Arch Linux

salafrance

Member

From: Aelfang's Barrow

Registered: 2013-04-17

Posts: 43

Alternatives To X/Windows For Arch Linux

Hi,

In general, I greatly prefer running under Linux as compared with Windows. Please don't misunderstand me - I think WIndows 7 is a very nice piece of work, and the fact that it remains more or less compatible with earlier and much less accomplished variants of Windows is nothing short of a miracle. What I miss in Windows is the sheer power and configurability of Linux. The sheer wealth of development tools is also an attraction.

However, Windows does tend to beat Linux at gaming, and the big graphical performance bottleneck appears to be X/Windows. I know that there alternative window systems to X that purport to be lightweight, yet broadly compatible replacements for X. Two such are Wayland and MicroWinX.

My question is, do any of you have any experience with alternatives to X? If so, could you share your experiences? I'm thinking of trying them out myself, and would appreciate any and all information on this subject.

WorMzy

Administrator

From: Scotland

Registered: 2010-06-16

Posts: 12,583

Website

Re: Alternatives To X/Windows For Arch Linux

The bottleneck is graphics drivers, not the windowing system. You can try out wayland by using weston (details on the wiki), but very few applications are compatible with it yet. No idea about MicroWinX.

---

Sakura:-
Mobo: MSI MAG X570S TORPEDO MAX // Processor: AMD Ryzen 9 5950X @4.9GHz // GFX: AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT // RAM: 32GB (4x 8GB) Corsair DDR4 (@ 3000MHz) // Storage: 1x 3TB HDD, 6x 1TB SSD, 2x 120GB SSD, 1x 275GB M2 SSD

Making lemonade from lemons since 2015.

RapidTransit

Member

Registered: 2013-04-27

Posts: 13

Re: Alternatives To X/Windows For Arch Linux

Have you looked into which graphics drivers you are using, are you using the proprietary or open source versions? Are you turning off compositing functions?

Yes X Windows leaves a lot to be desired but I don't think that is the culprit in this case.

salafrance

Member

From: Aelfang's Barrow

Registered: 2013-04-17

Posts: 43

Re: Alternatives To X/Windows For Arch Linux

Hi, thanks for the suggestions - I'm actually using the legacy fglrx support for my ATI HD3200 chipset (it's a laptop), along with a 64-bit AMD kernel compiled with -mnative. I plan to try Wayland - I'll let you know how that goes.

Last edited by salafrance (2013-04-29 15:08:06)

blackout23

Member

Registered: 2011-11-16

Posts: 781

Re: Alternatives To X/Windows For Arch Linux

From the tests that I have conducted X doesn't hold back Linux graphics performance at all. Every OpenGL benchmark was just as fast on Linux as on Windows 7 with the latest driver. With Serious Sam 3 Linux it even seemed a tiny bit faster (5%) than Windows.
The culprit in your case seems to be AMD. They are known to have not so great Linux drivers.

http://i.imgur.com/9CAsHmM.png

Last edited by blackout23 (2013-04-29 11:49:05)

salafrance

Member

From: Aelfang's Barrow

Registered: 2013-04-17

Posts: 43

Re: Alternatives To X/Windows For Arch Linux

Mmm... thank you for that. I'll take that information into account for my next desktop system.