On Sat, Aug 30, 2003 at 12:43:50PM +0300, Oded Arbel wrote: > 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] >
Riiight, lets work this out. Hopefully keeping a resonably respectable
tone while doing so.
> your first assert is so completly wrong I cannot even start to address it.
> where the heck did you come up with this BS ?
Great. You don't give any hard info to back your rebuttal so its my
word against yours. I did state that its only my opinion and for
people not to get enraged about it but I guess that you were already
in a blind religous rage by the time that you read that. Calling my
opinions BS does nothing but lower your statement to mere
belligerency.
> Just as a counter example: OS-X.
Ok. What about it? The fact that 2 people use it? Or is it because Mac
has the highest actual presence to market hype ratio of any computer
company on the planet? It's still a commercial product shipped within
a black box. Who knows if its engineering is good? If you call
benchmarking or window dragging the only way to measure quality of
engineering then that makes a 3GHz machine running Windows 3.11 better
engineered than a 333Mhz machine running 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.
Once again your talking market share for a non commercial product. Why
do you want everyone to use Linux? It's obviously not because you care
about freedom, otherwise you would be calling it GNU/Linux. It's
paramount to suggesting that a 1962 Chateau Lafeet is worst than a 20
Shekel bottle of Carmel Selected because carmel has an immensly huge
market share.
In order to get you so called "market share" for Linux you'll have to
do mutilate it with 2 things:
1) Dumb down anything intelligent, interesting or even slightly
ambiguous in the GUI until your left with a bland and insultingly
simple interface thats a pain to use for anyone with more than 2 brain
cells. Whats wrong with things being difficult? We are getting so lazy
that we drag everything down to our level instead of improving
ourselves. Three words: Talking Paper Clips. "I'm sorry but the new
version of our Linux GUI is being delayed while we develop our new
magical multicultural fairy princess user interface". As if poeple
living in Uganda and using Linux can even afford to run anything beyond
X. All they care about is that it's free and stable.
2) You have to turn the main factor for change in your GUI over to the
will of the masses instead of what the developers actually feel
passionate about doing. Why cripple their vision just so you can put
it in a box and sell it to as many people as possible.
If point #1 is wrong and the masses are collectivly intelligent then
they can get together and write their own GUI and decorate it with
helpfull magical monkeys.
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.
It works. Please don't try and suddenly forget tens of years of
computing history by saying that it doesnt. Noone else has been around
that long.
Its been working for a long time now. It's slow because it doesnt have
hardware dependece (3D, RISC etc..) built it and it doesnt have
planned obsolecence built in (like ALL modern commercial OSes do,
otherwise marketing departments do not let them leave the building,
its commercial suicide).
It will work tommorow even if I don't by the "Nvidia super 3000+++
blamo +1 against undead" new video card.
There is a price to be paid for keeping a system alive for so many
years. It also allows the comminity to get ahead with things that
actually matter. I'm more exited about SMP and RAID then getting into
a window redraw competition with some corporate entity.
All in all, thank you for a very interesting if somewhat "rough"
discussion. If you really disagree and want to get me angry then the
best way to do so is by posing an intelligent counter point that I
cannot work around, not by the automatic gainsaying of every other
line as BS. Yes, even if you think it is.
--
"Cut your own wood and it will warm you twice"
Regards, Yoni Rabkin
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