writing better drivers) I wouldn’t wait for it to happen soon.
So, KAA is *very* important if we want all that eye-candy to happen on Linux in the not-too-distant future.
I think by the time it is out, will Konqueror feature a much faster/lighter/better renderer. The cooperation between apple hackers and KHTML/KDE people is getting better, with more and more bug fixes from safari bugzila being ported/reworked to KHTML. With the KHTML2 project with state of art SVG support, KDE will blow away any of the current desktops. I’m really looking forward for KDE4. Meanwhile gnome development is stuck with answering questions no one is asking, I mean give me a bloody KPDF equivalent not that peace of crap that acrobat is.
Meanwhile gnome development is stuck with answering questions no one is asking, I mean give me a bloody KPDF equivalent not that peace of crap that acrobat is.
I don’t get it, what’s the link between acrobat and gnome software ? Have you tried evince ? (I haven’t but it’s supposed to be gnome’s answer to kpdf, isn’it ?)
There is an open source OpengGL(Mesa/DRI) driver for new radeon (from 9500 up to x800) right now you could play quake or others games with it. Thus the situation for open source driver isn’t so bad, at least for ati card. Thus Xgl could be accelerated on many card all ati, intel graphics chipset, unichrome…
NVidia will be the only major player to only have closed driver, and don’t say they can’t release their sources because they can at least release their specifications.
Anyway this EXA stuff can be the next default things in few month…Maybe Xorg 7.1 as Xorg 7.0 features are freezed. Next XCB will improve others things.
To people who complains about the web site, i would just say that i prefer seeing xorg people coding than doing fancy web site saying that they will improve the future and change the world Moreover their website is a wiki thus everyone even non dev can improve it. So if you don’t like it do something for it…
I’ll (not so) quietly ignore your Nvidia/Ati comments and point out this line from the 6.9/7.0 release schedule:
“4 Jul 2005: Feature freeze for the monolithic source tree”
So you’re not quite right in saying features are “freezed”, there’s a good chance that this code could be added to Xorg CVS this week.
On another note, my read on things: there’s little debate among Xorg developers regarding Xglx being the “future”, however there is much debate about timing. Exa is certainly going to work first.
I didn’t say that Xgl will be going first, And yes EXA will most likely be mainstream before Xgl.
The feature freeze is effctively in jul but i didn’t think that EXA will be included in 7.0, i may be wrong. And if my reading are good xorg dev don’t want to add any big things, this is what’s EXA, in 7.0. If i am wrong on that i would be the first one happy to see this included.
You could ignore my ati/nvidia comment but i was only telling pure fact. IIRC NVidia stated that they didn’t want to disclose source of their driver because they use third party technology and haven’t right on this stuff. If they didn’t want to release source for some strange third party tech OK, but they can at least give specifications.
Another thing i didn’t say that Ati was a good company for open source, they didn’t help much for this open source driver. Anyway the fact is that now you can have open source
3d opengl driver for all their card. But if you prefer to stick with closed driver it’s your choice and nvidia closed driver are far better than ati closed driver…
But i think that some people will appreciate to have a some recent graphic card with open source 3d acceleration. And if they want such card the choice are restriced to intel, unichrome, ati (maybe few others which i don’t know)
If you’d read Zack’s mail, you might have noticed this paragraph:
—snip—
6) The code as presented in the snapshot will be checked in on Monday morning/Sunday night, dependently on the feedback I’m going to get.
—snap—
Which means: yes, xorg 7.0 will most likely include EXA – at least it seems that way…?
> What Zack has done is port KAA to X.org, calling it Exa.
Wrong, it’s not a port. Exa is an extension of KAA.
Meanwhile gnome development is stuck with answering questions no one is asking, I mean give me a bloody KPDF equivalent not that peace of crap that acrobat is
First, have you even tried Evince? It uses EXACTLY the same rendering backend as KPDF. IT IS THE SAME UTILITY. One has a GTK frontend and another has a Qt frontend.
Also, what’s with all the hostility from KDE towards Gnome? I thought people outgrew this years ago. It’s very seldom you see users of Gnome bashing KDE anymore…it’s more a policy of “let’s both implement freedesktop.org standards, and whatever you want to use you go ahead and use.”
Really, bashing one desktop or another just because you like something different is childish.
Really, bashing one desktop or another just because you like something different is childish.
Welcome to OSNews, you must be new here.
You could ignore my ati/nvidia comment but i was only telling pure fact. IIRC NVidia stated that they didn’t want to disclose source of their driver because they use third party technology and haven’t right on this stuff. If they didn’t want to release source for some strange third party tech OK, but they can at least give specifications.
You can believe conspiracy theories or you can actually listen to the reasons these companies and their engineers give for being unable to open source their drivers or release detailed specs (and you really only touch on minor aspects here, hinting that you don’t actually understand the problems at all – the number one reason that dwarfs all others is patent liability). This has been hashed out to death elsewhere, so please feel free to make use of Google. There’s no reason to have this conversation a billionth time; if you’re interested in the sordid details the truth is out there.
