There is no good reason to throw away so many years work on X – it’s such a good platform. Your specific points are so close to being solved:
- Too hard to configure: Work is being done to make XF86Config optional (required only for setups that are too difficult to detect, or old monitors).
- Fonts suck: Whilst fonts are incredibly expensive and generally out of our reach for the time being, the infrastructure is getting a good rehaul with Xft2 and fontconfig. We’ve still have a fair few nice fonts available though.
- Changing resolutions: Very close to doable with the RandR extension, a side-benefit of its main role.
DirectFB can’t and shouldn’t compete with X on the desktop. It’s a great embedded solution for specific purposes (X is also a great embedded solution), but leaving X for it would be like carving off the top of your head because it gets in the way of doorframes.
Additionally, users don’t have to deal with text files and driver names in modern distributions. See Red Hat 8.0 for sane user-admin tools. Very sweet.
