the pro-linux args

Miscellaneous Topics
#21

[quote]I don’t understand the critcism of X in this context.
…
http://www.y-windows.org/ for more information.
[/quote]
Sadly, Y retains the remote-server concept of X. Why? Indeed, Y? (boom, boom!). This appears to be a niche-only use nowadays, mainliy for admins of headless servers. Maybe the design of Y includes this without being burdensome, but I recall continuing support for this feature of X has created enough headaches for XFree devs that a significant number want(ed) it dropped.

The why Y doc (sorry) does have a neat brief overview of what’s wrong with X (feel free to follow the link to the site and find and read the PDF).

What is not mentioned is that IIRC none of the original creators of X-Windows saw it as being particularly good (it was a hack by MIT to be able to use multiple proprietary systems from one GUI), and there’s little reason to suppose it has magically become any good. X was a compromise and a political ball game IIRC (I’d appreciate it if anyone who was around at the time could weigh in with some detailed info?) as much as it was an attempt to create a standard windowing system. Vendors didn’t want to interoperate, they wanted people to use their own WS because that way they made money, e.g. NeWS had to be licensed from Sun.

@Jeff: I thought that Sun dropped NeWS (in several ways technically superior) in order to support X, so that historically Sun ought to be anti-X? ???

#22

And I found this, which is so eloqently put I just had to include it :slight_smile:


Date: Fri, 5 Feb 88 01:52:55 EST
To: NeWS-makers@brillig.umd.edu
Subject: X and the future
From: maximo!mo@uunet.UU.NET (Mike O'Dell)

The astonishing baroqueness of X is the greatest threat to the general sucess of UNIX to have come along since System V hit the streets. If you try to give an X system to a real human being, not a computer hacker masquerading as a normal person, they will croak. If X doesn't instantly burn out their eyes and brain, causing them to throw their UNIX box out the nearest high window, it will drive them straight into the arms of the Macintosh II. With the toolbox under AUX, all the windowy programs on the MacII will have a clear, understable, and universal user interface. With other alternatives, we face the very real prospect of each window (program) having a different user interface. That, friends, will be the death of UNIX.

Indeed. That was 16 years ago. Note that X still hasn’t solved the lack of consistent interfaces problem…

#23

C’mon, even on our 100 mbit network VNC is hardly responsive enough to edit a file in a text editor, whereas with X you can work like it was a local display.

So the only things you can do with VNC are some small admistrative tasks, chores you’d had done quicker with a secure shell login, if the windows servers had one and were administrable with a text interface.

#24

I find X to be a terrible inconsistent interface.
Is there a replacement for Linux, that works more or less like the Windows way?

Cas :slight_smile:

#25

[quote]C’mon, even on our 100 mbit network VNC is hardly responsive enough to edit a file in a text editor, whereas with X you can work like it was a local display.
[/quote]
I’ve been using VNC over 100M, 10M, 4M, 56k, and 28.8k for the last 6 years and the performance is fine on all the above assuming no obvious mistakes like running on a 286 (don’t laugh :)), although at less than about 115k you need to be careful about your settings and even so it’s a little stuttery. It doesn’t dynamically reconfigure itself and/or the desktop if performance drops, so unfortunately you have to tweak settings by hand :frowning:

I imagine you have outdated versions of VNC and/or a badly configured system (e.g. if you configured it to send only full-screen JPEG updates at minimal compression…). Note that many old versions have the problem where the windows client (or server) is missing most of VNC’s features. As a first step, I’d suggest upgrading to tightvnc which is still very much in active development.

I’ve known many people who use VNC on a local 10M LAN where you can’t easily tell from watching that it’s a remote display. You should be able to achieve this performance quite easily!

#26

[quote]Sadly, Y retains the remote-server concept of X. Why?
[/quote]
I found a short statement on http://www.y-windows.org/about.html:

[quote]Network Transparency
Contrary to popular belief, supporting network transparency does not reduce the speed of the window system on local hosts. Further, with Y’s in-server knowledge of widgets, applications run over a slow network can appear almost as responsive as local applications (especially when compared to an X application).
[/quote]

#27

I agree with blah.

On Windows you DO have Windows Remote Desktop (with clients for Windows and Mac OS) and it works perfectly and is generally much better than VNC because of course they can wedge it in with more of their inside info on how it all works. That quote about X summarizes my opinion of it.

Mac also has the a remote desktop app - though it is not free (a mistake if you ask me).

So that aspect of X is of limited use. Being able to force something to display on a remote terminal is neat. But as a local UI it is one of the biggest issues with Linux usability. BeOS and Mac OS X have merged UNIX and a decent GUI… so I know it can be done. But I doubt it will happen in the near term for Linux.

Just to try to keep things positive: I do agree with Jeff, Linux is great because it is a free unix. And simply having a free unix with all of the free dev tools, like the GNU Compiler Collection is of course a good thing. I like that Linux is empowering in that regard. When/if they get the usability issues worked out… they will really have something.

#28

That’s great to know, but personally it’s not a performance issue that bothers me. It’s the fact that it makes installing and using the system significantly more confusing (c.f. explaining to people “you need an X-server” “But I don’t want to run a server!” “Yes, but the X server is what you run on the client” “Huh?”), and at least for X it’s also made development more tricky (although that is obviously an arch choice that perhaps can be avoided?)