Not that I think this is a good thing – obviously open drivers are better from both a technical and development standpoint, and if it’s important to you, I’m glad we have alternatives and you should buy them exclusively. But putting our fingers in our ears and pretending that these companies are just being “difficult” for no good reason is just silly and brings us no closer to a real solution.
Quote:
“Also, what’s with all the hostility from KDE towards Gnome?”
Please note that a few readers of this site, who post such comments, are not related to KDE, or GNOME or whatever.
So, saying things like the quote above is like saying that the developers of KDE are actually writing these comments.
That’s not the case. The people who write these stupid comments are people who have very little knowledge of what they are talking about.
Just ignore them…
ingoring somebody is extremely powerful.
A little correction on acceleration: XAA and KAA both do _hardware_ acceleration – but only of 2D operations.
Thanks for the correction, I read up some more on this last night. These are definitely exciting times for X.
Xgl is an X server which does _all_ the rendering using OpenGL, so it’s only an option if you have a driver for your graphics card that does OpenGL (3D) acceleration fast and stable. These drivers are the main stumbling block for Xgl
Is the eventual goal to move Xgl from kdrive/xserver into X.org?
>Section: “Device”
>Option “RenderAccel” “true”
>Option “AllowGLXWithComposite” “true” (only with nVidia)
>EndSection
>Section: “Extensions”
>Option “RENDER” “Enable”
>EndSection
|Sorry Joini,
|
|The system “can not parse” xorg.conf with these values. I |have to go down to the pub and do something about my |headache. I’ll try again later.
And if you do, remove the colons from the “Section” headers. Just imitate the other headers in your xorg.conf
I am aware of the patent excuse, but if i am not wrong (when i look to the current situation i am wondering if i didn’t misunderstood all this) patent were made so that people will publish their “secret” and it won’t be loose. Patent were created to increase creativity.
So now, when a compagny says that they don’t want to give specification for patent purpose i don’t take that as the real reason. There is no top secret or interesting things to learn from register specification of a chip. Thus i really don’t think that the real reason for not publishing specification is only related to patent.
Their secret is in the silicon not in how to send or to setup and play with the chip. There is now revolutionary way to send vertex, texture or other datas…
You told me to google for the patent issue, try google yourself and look at what driver developers says about that. They don’t buy this patent excuse, neither i. When you saw once how to program a graphics chips then you know how to program all graphics chips the only matter is to know the new reg address.
Nevertheless nvidia is doing a great closed driver, ati is improving too, but things would be a lot simpler if all this were open.
I am aware of the patent excuse, but if i am not wrong (when i look to the current situation i am wondering if i didn’t misunderstood all this) patent were made so that people will publish their “secret” and it won’t be loose. Patent were created to increase creativity.
Your not wrong about that – the purpose of patents – but you’re wrong about pretty much everything else, and your hostility shows no desire to understand the situation better. GPU’s, to name just one example, are literally a patent minefield. You can’t compete in that field without 1) extensive cross-licensing, and 2) violating patents by the boatload. Every engineer in the industry knows this. Can you imagine why they might not want to publish detailed specs without NDA or release open code now? Both 1 and 2 preclude them. And patents are only one reason of many. They are legitimate reasons.
I’m not saying this is right, in fact, I think it’s horribly, horribly wrong. But I’m also informed enough to know that the solution isn’t calling vendors names and acting like children, it’s solving the root problems.
> It’s very seldom you see users of Gnome bashing KDE anymore.
You don’t read OSnews comments often, right?
About five years ago Microsoft bought a bunch of 3D patents from SGI. There are rumors that threats from Microsoft around these patents are being used to control the 3D industry. One part of this is not releasing chips specs so that competitive open source drivers can not be written.
Rasterman has prooved a number of time that his libraries were far far ahead any of the competitors included GL rendering, so I wonder why Evas (the core of enlightnement rendering subsystem) is not widely adopted ?
(seriously, i’m not trying to start a flame war but they seems to be far more advanced while still using X11)
Djamé
Rasterman has prooved a number of time that his libraries were far far ahead any of the competitors included GL rendering, so I wonder why Evas (the core of enlightnement rendering subsystem) is not widely adopted ?
Here’s why:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html
7. Does Enlightenment have future plans to incorporate OpenGL into “normal” window programming? What are your other thoughts about the future of E?
The Rasterman: Currently its able to use GL to do any of its rendering. Evas allows this by its design as an abstraction layer – and it works. I actually was running my desktop background view and file manager view using OpenGL yesterday. It works. This is why evas is so important to E – and in future it has many more possibly uses outside of E.
Those superfast evas numbers you see are run on the OpenGL backend.
Read that joel article – just read it. Realise it doesnt apply. First its the same team – not a different team. why are we doing a better job second time? We learnt lessons from the first time. and it’s paying off massive dividends. No way would this have been possible built on the existing codebase. . By your implied assumption that ANY form of rewrite is bad, we should never demolish a house. We simply should keep rennovating it centry after century. Extrapolate that and imagine what kind of world we’d be in if we all did that.
