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Copyright © 2007-2010 by Zack Smith.
All rights reserved.
Introduction
Frugal Windowing Environment, or FWE, is my basic windowing system for
framebuffers.
It currently works under Linux only and is in an alpha stage of development.
It is the logical next step from my previous system,
FrameBufferUI (fbui), which is a small, in-kernel graphical user
interface for Linux.
Goals
The goal is to develop FWE to the level of
FBUI and beyond, especially with
support for overlapping windows and multiple windows
per program. At present it is much simpler
however with no overlapping & only one window per application.
At this time, FWE uses its own protocol of my design
to communicate with client applications.
Philosophy
Liberation from Bloat
FWE's most important role in my opinion
is the reduction of software bloat.
Why make a fuss about bloat? Software bloat is bad because:
- Software bloat keeps us all on the treadmill of always
buying new hardware, which ultimately new
software makes painfully slow, thus we are always falling behind.
But the software makes the system slow because it is poorly
designed and poorly implemented and rushed work,
with the frequent consequence that it is bloated.
Thus the purchasing-treadmill is economically and materially wasteful.
It profits the few while making the many suffer unnecessarily.
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Bloat is also bad for the Environment (which we live in and
rely upon) since the manufacture
of computer equipment involves the use of
numerous very nasty chemicals which inevitably
end up in the soil, water and air. Similarly the disposal of
electronics results in chemicals leaching out of circuit
boards, LCDs (which contain mercury) et cetera,
which then enter the biosphere. We cannot afford
to pretend this problem doesn't exist and
we cannot afford to leave it to self-serving politicians to solve.
It is better to solve the problem at the source:
buy less hardware.
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Article
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Liberation from bloat is liberation from rushed work,
poorly managed projects, and bad engineering.
It is liberation from those project managers and programmers
who, rather than produce better, leaner, less buggy software,
pass on the consequences of their bad choice to users
who must pay to upgrade their hardware to accommodate
the bloat.
And as that software gets bigger and bulk is piled
upon bulk, increasing numbers of bugs and vulnerabilities
arise which require, you guessed it, more upgrades.
Features
- Frugality
- Small size (the current alpha version is 27 kB).
- Minimal resource requirements.
- Software simplicity
- Client-server architecture, with clients potentially
located on remote computers (disabled at present)
- Graphics on each console with one server each.
- Basic drawing commands needed for frugal applications.
- Multiple non-overlapping windows per client.
Download
One of the benefits of FWE being user-space
software is that can potentially work with many
different kernel versions.
Contact
fbui aaaat comcast dottt net
Links
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