On Saturday 30 August 2003 10:02, John Rabkin wrote: > Aaaah yes. The age old argument. I cannot understand for the life of me why > some people are on a crusade to bog Linux down with eye-candy. A flashy > interface is a sure sign of a weak underlaying system. Please show me a > single instance were I am wrong.
<snipped lots of smug, speratist remarks> your first assert is so completly wrong I cannot even start to address it. where the heck did you come up with this BS ? Just as a counter example: OS-X. Your argument is basicly this - "They have a weak underlying system because they have negligable market share". well - suprise, but so does Linux. Except that OS-X has a very good underlying system, and last time I checked has better desktop market share then linux (they second place only to M$). I don't remember exact statistics, but I've read somewhere that of all the people who bought their first computer in north america at 2001-2002, about 50% were buying macs. I'd love to see Linux with these numbers. Fact: everybody loves eye-candy. Linux's Market share will grow with more eye-candy as it had done so in the past. Fact: two of the largest open source projects for Linux (and other OS) are mostly about eye-candy (KDE, GNOME). The whole attitude of "We don't need to stinking GUI" is fine, as long as you keep it to yourself. if your objective is to make Linux the best operating system for your own special needs, then everything is fine - you probably don't use X at all. But maybe, just maybe, the point of the whole exercise is to make Linux the best OS for everyone - and that means nice looking, _responsive_, stable GUIs. Now, after deviating from the main issue for a while - here's my real point: I don't care much for eye-candy in X. its nice to have, but less important then getting a fast and stable graphical environment. X is blocking the way as its so damn slow. its a CPU and Memory hog, and its design is so bad it makes it very hard to extend its feature set to compete with other graphical environments. Example: only this year the ability to change resolution w/o restart was included into X - this feature has been available on the major competitor's OS for about 7 years now, and still this feature is not visible to most users as there are no stable user end tools that take advantage of it. same with font anti-aliasing - very useful eye-candy, and people are still having problems with it. -- Oded ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
