I think you're right about X versus Aero being apples to oranges, but that's sort of the problem. In windows, it looks like the state of an application's GUI is separate from the state of the rendering system. In X, the two things are in the same process space. In windows, when the renderer crashes, GUI state isn't lost, a new renderer is started, and the user continues his day, slightly irritated. In X, the renderer crashes, and all applications crash as well. The user is somewhat more irritated. If X were split into a renderer and an application state tracker (like, I assume, windows does), then the renderer could crash all day, and the applications wouldn't ever notice.
In windows, if the application state tracker crashes, you're screwed, but that since the state tracker doesn't seem to depend on any third-party drivers, it's easier to verify its functionality and try to ensure its stability.
As for a rewrite, I'm not really sure how much of old XFree is still around. X has been modified in the past few years to no longer require configuration for its input (or, technically its video, but I still don't trust that). It supports multiple pointers, and in Linux on Intel, it doesn't even have to do initialize and exert low-level control over the video card. Things really are looking up for X, and I think your rewrite might actually be happening as we speak. It's just incremental, and with constant releases :)
> In windows, it looks like the state of an application's GUI is separate from the state of the rendering system.
It only looks that way because of the fact MS Windows Vista has two whole window managers integrated with the base OS itself, and it appears to run them both at the same time so that when one fails the other's there to pick up the slack. In fact, I'm not entirely sure Aero is a windowing system -- it may be an effects feature package layered on top of the one and only windowing system. If that's the case, the described behavior actually has nothing to do with applications being able to survive the crash of the windowing system, because that's not what actually happened.
Of course, this is all speculation (since I don't have access to the source code for the windowing system on Vista, for instance), but it's speculation based on what I've observed and what was claimed in this extended complaint about how X Windows on Ubuntu is too primitive.
> As for a rewrite, I'm not really sure how much of old XFree is still around.
Starting from XFree probably wouldn't do much good. The whole thing is a mess, from what I've seen, and needs "rearchitecting" (to buzzwordize the discussion). Then again, I'm not an X Window system expert, so maybe I'm missing something important.
> Things really are looking up for X, and I think your rewrite might actually be happening as we speak. It's just incremental, and with constant releases
As long as things get better rather than worse, I guess that's a good sign. I'm just not sure that the changes I've seen are indications that it's moving in a better direction; it kinda looks like it's just moving in a different direction, with some of the changes (but not all) being improvements.
In windows, if the application state tracker crashes, you're screwed, but that since the state tracker doesn't seem to depend on any third-party drivers, it's easier to verify its functionality and try to ensure its stability.
As for a rewrite, I'm not really sure how much of old XFree is still around. X has been modified in the past few years to no longer require configuration for its input (or, technically its video, but I still don't trust that). It supports multiple pointers, and in Linux on Intel, it doesn't even have to do initialize and exert low-level control over the video card. Things really are looking up for X, and I think your rewrite might actually be happening as we speak. It's just incremental, and with constant releases :)