Well if I have it so wrong Rasterman, perhaps you can answer the guy’s question:
so I wonder why Evas (the core of enlightnement rendering subsystem) is not widely adopted ?
Why do you think?
I don’t think Evas requires OpenGL to be fast, I understood that currently it doesn’t use it by default for stability reason but I might be wrong.
By the way I am not sure if Exa is an equivalent layer to Evas, Raster ?
Is xcompmgr to get more stable. If this helps…great. I just want more stability. The eye candy is there today..its fast with a cheap nvidia card….but it crashes too much.
Is xcompmgr to get more stable. If this helps…great. I just want more stability. The eye candy is there today..its fast with a cheap nvidia card….but it crashes too much.
Composite is already stable in xserver/kdrive. I really hope they merge compsosite from xserver/kdrive with x.org before the next release!
Section: “Device”
Option “RenderAccel” “true”
Option “AllowGLXWithComposite” “true” (only with nVidia)
EndSection
Section: “Extensions”
Option “RENDER” “Enable”
EndSection
You don’t have to enably render, it has been on by default for years. And RenderAccel only works for the closed source nvidia drivers or the open source ati drivers for radeon 9200 and olader, but it’s already on by default for the later.
Something needs to be done to improve X… for every fanboy rant about how it can render content as fast or it test so much faster than windows, you have ten nube users who sit down complaining about “Flicker” when they drag a window… and then wondering why when they increase the refresh rate it gets worse… DUH…
On the other hand, if they are gonna bloat it down further with stupid shit like transparant windows who needs it… talk about something I DON’T understand. Makes the text impossible to read, wastes CPU/GPU rendering time etc. etc.
The big improvements to X are coming, this very article you are allegedly commenting on is about an important piece of that puzzle. With a better X platform all kinds of things asuddenly become possible (including things like transparent windows), however none of those things become mandatory.
Ok, so I’m somewhat confused. I’ve been following the osnews posts on xgl and mesa-solo, and have even emailed with one of their developers. Here’s what I do understand:
* OpenGL is an open source library for rendering graphics (2D and 3D)
* XGL is an X-server which uses OpenGL for rendering, as opposed to the currently used system which is called XAA.
Here’s what I’m a bit shaky about:
* In the end, you’ll use either KAA or xgl, but not both, since they are in a sense two projects attempting to improve upon the same rendering capabilities of the X server.
* KAA’s main “advantage”, currently, is it’s support of older (non-OpenGL) videocards, but it’s debatable if driver support will actually be a hurdle for adopting xgl.
I basically turned my back on my linux partition back in 2000 primarily because of it’s poor, clunky GUI experience, which only seemed to improve when I switched to WindowMaker or XFCE as my window manager. In the meantime, there are several efforts to improve upon X, the bane of many linux users’s existances:
* there’s the creation of X.org, which increased my hope that all the feet-dragging that went on with Xfree86 would come to an end, and things would fiiiiiinaly move forward
* there’s Rasterman’s work within his Enlightenment system
* there’s xgl (which reportedly will appear in NDL10)and mesa-solo (which, as I understand, would actually REPLACE the x-server entirely — about ___’_ time)
* now there’s KAA
* oh, there’s also DirectFB
Here’s an idea: Why don’t all the interested parties work together towards some kind of agreement as to how the graphical subsystems will progress, and then create a modular architecture to allow for these and other forms of experimentation to take place? I thought that’s where freedesktop.org comes in?
Just an idea.
Just because you don’t think that’s what’s happening doesn’t mean that it isn’t. Not to mention, OSS’ strength is the organic nature with which it develops. ie, you’ll see a continual divergance and convergence effect over and over again. With the environment decided what’s necessary and what it isn’t.
This entire stupid call for get everything working under one banner is a flaw and disease. In fact, you want diversity so you can choose smarter solutions and once the smart solution is realised, it needs to be rallied around and moved forward, people are still getting used to this, because until recently OSS development wasn’t nearly as large scale and as diverse as it has been in the last couple of years, that’s right, 2 maybe 3 years.
Evas can use opengl, or directfb or not. it’s software rendering beats the pants of xrender either way (caveat – 1 case xrender beats it on 1 driver only if you enable special options, or 1 kdrive monolithic xserver for ati that basically no one uses anyway) – the opengl rendering is insanely fast.
i think a lot of peolpe don’t understand what all these pieces of software do and how – evas for example is not something you would build x on top of. its a userspace canvas library with a lot of funky mojo. i think this is not the forum to explain all the intricate details/differences.
Because we have been busy writing code, not playing politics and pushing things onto people. It isn’t widely adopted because “gnome” and kde” havent adopted it. and they wont either. we’re not TRYING to get them to adopt it. evas has its uses for specific things. i dont think people realsie exactly what it is. all they see is “ooh pretty” and think that it suddenly applies to a bunch of other things.