#29

You didn’t write what you don’t like about the client/server concept, so I guessed you thought performance is the problem.

Installing is probably not a problem at all. The people who manually install X-server and X-client probably know what they do. The average user’s distro installs X by default, so you don’t have to worry much about it. They may not even know about X or its client/server concept. After all a distro can always create a meta-package for X, if they like. All in all this is more a distribution or naming question than something you should base your design desicions on. (Every X above can be replaced by Y, if it becomes the standard.)

#30

[quote]This is the pro-linux thread :slight_smile: so I’d like to hear someone say something good about X?
[/quote]
…anyone?

#31

X has been around for an incredibly long time. And all graphics drivers are written for it. Changing to an new system, Y windows, or such would require a complete rewrite of every gui library and graphics driver. I agree it could be improved upon but a new system would need to be compatible with X. If it aint broke don’t fix it. :slight_smile:

#32

Some positive things about the XFree86 implementation of X:free, stable, modular, network transparent, platform independent, modular/extensible. It has quite a number of disadvantages, which don’t fit in a pro-Linux thread. ;D

Btw. Y looks very promising. With XFree86’s current license problems it’s likely to gain momentum.

#33

[quote]If it aint broke don’t fix it. :slight_smile:
[/quote]
Some people are of the opinion that it IS broke. :slight_smile: (as a desktop graphics interface… for X-Terminal purposes it seems to be ok.)

Are graphics drivers on Linux really tied to the windowing system? That seems like it’s the wrong layer for a driver to be working in… e.g. X should call more general/primitive graphics methods in the driver. OR is X handling too many layers of the windowing system? E.g. if you wrote X on top of OpenGL, then the drivers are not tied to a windowing system. OS X uses “Quartz” and “Quartz Extreme” to do their windowing system on top of OpenGL this way and it works quite nicely. From what I hear, Microsoft may be doing something similar with D3D for Longhorn.

X configuration is more automated in later versions of Linux. (There I said something positive ;))

#34

[quote] Are graphics drivers on Linux really tied to the windowing system? That seems like it’s the wrong layer for a driver to be working in… e.g. X should call more general/primitive graphics methods in the driver.
[/quote]
X uses the graphics drivers, not the other way round.

[quote]X configuration is more automated in later versions of Linux. (There I said something positive ;))
[/quote]
:o :o

::slight_smile:

#35

[quote]X uses the graphics drivers, not the other way round.
[/quote]
Then I don’t understand javapunk’s comments of:[quote]X has been around for an incredibly long time. And all graphics drivers are written for it. Changing to an new system, Y windows, or such would require a complete rewrite of every gui library and graphics driver.
[/quote]

#36

So a few clarifying comments:

on X. You are all 100% correct that a good local GUI shell could be written for Linux. In fact thats why I brought up OSX because IMO thats exactly what Apple did ontop of FreeBSD. However the Linux community seems entirely X centric so i have my doubts it will happen there. Still I could be wrong.

And yes when I referred to it being “too expensive” that was indeed short hand for its client/server nature that requires many more layers of communication and processing then necessary for a local GUI. Its an expense a desktop system doesnt need to be paying.

I think that clarifies most of my comments that were unclear. IF Apple were to release on Intel I think they would ultimately be stronger for it but I agree thats unlikely to happen. Baring that then yes, I could imagine someone doing an OSX like shell for Linux. Done right it would I think make Linux a player in the desktop space, but again I don’t see any will to make it happen in the Linux world.

#37

[/quote]
I think he made a mistake in this comment.

I read that the Y-people want to create some kind of X-Wrapper as a temporary solution for a smoother transition from X to Y. However in the long term the graphical apps (or at least the underlying libraries) have to be rewritten, otherwise the new approach of offering Server-Side widgets wouldn’t make much sense. This is quite some work.

#38

[quote]You are all 100% correct that a good local GUI shell could be written for Linux. In fact thats why I brought up OSX because IMO thats exactly what Apple did ontop of FreeBSD. However the Linux community seems entirely X centric so i have my doubts it will happen there. Still I could be wrong.
[/quote]
Currently you are right, although (as already said several times) the current license problems of XFree86 will lead to changes. Y-Windows is the only promising approach that I know of. There is also Fresco and some windowing systems for embedded devices. Fresco (http://www.fresco.org) uses CORBA for language independance, but it doesn’t look like it will be established as a standard. It’s important to take the best of all worlds and userinterface consistency is certainly a strength of Mac OS X. Server-side widgets are definitely needed to get there.

[quote]And yes when I referred to it being “too expensive” that was indeed short hand for its client/server nature that requires many more layers of communication and processing then necessary for a local GUI. Its an expense a desktop system doesnt need to be paying.
[/quote]
I quoted something in this thread, which basically says: Not the client/server concept is slow, but the implementation X has for it. (“Slow” means a high latency. Throughput of X is good.)

#39

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/personaltechnology/2001872755_ptlinux060.html
Seattle Times section on Personal Technology compares Xandros and Lindows as two alternatives to Windows for desktop computing. Their verdict: installation - excellent; OpenOffice - good enough; digital cameras, printers and other peripherals - excellent; CD burning - no problems; video playback - could be better (with more progress bars and support for Apple’s formats); digital camcorders - poor; burning audio CDs - poor; Net access and Web browsing - no problems.
Ripped from slashdot ::slight_smile: