X / gtk-x11 / flicker and other problems

["John Emmas" <johne53 at tiscali dot co dot uk>]

I've been 'tinkering around' with Cygwin for a few months now.  Not doing
anything serious with it - just finding out about it.  And in the main, I
like it.  The only disappointment (sorry guys) is 'X11' (or maybe the
problems are with gtk-x11).

Either way, I've been hugely disappointed at how 'clunky' a GUI app feels,
on screen.  Moving windows around the screen isn't so bad - but resizing
them looks horrendous.  Even simple windows flicker very badly.  Another
problem is tnat the contents don't actually resize until I let go of the
window.  So, if I'm dragging the bottom-right corner of a window to make it
bigger, I just get a big white flickery space at the bottom and on the RHS -
until I let go of my mouse button at which point, all the objects reposition
themselves.  Twin monitors are a bit of a pain too, to be honest.

A few days ago I realised that GTK+ offers various backends, including a
win32 one.  So over the past few days I've been taking a look at it - to see
if I could ditch 'X' and gtk-x11 abd build my Cygwin apps using gtk-win32.
It's not without its problems but I've been truly astonished at how much
smoother the windows behave, on screen.  Okay - we'd expect a native build
to be slicker, but this is sooooo smooth compared to the clunky effects
that I see with Cygwin-X and gtk-x11.

Before I decide to dive off at a tangent, is there anything I could do to
'tweak' the performance of Cygwin's 'X' and/or gtl-x11?  For example, is it
possible that X11 isn't taking advantage of hardware accelleration?  And if
so, is this something I could 'turn on' somehow?

Thanks,

John


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