Commercial X servers

[Pantso]

I don't know if this has been posted before, but if it has forgive me for doubleposting in advance. Now, to my question: has any of you guys ever used a commercial X server like Metro-X or Accelerated-X? If you have, what were your opinions on either or both of them?

[Siplus]

erm....what is the point of a comercial Xserver? i thought the whole point of creating stuff for a free operating system is to make it free...hmm

[voidmain]

I had used MetroX several years ago and it was pretty good. The main advantage was it had accelerated drivers for many popular high end graphics cards. Now that many of the card developers are distributing their own accelerated drivers I see less need for the commercial X servers. The other thing was MetroX had a fool proof setup utility for X.

[Pantso]

I agree that the Xfree86 server should work fine for most Linux users. However, the Xfree86 graphics drivers don't usually work well with modern accelerated graphics cards or chips. On the contrary, support for some chipsets is still limited and those that do work, usually have very poor performance and no OpenGL capabilities, which is the case for most modern laptops or portable computers. Now, I also agree to the fact that Xfree86 is free and comes bundled in every Linux distro but what if someone wants to fully utilize their graphics card or chipset's potentials?

[Pantso]

quote:Originally posted by void main:
Now that many of the card developers are distributing their own accelerated drivers I see less need for the commercial X servers.

I agree with that, since most people nowadays use Geforce cards that provide excellent drivers for Linux but what about those laptop users that have to deal with Trident or SiS chipsets and so on?

[voidmain]

quote:Originally posted by Panos:


I agree with that, since most people nowadays use Geforce cards that provide excellent drivers for Linux but what about those laptop users that have to deal with Trident or SiS chipsets and so on?

Yes that is true (even though I don't buy such hardware).    I would say that it is a niche market. At one time if you didn't know how to figure out your horizontal and verticle sync rates and build your own XF86Config the commercial X servers also filled that void.

Most distros today come with pretty good automatic video detection and configuration for most hardware. XFree v4 has made life much easier as well. I'm not trying to say that there is no use for the commercial X servers, just that there is less of a need today than there once was.

[Calum]

so do other x servers typically cost a lot?

[voidmain]

quote:Originally posted by Calum:
so do other x servers typically cost a lot?

Other X servers? Are you referring to MetroX or X servers other than what we have discussed and other than XFree? I'll assume the latter.

On all other UNIX operating systems (Solaris, AIX, IRIX, HP-UX, etc) the X server comes with the operating system. You can't really purchase it separate. And I don't believe I ever heard of a commercial third part X server for those operating systems. Part of the reason for that is most of those other operating systems run on proprietary hardware and graphics cards built by the same company that writes the operating system so who would know the most about optimizing X for their hardware?

There are a few 3rd party X servers for Windows. I have used Hummingbird Xceed and believe it to be the most popular (although recently XFree on Cygwin might have taken over). I believe Xceed went for between $300 and $600 USD (maybe the price has come down in recent years). See http://www.hummingbird.com/